What is welfare? How did capitalism arise? Why pay taxes? How does the principle of distribution work in the modern world? Answering these and other questions, financier Georg von Wallwitz writes a new history of the development of economic ideas, from Adam Smith to Occupy Wall Street. With wit and ease, he explains what we are accustomed to consider very complex. Dwelling on the key figures and events of two hundred years of the existence of economics in the modern sense of the word, in each chapter he draws parallels with modern times: the ideas of Smith, Rousseau, Mill, Bakunin, Marx and Keynes in the book echo the crises in Greece and Iceland, the economic model of China and protests of recent years.