# David Ricardo **David Ricardo** (1772–1823) was the English stockbroker, landowner and member of Parliament whose *On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation* (1817) turned [[Adam Smith]]'s system into a deductive science — and supplied both the free-trade right and the Marxist left with their founding arguments. Born to a Sephardic family in London and disinherited when he married a Quaker, he made a fortune in government securities (famously on the Waterloo loan of 1815), retired at 42 to write, and bought a seat in the Commons in 1819 to argue against the Corn Laws. ## The three ideas - **Comparative advantage.** Chapter 7 of the *Principles*: even if Portugal makes both wine and cloth more cheaply than England, both countries gain by specializing in what each makes *relatively* better and trading. It is the strongest result in economics and the foundation of every free-trade argument since — and the argument the tariff right, from the 1890 McKinley schedule to the second Trump administration's [[Tariffs]], has spent a century and a half trying to talk around. See [[Free Trade]] and Comparative Advantage. - **Rent and the stationary state.** Ricardian rent — the surplus that accrues to owners of the best land as population pushes cultivation onto worse land — made landlords the class whose interest is "always opposed to the interest of every other class." Combined with [[Malthusianism]]'s population pressure, it yielded the "iron law of wages" and a long-run stationary state: the pessimism that earned economics the name "the dismal science." See [[Malthusianism]] and [[Technological Unemployment]] — Ricardo's 1821 chapter "On Machinery" conceded that mechanization could hurt workers, the concession the [[Luddites]] had been hanged for making. - **The labor theory of value.** Ricardo's attempt to ground prices in embodied labor was the analytical inheritance [[Karl Marx]] took up in [[Das Kapital]]; the "Ricardian socialists" of the 1820s had already drawn the conclusion that if labor creates value, labor is owed it. See [[Marxian Economics]] and [[Classical Economics]]. ## Why he matters here Ricardo is where the two traditions the vault tracks diverge from one book. The right kept comparative advantage and the case against landlords' protection; the left kept the labor theory and the class analysis; each discards the other half. The [[Techno-Optimist Manifesto]]'s claim that machines never cost jobs on net is an argument *against* Ricardo's own late correction, and the tariff regime of 2025–26 is the largest real-world test of Chapter 7 since Smoot–Hawley. See the [[Economics Hub]] and [[The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money]] for the next turn of the argument. ## See Also - [[Adam Smith]] · [[Classical Economics]] · [[Malthusianism]] · [[John Stuart Mill]] · [[Karl Marx]] · [[Das Kapital]] - [[Free Trade]] · Comparative Advantage · [[Tariffs]] · [[Technological Unemployment]] · [[Luddites]] · [[Economics Hub]]