Adam Smith: A Summation
• Moral sentiments a first principle.
• Market coordination of self – interested individuals
“Economic man” led by an “invisible hand”
Competition  Efficiency and Equity
» Guard against monopoly
• Laissez – faire!
Restricted government trumps government restrictions
• Labor theory of value
• Progress through specialization and exchange
The division of labor is limited by the extent of the market.
Spiraling progressImproved rule of lawProgress
Stagnation and decline in the future
Enter Malthus
Enter Ricardo
Ricardo & Malthus: Welcome to the Dismal Science
David Ricardo, 1772 – 1823
Thomas Malthus,1766 – 1834
Stockbroker/Dealer/Pampleteer
Parson/Professor of History&PolEcon
Abstraction  Economic Science
• Championed capitalists
Intuitive approach/empiricist
• Championed landlords
– Opposed Corn Law
– Favored Corn Law
Whoever wins, workers get dry crust…not quite, as we’ll see
• Advanced Say’s Law
Major contributions
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–
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Differential rent
Labor theory of value
Theory of distribution
Comparative advantage
Quantity Theory
• Advanced Theory of Gluts
– Macro failure  Keynes
– Capitalism needs
unproductive consumers
Major contribution
• Law of population  Darwin
Diminishing Returns Prevail
Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it Affects the Future
Improvement of Society with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin,
M. Condorcet, and Other Writers, 1st ed., 1798
Malthus’ precursors:
• Cantillon: men multiply like mice
• Quesnay: propagation has no limit but subsistence
• Franklin: American vs. European fertility/rural vs. urban fertility
• Smith: Wage increase  Population increase
• Godwin/Condorcet: reason would restrain propagation
Malthus’ insight: Diminishing Returns
Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it Affects the
Future Improvement of Society with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr.
Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers, 1st ed., 1798
•
First principles
– Food
– Passion
•
Population, when unchecked,
increases in a geometric ratio
• 1, 2, 4, 8, …[25 year doubling time]
•
Subsistence increases in an
arithmetic ratio
• 1, 2, 3, 4, …
Le
Q
c
Q  c ln L
• Subsistence checks population
(“Subsistence” adjusts to experience)
– Positive checks:
• Vice
• Misery: War, pestilence, famine
– Preventive check: Moral restraint
Law of Diminishing Returns
• in proportion as cultivation is
extended … additions to average
produce must be gradually and
regularly diminishing
Q c

L L
Hint of an externality in Malthus’ Law of Population:
Your use of resources reduces my wellbeing
 Today’s environmental movement
From An Essay in Population…Malthus as ogre
• Famine seems to be the last, the most dreadful resource of nature. The
power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to
produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some
shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active
and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the
great army of destruction. But should they fail in this war of
extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague,
advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and ten
thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable
famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the
population with the food of the world.
• … to better the condition of the laboring classes [we should cultivate]
a spirit of independence, a decent pride, and a taste for cleanliness
and comfort. The effect of a good government in increasing the
prudential habits and personal respectability of the lower classes …
will always be incomplete without a good system of education…The
benefits derived from education are among those, which may be
enjoyed without restriction of numbers; and, as it is in the power of
governments to confer these benefits, it is … their duty to do it.
Why no apocalypse? What did Malthus miss?
The Dismal Science of David Ricardo
… Ricardo offers us the supreme intellectual achievement, unattainable by weaker
spirits, of adopting a hypothetical world remote from experience as though it were
the world of experience and then living in it consistently. With most of his
successors, common sense cannot help breaking in – with injury to their logical
consistency.
John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money
• Prototypes, not people
• Laws of behavior, not lives
• Long-run equilibrium…Production cost  Natural price
– Dismissed Supply-Demand as championed by Malthus: …ephemeral and transient
• Ricardo, The High Price of Bullion, 1810
Paper money  Wartime inflation
– Regulate paper currency (so its value corresponds to its gold “content”)
– Stick to metallic money…Private enterprise “controls” money supply
Ricardo  Currency School  Monetarism
• Influence of a Low Price of Corn on the Profits of Stock, 1814
• Discussed with Malthus
• Ricardo, Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, 1817
• Encouraged by James Mill (another East India functionary…and mutual friend)
Ricardo on Money:
…put the mass of commodities (Y) on one side of the line and the
amount of money (M) multiplied by the rapidity of its turnover
(V) on the other. Is not this in all cases the regulator of prices?
[P = MV/Y]
…Money cannot call forth goods.
