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David Ricardo: Adam Smith
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This eleven-volume set of The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo contains all of Ricardo’s published and unpublished writings, and provides great insight into the early era of political economics by chronicling Ricardo’s significant contributions to modern economics. The edition has been widely acclaimed as the best example, prior to the Glasgow edition of Adam Smith’s writings, of scholarly editing applied to the work of an economist. It contains a general index and includes four volumes dedicated to his personal correspondence with such economic luminaries as Malthus, Jean-Baptiste Say, and James Mill, the father of John Stuart Mill. Complete sets of the edition have not been available for many years. This publication is an affordable paperback version of the hardcover edition prepared under the auspices of the Royal Economic Society by Piero Sraffa and printed by Cambridge University Press in 1951–1973.
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"The European Union, Japan and Canada, are avid supporters of the ideas of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, but only when it means liberalising the markets of smaller and weaker countries, not their own." 4/15
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Ricardo was born in London. His father was a Jewish stockbroker. With his marriage in 1793, Ricardo turned Christian. He learned well... from his father, and by 1814, David Ricardo was a rich man in his own right. "In 1799 his interest in political economy was awakened by Smith's
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Like Adam Smith, Ricardo was ... an opponent of protectionism for national economies, especially for agriculture. He believed that the British "Corn Laws" — tariffs on agriculture products — ensured that less productive domestic land would be harvested and rents would be driven up. (Case & Fair, 1999: 812, 813). Thus, the surplus would be directed more toward feudal landlords and away from the emerging industrial capitalists. Since landlords tended to squander their wealth on luxuries, rather than investments, Ricardo believed that the Corn Laws were leading to the economic stagnation of the British economy. Parliament repealed the Corn Laws in 1846.
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Up to this point there is little, if anything, to distinguish Ricardo's thought from Adam Smith's exposition. In stating it, Ricardo would probably have slipped more easily than Smith into the loose habit of speaking of labor expenditure as a cause -- indeed, the sole cause -- of exchangeable value, -- "the original source of exchangeable value."(15) But this was as far from Ricardo's real meaning as it was from Smith's. On the other hand, Ricardo was even less concerned than Smith with the value of a commodity in itself, -- that is, with its intrinsic significance to its possessor, -- but, exclusively, with the several amounts of other commodities which it might secure in exchange. His interest ... lay not with positive, but with relative value, and consequently less with the cause than with the measure of exchange value.
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Ricardo became interested in economics after reading Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations in 1799 on a vacation to the English resort of Bath. This was Ricardo's first contact with economics. He wrote his first economics article at age 37 and within another ten years he reached the height of his fame.
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