Scott Nearing (August 6, 1883 – August 24, 1983) was an American radical economist, educator, writer, political activist, pacifist, vegetarian and advocate of simple living. In 1915, he was dismissed from a teaching position at the Wharton School on account of his left-wing politics, becoming a cause célèbre of the American Left. His opposition to American entry into World War I led to his prosecution under the Espionage Act, for which he was found not guilty. After the war, he became a leading leftist intellectual associated with the Socialist Party of America, and later with the Communist Party USA. From the Great Depression until the end of his life, Nearing and his wife Helen lived a self-sufficient homesteading lifestyle. Together, they published Living the Good Life: How to Live Simply and Sanely in a Troubled World in 1954.

Nearing was born in Morris Run, Tioga County, Pennsylvania, the heart of the state's coal country. Nearing's grandfather, Winfield Scott Nearing, had arrived in Tioga County with his family in 1864, at the age of 35, when he accepted a job as a civil and mining engineer. Before the end of the year he had assumed full control of mining operations as the superintendent of the Morris Run Coal Company, a position of authority which he held for the remainder of his working life. An intense, driven man, Scott Nearing's grandfather studied science and nature, practiced gardening and carpentry, and regularly received crates of books from New York City, amassing a large personal library. In his memoirs written late in his life, Scott Nearing would recall his grandfather as one of the four most influential figures in his life. Nearing's upbringing was that of a young bourgeois, his mother employing a part-time tutor and two Polish servants to clean the gleaming white house atop a hill overlooking the town. Nearing had three sisters and two brothers. Scott's brother Guy recalled that the citizens of Morris Run had treated the handsome and intelligent Scott "the way they would treat the heir to the nobleman. ... They all treated him with awe."

Nearing's father was a small businessman and stockbroker, his mother a vigorous, energetic, and idealistic woman whom Nearing later credited with instilling in him an appreciation for the higher things in life: nature, books, and the arts. Despite an upbringing in a life of privilege made possible in no small measure by the harsh anti-union policies of his patriarchal grandfather, young Scott nevertheless developed a social conscience, which one of his biographers describes as "a burr under his skin that none of his relatives acquired and that no interpretation satisfactorily explains."

Nearing graduated from high school in 1901 and enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania Law School, "where corporate bias so violated his idealism that after one year he quit." Instead, he studied oratory at Temple University in Philadelphia and enrolled at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, where he immersed himself in the emerging science of economics. At the Wharton School, Nearing was deeply influenced by Simon Nelson Patten, an innovative and unconventional educator and founding father of the American Economic Association. Nearing distinguished himself as a "Wharton man" during the progressive era, one of the proverbial "best and brightest" trained in practical economics to be readied for a place as a responsible leader of the community. In the words of another of his students, Patten taught innovative thinking—"making use of creative intelligence to master new situations irrespective of received dogma." Nearing seems to have found these new intellectual tools for potential social change to be exciting and liberating. He completed his undergraduate program in just three years, while simultaneously engaging in campus politics and competitive debate.

Nearing received his BS degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1905 and his PhD in economics in 1909. From 1905 to 1907, he served as the Secretary of the Pennsylvania Child Labor Committee, a volunteer society working to solve the child labor problem in the state.

From 1908 until 1915 while living in Arden, Delaware, Nearing taught economics and sociology at the Wharton School of Business and at Swarthmore College, authoring a stream of books on economics and social problems. Nearing was a staunch advocate of a "new economics," which insisted that

... economists part company with the ominous pictures of an overpopulated, starving world, prostrate before the throne of "competition," "individual initiative," "private property," or some other pseudo-god, and tell men in simple, straightforward language how they may combine, re-shape, or overcome the laws and utilize them as a blessing instead of enduring them as a burden and a curse.

Much as Karl Marx drew radical implications from the ideas of the conservative Hegel, Nearing took the economic logic of his department head, Simon Patten, and made radical inferences about wealth and the distribution of income that his mentor had hesitated to draw. Nearing believed that unfettered wealth stifled initiative and impeded economic advancement, and hoped that progressive thinkers among the ownership class would come to realize the negative impact of economic parasitism and accept their civic duty of enlightened leadership. He outlined an economic republicanism based on "four basic democratic concepts—equality of opportunity, civic obligation, popular government, and human rights."