Supply-side economics arose as a renegade reform tradition in economic theory in the 1960s. Its two original exponents were Arthur Laffer and Robert Mundell, colleagues on the economics faculties at the University of Chicago from 1967-71. At the hands of Laffer and Mundell, supply-side economics restated classical economics in macroeconomic terms to challenge the main modernist schools of the midcentury, Keynesianism and monetarism. The term “supply-side economics” dates from 1976. Its origins in the scholarship of its founders date from the 1960s and in Mundell’s case the 1950s.
The chief propositions of supply-side economics are that the monetary system should be classical, tax rates should be low, and governmental economic management is illusory given a world economy.
This section of the website offers the beginnings of a comprehensive archival repository, with commentary, of the original elaborations of supply-side economics on the part of Laffer, Mundell, and those with affinities to the supply-side movement in its era of nascence.
