Do you long for the good old days? What, exactly, were “the good old days”? Depends on your time horizon. Today’s excerpt comes from page 11 of Economic Thought: A Brief History by Heinz D. Kurz, translated by Jeremiah Riemer (Columbia University Press, 2016). “According to Scholastic economic thought, the answer to the material hardship experienced by large segments of the [medieval European] population was not higher production and economic growth but self-restraint and the repression of needs. “The heart of Scholasticism was the doctrine concerning usury. A core argument was that money is sterile—it cannot “breed offspring.” Another argument […]