…Productions are always bought by productions. Money is only
the medium by which exchange is effected.
…To save is to spend … a general glut is evidently impossible
Say’s Law: Supply creates its own demand!
…every part of the income, whether entirely consumed or
invested, will always produce an equal demand for goods,
although not the same kind of goods.
• Ricardo’s preferred monetary regime: paper money freely
convertible into gold at a fixed rate.
The economic way of thinking:
Ricardo to Malthus:
• Our differences may … be ascribed to your considering my book more
practical than I intended it to be. My object was to elucidate principles,
and to do this I imagined strong cases that I might show the operation of
those.
Comparative advantage  international division of labor
When there’s a bad harvest, gold becomes the cheapest commodity to export.
Validity of Say’s Law? If workers paid little, who buys?
Malthus on gluts: focus on effectual demand (Smith also used term)
Growing Supply
Satiation
Stable Demand
Excess Supply
General Glut
Decline in Profits
Stagnation
(Why invest if demand is down?)
Ways out:
– Redistribution? No!
– Unproductive consumers: Clergy, landlords, public works…military-industrial complex
Malthus on Gluts: Anticipation of Keynes???
We see in almost every part of the world vast powers of production which are
not put into action…[F]rom the want of a proper distribution of the actual
produce adequate motives are not furnished to continue production…the grand
question is whether it is distributed in such a manner…as to occasion the most
effective demand for future produce: and I distinctly maintain that an attempt
to accumulate very rapidly which necessarily implies a diminution of
unproductive consumption, by greatly impairing the usual motives to
production must prematurely check the progress of wealth.
Letter from Malthus to Ricardo, July 7, 1821
• Too much investment  Glut???...anti-Keynes
• Need for “unproductive consumption”  pro-Keynes
Ricardo defended Say’s Law: to save is to spend
..but in an afterthought, unemployment could result from progress:
“On Machinery” (Principles, Chapter 31, 1821)
• If machines substitute for labor rather than complement labor,
unemployment is possible with accumulation… Say’s Law.
• When will technological advance result in unemployment?
If interest rate is high
Capitalist expansion won’t offset reduced labor input
If machines are long-lived
 Low replacement demand for machines  Low demand for labor
Say’s Law: The Beat Goes On
• Which Law? Baumol, 1977…The are really eight Say’s Laws.
• The simple version, per James Mill (1808):
The production of commodities creates…a market for the commodities
produced…When goods are carried to market, what is wanted is someone to
buy. But to buy one must have the wherewithal to pay…But wherein consist
the collective means of payment of the whole nation? Do they not consist of its
annual produce?...[So] the more you increase the annual produce, the more by
that very act you extend the national market…and the actual purchases of the
nation…[T]he demand of a nation is always equal to the produce of a
nation.
• A clearer version per John Stuart Mill (1844):
[the proposition that supply is at the same time demand is]…evidently founded
on the supposition of a state of barter…One [person] cannot sell without buying.
If, however, we suppose that money is used, …, although he who sells, really
sells only to buy, he need not buy at the same moment when he sells…[T]o
render the argument for the impossibility of an excess of all commodities
applicable to the case in which [money] is employed, money itself must be
considered as a commodity.  High demand for money  Short-run glut.
• J.S. Mill sketches a business cycle with fluctuations in Md
Ricardo’s Theory of Distribution
Differential rent: rent built up from zero-rent margin
• As push out to worse and worse land, owners of better land
command bigger and bigger premiums (rents)
Extensive margin / Intensive margingets rid of rent from distribution
Idea picked
up from
Malthus •
• Only scarcity of fertile land yields rent
» Rent is a sign of poverty, not prosperity
» Interest of landlord is always opposed to interest of society
» Only landlord could gain from progress
– Importing grain serves like a technological advance in agriculture
» It makes as much sense to limit imports as to forbid
agricultural improvements
Wages ~ Natural price of labor = what’s required for
(socially necessary) subsistence & reproduction: dry crust
• Malthusian Law of Population  Iron Law of Wages
» Poor Law (Speenhamland System) only increases number of poor
but does not improve their well-being
» Dole (wage subsidy)  Population growth  Lower wage  Dole
» Malthus: the poor are themselves the cause of their own poverty
Population changes slowly “natural” wage adapts to market wage (high wagehabits)
Ricardo’s Theory of Distribution
Profits ~ equalized and eliminated by competition
…nothing can increase profits permanently …but a really cheaper
mode of obtaining food  profits depend inversely on wages
Class Conflict: Theme picked up my Marx
…profits of capitalist farmer regulate the profits of all other trades
 corn-ratio theory of profits (corn is capital stock…wage fund)
Diminishing returns  Profit squeezed as economy grows
Wage Rate = Dry Crust? Profit Rate = “Zero”???
