Capitalism
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50 free Capitalism trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Capitalism is the economic system most of the world lives under, yet its story is stranger than any textbook suggests. It grew out of spice voyages, coffee houses and family banks, and it has been praised, blamed, reformed and written off many times over. This quiz covers that whole sweep. You will meet the philosophers and economists who explained how markets work, the critics who thought the system was doomed, and the industrialists, financiers and politicians who shaped it in practice. There are questions on famous manias and crashes, on the words traders still use, and on the novels, films and games that argue about money. It suits economics and history students checking the basics, quiz hosts who need reliable answers, and anyone curious about where everyday business terms came from. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still teaches you something.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which hit board game grew out of The Landlord's Game, patented in 1904 by the feminist game designer Lizzie Magie?
Monopoly
Monopoly, the 1935 hit, was inspired by a game Magie designed to teach Georgism, the idea that land values should be taxed for everyone's benefit.
Q 02Which flower's bulbs sold for more than ten times a skilled artisan's yearly income in the Netherlands in 1637?
Tulip
Tulip prices in the Dutch Republic collapsed in February 1637, ending what is widely regarded as the first recorded speculative mania in history.
Q 03Which farm animals share a Latin root with the word capital, both tracing back to caput, meaning head?
Cattle
Cattle once meant movable property of any kind, like its sister word chattel. Only much later did it narrow to mean livestock.
Q 04Which Scottish thinker, often called the father of capitalism, used a pin workshop to show the power of dividing labour?
Adam Smith
Adam Smith described ten men sharing the work of one small workshop, each doing only a step or two, such as drawing out the wire or sharpening the point.
Q 05Which word for a wealthy business leader comes from a Japanese title once used for the shogun?
Tycoon
Tycoon comes from taikun, meaning great lord, and entered English in 1857. Abraham Lincoln's aides jokingly used it as their nickname for the president.
Q 06Which animal names a falling stock market, after 18th-century London traders who sold its skin before the catch?
Bear
Bear markets owe their name to the bear-skin jobbers of London's Exchange Alley, who sold shares they did not yet own. Traders who bought on credit were called bulls.
Q 07Which fictional corporate raider, played by Michael Douglas in a 1987 Oliver Stone film, came to stand for 1980s greed?
Gordon Gekko
Gordon Gekko won Michael Douglas the Academy Award for Best Actor. The character was loosely based on several real financiers, among them the arbitrageur Ivan Boesky.
Q 08Which carmaker astonished the world in 1914 by offering a five-dollar daily wage, more than doubling most workers' pay?
Henry Ford
Henry Ford wanted to end the constant staff turnover in his plants. The move proved extremely profitable, as the best mechanics in Detroit flocked to work for him.
Q 09Which American fast-food chain opened on Moscow's Pushkin Square in January 1990 to record-breaking queues?
McDonald's
McDonald's needed 14 years of planning and negotiation to get there. Its arrival was seen as a symbol of the economic and political reforms under way in the Soviet Union.
Q 10Which New York thoroughfare takes its name from a wooden barricade that Dutch colonists built across Manhattan in 1653?
Wall Street
Wall Street follows the line of a palisade ordered by Peter Stuyvesant, who feared an overland attack by English troops. The barrier came down in 1699, once the city had outgrown it.
Q 11Which 1776 book by a Scottish moral philosopher became a fundamental work of economics and sold out in six months?
The Wealth of Nations
The Wealth of Nations took its author some ten years to produce, drawing on seventeen years of notes and earlier studies.
Q 12Which French phrase, traced to merchants answering the minister Colbert, names a hands-off economic policy?
Laissez-faire
Laissez-faire echoes the merchant Le Gendre, who is said to have told Colbert around 1681 that the best help the French state could give business was to leave it be.
Q 13Which German thinker, buried in London's Highgate Cemetery, wrote the three-volume critique Das Kapital?
Karl Marx
Q 21Which 1957 novel imagines America's business leaders vanishing in a strike led by the mysterious John Galt?
Atlas Shrugged
Atlas Shrugged was Ayn Rand's longest novel and the one she considered her masterpiece. It ends with the strikers planning a new society built on Galt's philosophy.
