HKB
6 passages · search this phrase →
Often appears with: value, price, and exchange · labor, wages, and the division of work · famine, scarcity, and plenty · capital, credit, and banking · white labor and dishonor · wages, profit, and rent · wages supply and demand · trade, markets, and merchants · theory of rent · surplus produce ratio · structure of the soul · slavery and bondage
Usually: argument (5) · detachment (2) · skepticism (2) · letter or document (1) · censure (1) · curiosity (1) · exhortation (1) · lament (1)
“Your position, if established, would, I think, overturn both your theory of rent and population, for I understand you to maintain that the higher the price of corn rises, in consequence of more men being employed on the poorer land, the greater will be, not only the surplus produce after paying the labourers, but the ratio of that surplus produce to the whole capital employed on the land.” David Ricardo, Letters of David Ricardo to Thomas Robert Malthus, 1 · insight
He explains that wages rise or fall due to labour supply and demand and the prices of wage-bought commodities, with fertility and settlement conditions affecting population and capital accumulation rates.
life is cheap," and his wants easily satisfied. Many of the conveniences now enjoyed in an English cottage, would have been thought luxuries at an early period of our history. From manufactured commodities always falling, and raw produce always rising, with the progress of society, such a disproportion in their relative value is at length created, that in rich countries a labourer, by the sacrifice of a very small q…
Ricardo replies that Malthus’s claim implies population has no effective check, with rent and profit rising geometrically, and he clarifies his earlier numerical comparison between producing corn on better vs worse land.
MY DEAR SIR, On no subject that we have been lately discussing have we so materially differed as on the one now occupying our attention. Your position, if established, would, I think, overturn both your theory of rent and population, for I understand you to maintain that the higher the price of corn rises, in consequence of more men being employed on the poorer land, the greater will be, not only the surplus produce…
Ricardo tells Malthus he’s working privately on his rent-and-wages theory, concedes a special case where profits fall if population is held back, and plans to meet in London with further correspondence about country visits.
I am not at a loss for amusement within doors, I contrive to take my walks while it is fine, and return to my library with the recommencement of rain.... I hope your additional volume will soon follow your new edition of the old work[138]. I shall be glad to see in a connected form your matured opinions on the progress of rent, profits, and wages, and in what manner they are affected by the increasing difficulty of …
Key “secular problems” like population growth will worsen food imports, but Europe’s urgent crises—famine, war, cold, disease, murder, and anarchy—require redirecting postwar economic tendencies toward prosperity and order.
increase in the population of the world, a tendency which must be especially injurious to the greatest of all industrial countries and the most dependent on imported supplies of food. But these secular problems are such as no age is free from. They are of an altogether different order from those which may afflict the peoples of Central Europe. Those readers who, chiefly mindful of the British conditions with which t…
The writer praises Plato’s regulation of poetry and soul-division as a basis for excluding imitation, then broadens into a modern critique: societies struggle to manage marriage, population pressure, and the health consequences of early or improvident unions.
of individuality. But we can hardly condemn too strongly a system which, instead of fostering the scattered seeds or sparks of genius and character, tends to smother and extinguish them. Still, while condemning Plato, we must acknowledge that neither Christianity, nor any other form of religion and society, has hitherto been able to cope with this most difficult of social problems, and that the side from which Plato…
Using a left-bank (Kentucky) vs right-bank (Ohio) comparison, Tocqueville claims that slavery depresses labor and prosperity while freedom encourages industry, education, and higher population growth.
Mississippi, may be said to sail between liberty and servitude; and a transient inspection of the surrounding objects will convince him which of the two is most favorable to mankind. Upon the left bank of the stream the population is rare; from time to time one descries a troop of slaves loitering in the half-desert fields; the primeval forest recurs at every turn; society seems to be asleep, man to be idle, and nat…