• Hollander and Hicks: Ricardo not as dismal as you’d think
Wage
.
A
“subsistence” profit
Curvature reflects diminishing returns
subsistence wage
long-run equilibrium
stationary state
Labor
• In expanding economy (point A)
– Profit exceeds bare minimum  incentive to accumulate
– Wage exceeds bare minimum
 population growth to meet increased demand for labor
• Ricardo “does not dispute Malthus’s view that the stationary state is remote.
Ricardo’s Labor Theory of Value
•
•
•
•
•
Assuming constant proportions
Abstracting from disutility of labor in different occupations
Abstracting from different inherent qualities/skills of labor
Abstracting from different qualities of land
Abstracting from different quantities of capital
» Assume (circulating) capital:labor ratio the same for all goods
» Assume capital inputs relatively small
 “Ricardo’s 93% labor theory of value” Stigler
• Then Smith’s Beaver:Deer labor theory of value applies
Ricardo’s Labor Theory of Value does not apply to
•
•
•
•
Goods in inelastic supply (Old Masters/Positional Goods)
Paper money
Monopolized products
Goods in international trade
» Owing to immobile factors of production, can only speak of comparative
labor costs, not absolute labor costs
The problem with the labor theory of value…
• Competition equates profit rates across industries
• Some industries more ‘capital intensive’ than others
– Costs of production, including normal rate of profit, in capital
intensive industries are greater relative to labor inputs than
costs of production relative to labor inputs in less capital
intensive industries.
 Higher prices relative to labor input costs in capital intensive industries
 Prices not uniformly in proportion to “labor values”
• Berries (L1 labor input;T1 to ripen) – Berry Liqueur (L2 labor input;T2 to distill)
P1 / P2 = {w L1 (1+i) T1 } / {w L2 (1+i) T2 } = {L1 / L2 } (1+i) (T1 – T2)
 Relative prices independent of wage…but not of i … unless T1 = T2
• Ricardo: assumed equal ratios of fixed capital (machines) to
working capital (wage fund) across all products
…not rigidly true, but I say it is the nearest approximation to the truth
• Malthus: Ricardo’s rule may be considered as the exception,
and the exceptions the rule.
Marginal Product
(corn)
Ricardo: Value, Distribution, and Growth
Price of product determines how far cultivation is pushed.
Price  Rent
More fertile/better situated land commands rent
to extent output can be produced with less labor.
Rent
 Rent measured in units of labor
Product of worst land only divided between
capitalist and labor…gets rid of rent
Profit is a residual
Profit
w*
Wage
Bill
Workers paid “price” of own production/reproduction.
 Subsistence wage
K1
Capital-Labor Input
(Capital and Labor are Complements)
Ricardo: Value, Distribution, and Growth
Marginal Product
(corn)
• Marginal product declines as economy grows.
• Profit is squeezed by increasing rent.
Rent
Profit
w*
Wage
Bill
K1 K2
Capital-Labor Input
(Capital and Labor are Complements)
Marginal Product
(corn)
Ricardo: Value, Distribution, and Growth
Profit squeezed to zero
 Growth ceases
Rent
w*
Wage
Bill
K1
Malthus: Perhaps, but
only in the v e r y
Lo n g R u
n
K*
Capital-Labor Input
(Capital and Labor are Complements)
Ricardo: Value, Distribution, and Growth
Marginal Product
(corn)
• Free trade effectively extends the margin of cultivation, reduces rent and
postpones the dismal stationary state.
» Additional fertile land made available to economy
• Agricultural & transportation technology also serve.
Rent
Profit
w*
Wage
Bill
K1 K2
Capital-Labor Input
(Capital and Labor are Complements)
Ricardo’s parting words to Malthus:
• And now, my dear Malthus, I have done. Like other
disputants, after much discussion, we each retain our
own opinion. These discussions, however, never
influence our friendship; I should not like you more than
I do if you agreed in opinion with me.
• Homage to Malthus:
If only Malthus, instead of Ricardo, had been the
parent stem from which 19th century economics
proceeded, what a much wiser and richer place the
world would be today.
John Maynard Keynes