David Ricardo

Tema	Ekonomika
Tipas	Referatas
Aprašymas	Darbas anglų kalbą apie ekonomistą Davidą Ricardo. The Theory of Comparative Advantage. David Ricardo's Principles.
Patalpinta	2008-03-05
Parsisiuntė	73
	Parsisiųsti50 KB

Išsamus aprašymas

The brilliant British economist David Ricardo was one the most important figures in the development of economic theory. He articulated and rigorously formulated the "Classical" system of political economy. The legacy of Ricardo dominated economic thinking throughout the 19th Century.
David Ricardo's family was descended from Iberian Jews who had fled to Holland during a wave of persecutions in the early 18th Century. His father, a stockbroker, emigrated to England shortly before Ricardo's birth in 1772. David Ricardo was his third son (out of seventeen!).
At the age of fourteen, after a brief schooling in Holland, Ricardo's father employed him full-time at the London Stock Exchange, where he quickly acquired a knack for the trade. At 21, Ricardo broke with his family and his orthodox Jewish faith when he decided to marry a Quaker. However, with the assistance of acquaintances and on the strength of his already considerable reputation in the City of London, Ricardo managed to set up his own business as a dealer in government securities. He became immensely rich in a very short while. In 1814, at the age of 41, finding himself "sufficiently rich to satisfy all my desires and the reasonable desires of all those about me" (Letter to Mill, 1815), Ricardo retired from city business, bought the estate of Gatcomb Park and set himself up as a country gentleman.

Despite his own considerable practical experience, his writings are severely abstract and frequently difficult. His chief emphasis was on the principles of diminishing returns in connection with the rent of land, which he believed also regulated the profits of capital. He attempted to deduce a theory of value from the application of labour, but found it difficult to separate the effects of changes in distribution from changes in technology. The questions thus raised about the labour theory of value were taken up by Marx and the so-called `Ricardian socialists' as a theoretical basis for criticism of established institutions.
Ricardo's law of rent was probably his most notable and influential discovery. It was based on the observation that the differing fertility of land yielded unequal profits to the capital and labour applied to it. Differential rent is the result of this variation in the fertility of land. This principle was also noted at much the same time by Malthus, West, Anderson, and others. His other great contribution, the law of comparative cost, or comparative advantage, demonstrated the benefits of international specialisation of the commodity composition of international trade. This was at the root of the free trade argument which set Britain firmly on the course of exporting manufactures and importing foodstuffs. His success in attaching other economists, particularly James Mill and McCulloch, to his views largely accounted for the remarkable dominance of his ideas long after his own lifetime. Though much of this was eventually rejected, his abstract method and much of the theoretical content of his work became the framework for economic science at least until the 1870s.
Egged on by his good friend James Mill, Ricardo got himself elected into the British parliament in 1819 as an independent representing a borough in Ireland, which he served up to his death in 1823. In parliament, he was primarily interested in the currency and commercial questions of the day, such as the repayment of public debt, capital taxation and the repeal of the Corn Laws. (cf. Thomas Moore's poems on Cash, Corn and Catholics)

Raktiniai žodžiai

• david ricardo
• davidas ricardo
• david ricardo classical system