Abstract
With the 1830s a more optimistic conception of the future emerged. The divergence between population and resources seemed to settle into a new equilibrium; the advent of the factory system, which brought great upheavals in social patterns, began to open up unexpected scenarios relating to production, which the rapid changes in models of consumption helped to foster. In this new climate, some observers went so far as to demonstrate their trust in the ‘unlimited’ self-expanding capacity of the capitalist economy.
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Notes
J.A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 571.
This eclectic Scot — who had emigrated to Canada, the only one of the North American economists in the first half of the nineteenth century who enjoyed some renown in Europe — until a few decades ago was commonly identified with the label of ‘precursor of Böhm-Bawerk’. Only more recently has he become the subject of real interest as a thinker tout court. See O.F. Hamouda, C. Lee and D. Mair (eds), The Economics of John Rae (London: Routledge, 1998).
J. Rae, Statement of Some New Principles on the Subject of Political Economy (New York: Kelley, 1964 [1834]).
N.W. Senior, An Outline of the Science of Political Economy (New York: Kelley, 1965 [1836]), pp. 58–59.
D. Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, ed. by P. Sraffa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951 [1821, 1st edn 1817]), p. 120, emphasis added.
T.R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, ed. by P. James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989 [variorum edn]).
T.R. Malthus, Principles of Political Economy, ed. by J. Pullen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989 [1820, with alterations from the 1836 edn]), vol. I, p. 359.
Ibid., p. 402; cf. also pp. 264–265. Even compared with Ricardo’s early opinions on machinery, Malthus’s analysis formed a considerable advancement. Ricardo (see his Principles of Political Economy, p. 387) had supposed that an excess of labour in one market could be ‘employed on the production of some other commodity’ (evidently, it would be a zero-sum game). Malthus did not need to resort to any auxiliary hypotheses like this, since for him the adjustment would occur through an endogenous growth process (the sum would now be positive). The intermediate steps in the development of Ricardo’s position cannot be discussed here: the best reference is still S. Hollander, The Economics of David Ricardo (London: Heinemann, 1979), pp. 346ff.
Ibid., p. 84. It is interesting to note how the figures on which Senior bases his arguments are correct, except for underestimating imports in the 1830s; however, their amendments further reinforce his conclusions. Here is a comparison with the quantity-price series reconstructed by P. Bairoch (Révolution industrielle et sous-développement (Paris: SEDES, 1963), Tabs 11 and 12, on pp. 235, 237) using other sources:
N.W. Senior, Two Lectures on Population, with a Correspondence between the Author and T.R. Malthus [1828; 1831], in his Selected Writings on Economics (New York: Kelley, 1966), pp. 14, 26–27. It is curious how on p. 24 Senior shows that he underestimates the spread of birth control in the world (and, paradoxically, on the other side of the Channel) thinking it to be a trivial phenomenon.
I do not think that seeing Mill as ‘the first major environmentalist’, as in W. Rostow’s Theorists of Economic Growth from David Hume to the Present: With a Perspective on the Next Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 117, does truth any credit; it does, however, have a certain fascination.
See the discussion in M. Donoghue, ‘Mill’s Affirmation of the Classical Wage Fund Doctrine’, Scottish Journal of Political Economy, 44.1 (1997), pp. 82–99.
J.S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy with Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy [variorum edn, 1st edn 1848], ed. by J.M. Robson, in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vols II–III (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), pp. 497–500.
One of the brightest Cambridge mathematicians, he owes his fame to the design of the first calculator. The forma mentis that came from long application in the fields of computer engineering and logistics led him to become interested in business economics (cf. B. Schefold, Charles Babbage: Pioneer of the Theory of Industrial Organisation and Development, in L. Magnusson et al., Innovations and Economic Changes (Galatina: Congedo, 1996), pp. 19–38).
N. Rosenberg, Exploring the Black Box: Technology, Economics and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 24.
T.S. Ashton, The Industrial Revolution 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 77.
Both contributions can be read in F. Crouzet (ed.), Capital Formation in the Industrial Revolution (London: Methuen, 1972).
Cf. F. Caron, ‘La Grande-Bretagne 1815-vers 1850’, in P. Léon (ed.), Histoire économique et sociale du monde, vol. III (Paris: Colin, 1978), p. 396.
J. Mokyr, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), ch. 6.
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© 2008 Francesco Boldizzoni
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Boldizzoni, F. (2008). Industrial Maturity. In: Means and Ends. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230584143_5
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