On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text · 1 illegible passages, excluded from answers
- Extent:
- ~140,000 words · 642 passages
Cite this work
- APADavid Ricardo. (n.d.). On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/david-ricardo/on-the-principles-of-political-economy-and-taxation
- MLADavid Ricardo. "On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/david-ricardo/on-the-principles-of-political-economy-and-taxation.
- ChicagoDavid Ricardo. On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/david-ricardo/on-the-principles-of-political-economy-and-taxation.
What it is about
The 1817 book that gave political economy its deductive form: abstract models, few variables, rigorous conclusions.
Context and history
Three things from it have lasted. The first is the theory of rent: the worst land still worth cultivating sets the price, and what the better lands yield above that goes to the owner without his doing anything. The second is comparative advantage, the counter-intuitive and still living argument that two countries gain by trading even when one is better at producing everything. The third is the labour theory of value, which Ricardo left half settled and which Marx took up from another side. His way of reasoning, more than his conclusions, is what has marked later economics; the so-called 'Ricardian vice' — deducing conclusions about the world from the model without looking at the world — comes from his example.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
The produce of the earth--all that is derived from its surface by the united application of labour, machinery, and capital, is divided among three classes of the community; namely, the proprietor of the land, the owner of the stock or capital necessary for its cultivation, and the labourers by whose industry it is cultivated. But in different stages of society, the proportions of the whole produce of the earth which will be allotted to each of these classes, under the names of rent, profit, and wages, will be essentially different; depending mainly on the actual fertility of the soil, on the accumulation of capital and population, and on the skill, ingenuity, and instruments employed in agriculture. To determine the laws which regulate this distribution, is the principal problem in Political Economy: much as the science has been improved by the writings of Turgot, Stuart, Smith, Say, Sismondi, and others, they afford very little satisfactory information respecting the natural course of rent, profit, and wages. In 1815, Mr. Malthus in his "Inquiry into the Nature and Progress of Rent," and a Fellow of University College, Oxford, in his "Essay on the Application of Capital to Land," presented to the world, nearly at the same moment, the true doctrine of rent; without a knowledge of which it is impossible to understand the effect of the progress of wealth on profits and wages, or to trace satisfactorily the influence of taxation on different classes of the community, particularly when the commodities taxed are the productions imm