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Faustino Ballvé's Essentials of Economics is a modern classic. It covers nearly the whole field of economics — from the meaning of economics to the market, from money and credit to socialism — and is short enough to read in a day.
Ballvé was a remarkable thinker and economist, educated in Spain and England and later a teacher and practitioner of law in Mexico City. It was in Mexico that he first heard Ludwig von Mises lecture. These talks sparked a new intellectual energy in him, and through a long correspondence with Mises they became good friends.
The result of his studies and correspondence was this splendid book. He combines history, theory, and clear exposition to present what might be called an orthodox Austrian view of the way the world works. In its elegant simplicity and refreshing accessibility, it is the perfect text to educate the intelligent laymen in economic theory.
As Felix Morley writes in his introduction, "Something of the warmth and cheerfulness of the author's personality comes through, to make the reader feel that his is listening to the conversation of an old and cherished friend."

From the earliest times, too, this manifestation of human activity has engaged the minds of scholars and thinkers. To go no further back than the days of ancient Greece, Plato concerned himself with the division of labor and of the various occupations; Xenophon dealt with the increase in rents in Attica and formulated a theory of money; Aristotle spoke of the chrematistic occupations, expressed the hope that slave labor might be replaced by machinery, and anticipated the distinction that Adam Smith was to make twenty-two centuries later between value in use and value in exchange. Rome made the protection of agriculture an economic policy—one that was supported in the Middle Ages by the Catholic Church's condemnation of trade, its prohibition on the charging of interest, which it characterized as usury, its repudiation of value in exchange, and its refusal to accept, as the basis for prices, anything but value in use. St. Thomas Aquinas advocated a kind of communism that was later, from 1610 to 1766, to be practiced by the Jesuits of Paraguay. The French bishop Nicholas Oresmius published a treatise on money, and Gabriel Biel of Wiirttemberg made investigations into the nature of money and the formation of prices

Faustino Ballvé

Faustino Ballve

Born in Barcelona, Ballvé trained first as a lawyer, took his doctorate in Madrid, and then proceeded for further study first to Berlin and then to London. It was in England that, with a seasoned juristic background, he first specialized in the study of economics. He is the author of Essentials of Economics(1963).