[From the Austrian Economics Newsletter, Spring 1987]
The Austrian School of economics did not develop out of thin air. It built upon the work of a number of other economists and philosophers going back as far as Aristotle. Among the precursors of the Austrian School were a number of Spanish and Italian scholastic economists.
Several early Italian economists influenced the development of continental European economic thought in the centuries before Carl Menger.
Gian Francesco Lottini (1512–1572) had a rough idea that people value present wants higher than future wants — the basis of time-preference theory. Bernardo Davanzati (1529–1606) applied subjective-value theory to money, and solved the “paradox of value.” He also pointed out that the price increases of his

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