Few deny that the work of economists has often embodied or stimulated significant contributions to political thought. Smith, Keynes, Hayek, and Friedman are good examples. However, the work of the ...great classical economist David Ricardo is not usually placed in such company. Despite Ricardo's affiliations with philosophical radicals like Bentham and James Mill, the most that previous scholars have been prepared to allow is that if Ricardo spoke to political questions at all, he addressed only economic policy. This book argues forcefully for a revision of that received opinion. Murray Milgate and Shannon Stimson show that Ricardo articulated a distinctive political vision, and that he did so in a novel and sophisticated way by linking arguments for democratic reform with the conclusions of political economy. Ricardian Politics examines compelling but neglected evidence of how Ricardo deployed economic theory to construct a new view of politics. Milgate and Stimson analyze the case he made for a more inclusive political society and for a more representative and democratic government, discuss how his argument was structured by his economics, and explicitly draw out comparisons with Bentham and James Mill. Ricardo wrote at a critical moment, which saw the consolidation of capitalist industry and the emergence of modern democratic political ideology. By attending to the historical context, this book recovers a more accurate picture of his thought, while contributing to the current renewal of research on the relationship between economic and political thought in early nineteenth-century Britain.
Originally published in 1991.
ThePrinceton Legacy Libraryuses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
A Key To Ricardo Clair, Oswald St
1957, 20131016, 2003, 2013-10-16
eBook
Ricardo is one of the most imposing figures in the history of economic thought, yet attimes his writings are among the most obscure. A Key to Ricardo traces,simplifies and clarifies Ricardo's ideas ...on the principal topics on which he wrote.
The book provides a careful analysis of Ricardo's most cryptic passages and also explores areas where Ricardo appears to be mistaken. Setting Ricardo's writings against the context of his contemporaries, the relevance of the Ricardian contribution to subsequent economic thinking is nonetheless made very clear.
"This book explores the perceived paradigmatic conflict within British classical economics between the so called 'Ricardo School' and the contemporary French Economics of Jean-Baptiste Say. Samuel ...Hollander provides the reader with extensive evidence, utilizing all editions of Say's main texts and his lesser-known writings in order to demonstrate his adherence to much of Ricardian theory.
This intriguing book focuses on selected doctorinal issues and surrounding debates, and will interest all serious historians of economic thought, finding a place on the bookshelves of many economists across the world."
Against the idea that thinkers such as Althusser practice a form of ideology critique that is equivalent to a style of “deep reading,” at issue is a model of critical analysis that attends to what is ...readily perceptible on the surface but not conceptualized as such. In the mid-1960s, Althusser and Foucault, not unlike Lacan, propose similar models of reading that focus on what is visible yet invisible insofar as not fully recognized. However, Ricardo serves as a nodal point dividing Althusser’s and Foucault’s otherwise strikingly parallel modes of adjacent reading, or surface critique: for Althusser, Ricardo’s difference from Marx represents the break between ideology and science; for Foucault, Ricardo and Marx are entirely of the same moment.
Retrospectives Bernhofen, Daniel M.; Brown, John C.
The Journal of economic perspectives,
10/2018, Volume:
32, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Last year marked the 200th anniversary of Ricardo’s famous “four numbers” paragraph on comparative advantage, which is one of the oldest analytical results in economics. Following the lead of James ...Mill (1821), these four numbers have been interpreted as unit labor coefficients. This interpretation has provided the basis for the development of the ‘Ricardian model’ from John Stuart Mill (1852) to Eaton and Kortum (2002). However, if we accept the labor unit interpretation of these numbers, Ricardo’s exposition in his 1817 Principles of Political Economy and Taxation makes little logical sense. Building on Sraffa’s (1930) interpretation of Ricardo’s numbers as labor embodied in trade, our discussion reveals the amazing simplicity and generality of Ricardo’s comparative advantage formulation and gains-from-trade logic.