Q 22Which name is given to 29 October 1929, when some 16.4 million shares changed hands on the New York Stock Exchange?
Black Tuesday
Black Tuesday came five days after another day of panic selling, when a then-record 12.9 million shares were traded.
Q 23Which British economist argued in his 1936 General Theory that governments should spend on public works to fight slumps?
John Maynard Keynes
Karl Marx was expelled from Germany after the revolutions of 1848 and settled in London, where he lived until his death in 1883.
Q 14Which metaphor, used just once in a famous 1776 treatise, has markets steering self-interest to the public good?
The invisible hand
The invisible hand appears only in passing, in a passage about merchants who prefer to keep their capital at home rather than risk it abroad.
Q 15Which oil magnate became America's first billionaire in 1916, after the Supreme Court dismantled his Standard Oil?
John D. Rockefeller
John D. Rockefeller grew ever richer as kerosene and gasoline became vital commodities, which made him the wealthiest person in the United States.
Q 16Which Scottish-born industrialist wrote The Gospel of Wealth and paid for more than 2,500 libraries around the world?
Andrew Carnegie
Andrew Carnegie argued in that 1889 article that the rich should use their fortunes to improve society, and he even backed an estate tax.
Q 17Which city is home to the world's oldest modern stock exchange, set up after 1602 to trade shares in the VOC?
Amsterdam
Amsterdam's exchange began as a market for reselling shares in the Dutch spice-trading giant, and it was the first to trade securities formally.
Q 18Which Florentine family ran Europe's largest bank in the 15th century and bankrolled Botticelli and Michelangelo?
The Medici
The Medici also financed the building of St Peter's Basilica and Florence Cathedral, and counted Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo among those they supported.
Q 19Which British insurance market traces its origins to a coffee house opened on Tower Street around 1689?
Lloyd's of London
Lloyd's of London began among the seafarers and shipowners who gathered at Edward Lloyd's coffee house, which became the ideal place to arrange marine insurance.
Q 20Which English textile workers wrecked machines in raids from 1811, giving their name to foes of new technology?
Luddites
Luddites claimed to follow Ned Ludd, a legendary weaver whose name they signed on threatening letters to mill owners and officials.
John Maynard Keynes saw his influence wane in the 1970s, when stagflation hit Britain and America and monetarists disputed that governments could tame the business cycle.
Q 24Which British prime minister raised over £29 billion by selling nationalised industries and curbed trade union power?
Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher was dubbed the Iron Lady by a Soviet journalist, a nickname that stuck to her uncompromising style of leadership.
Q 25Which US president cut the top income tax rate from 70 to 28 per cent and fired 11,345 striking air traffic controllers?
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan lowered the top rate in two steps, to 50 per cent in 1981 and to 28 per cent in 1986.
Q 26Which investor, nicknamed the Oracle of Omaha, turned the textile maker Berkshire Hathaway into a giant holding company?
Warren Buffett
Warren Buffett later called buying the textile business his worst trade, even though he kept its name for the diversified group he built.
Q 27Which American investment bank's collapse on 15 September 2008 remains the largest bankruptcy filing in US history?
Lehman Brothers
Lehman Brothers had more than 600 billion dollars in assets when rescue talks failed, and its fall was the climax of the subprime mortgage crisis.
Q 28Which pair of market forces did Alfred Marshall popularise as two crossing curves in his 1890 Principles of Economics?
Supply and demand
Supply and demand diagrams still follow Marshall's choice of putting price on the vertical axis, although price is normally the independent variable.
Q 29Which documentary maker followed Roger & Me and Fahrenheit 9/11 with the 2009 film Capitalism: A Love Story?
Michael Moore
Michael Moore built the film around the 2008 financial crisis and the rescue that followed, as an indictment of the American economic order.
Q 30Which German sociologist argued that a Calvinist work ethic helped give rise to capitalism in Northern Europe?
Max Weber
Max Weber held that Protestant believers threw themselves into worldly work, building their own enterprises and accumulating wealth to invest rather than spend.