Abstract
Little is known about Gray except that he worked at the War Office in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His major work (if that is the right phrase) was The Happiness of States, a book which ‘he meant to have published in 1804 but was prevented’, with the result that it did not appear until 1815. A large and cranky work, it is at once anti-Physiocrat, anti-Smith (the similarity of its title to The Wealth of Nations is no accident) and anti-Malthus.
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References
Keynes, J.M., and P. Sraffa (eds.). 1938. An abstract of a treatise of human nature 1740, by David Hume. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Masuda, E., and P. Newman. 1981. Gray and Giffen goods. Economic Journal 91: 1011–1014.
Powell, E.G. 1896. Gray, Simon. In Dictionary of political economy, vol. II, ed. R.H.I. Palgrave, 257–258. London: Macmillan.
Sraffa, P. (ed. with the collaboration of M.H. Dobb). 1952. The works and correspondence of David Ricardo, vol. VIII. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Economic Society.
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Newman, P. (2018). Gray, Simon (Alias George Purves, LL.D.) (fl. 1795–1840). In: The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95189-5_1069
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95189-5_1069
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