Retrospectives Hollander, Samuel
The Journal of economic perspectives,
04/2019, Volume:
33, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
We are currently experiencing an outpouring of concern both popular and professional regarding technological unemployment. I shall be discussing an apparent about-turn on the subject by David Ricardo ...(1772–1823), who at different times, even in different chapters of the same book, and, indeed, even at different places in the same chapter, seemed to be on both sides of the argument as to whether technological unemployment should be a matter for concern. In a chapter entitled "On Machinery," added to the third edition of his Principles of Political Economy (1821), which comprises volume 1 of his Collected Works (1951–73), Ricardo announced that he had become concerned about the possibility, even likelihood, of technical change detrimental to labour's interests. However, in the very same "On Machinery" chapter, Ricardo also outlined qualifications to show that there was little need for concern. Ricardo's opposing messages are reflected in contrasting reactions to the chapter "On Machinery." Some readers—including Thomas Robert Malthus and J. R. McCulloch—understood it as supporting working-class opposition to machinery. Others—including John Stuart Mill and Sir John Hicks—find therein the answer to such opposition.
This paper evaluates the role of sectoral heterogeneity in determining the gains from trade. We first show analytically that in the presence of sectoral Ricardian comparative advantage, a one-sector ...sufficient statistic formula that uses total trade volumes as a share of total absorption systematically understates the true gains from trade. Greater relative sectoral productivity differences lead to larger disparities between the gains implied by the one-sector formula and the true gains. Using data on overall and sectoral trade shares in a sample of 79 countries and 19 sectors we show that the multi-sector formula implies on average 30% higher gains from trade than the one-sector formula, and as much as 100% higher gains for some countries. We then set up and estimate a quantitative Ricardian–Heckscher–Ohlin model in which no version of the formula applies exactly, and compare a range of sufficient statistic formulas to the true gains in this model. Confirming the earlier results, formulas that do not take into account the sectoral heterogeneity understate the true gains from trade in the model by as much as two-thirds. The one-sector formulas understate the gains by more in countries with greater dispersion in sectoral productivities.
•The one-sector sufficient statistic formula understates the true gains from trade.•Greater relative sectoral productivity differences lead to greater understatement.•In the data, multi-sector formula implies 30% higher gains than one-sector formula.•Results are confirmed in a quantitative Ricardian–Heckscher–Ohlin model.
Ricardo and International Trade Senga, Shigeyoshi; Fujimoto, Masatomi; Tabuchi, Taichi
2017, 20170518, 2017-05-18, Volume:
195
eBook
iDavid Ricardo’s theories have been widely studied and discussed, including the prominent theory on comparative advantage. Ricardo and International Trade looks at the ongoing renaissance of the ...Ricardian international trade theory. The book’s interpretation brings fresh insights into and new developments on the Ricardian international trade theory by examining the true meaning of the ‘four magic numbers’. By putting together theories of comparative advantage and international money, the book attempts to elucidate Ricardo’s international trade theory in the real world.
This book also features contributions from the Japanese perspective and compares Ricardian theories with those of his contemporaries, such as Malthus, Torrens and J. S. Mill. This book will be a valuable reference for researchers and scholars with interests in history of economic thought and international economics.ii
iii
Piero Sraffa’s The Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities is the seminal attempt to create a physical, rather than a social, numeraire to measure the price of commodities. Sraffa’s ...physical numeraire is predicated on the physical identity and, therefore, direct commensurability of inputs and outputs. It is considered to be the viable alternative to Ricardo and Marx’s social numeraire that used labour time to measure the value of incommensurate inputs and outputs. Sraffa’s assumption of the identity of inputs and outputs contradicts the essential nature of the production process itself, where human activity changes one set of inputs into a different, and therefore incommensurate, set of outputs. This false premise underpins every critique of labour value theory, including from Samuelson and Steedman. Paradoxically, Sraffa’s assumptions also underpin the work of Marxists, notably Freeman and Kliman, who attempt to defend labour value theory in models where it does not apply.
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