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		Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, The
		In Eleven Volumes By David Ricardo Edited by Piero Sraffa with the Collaboration of M. H. Dobb
		Table of Contents Publication Date: October 2004 6 x 9. 4,624 pages.

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David Ricardo was born in London in 1772. His father, a successful stockbroker, introduced him to the Stock Exchange at the formative age of fourteen. During his career in finance, he amassed a personal fortune, which allowed him to retire at the age of forty-two. Thereafter, he pursued a political career and further developed his economic ideas and policy proposals. A man of very little formal education, Ricardo arguably became, with the exception of Adam Smith, the most influential political economist of all time.

Ricardo was the first economist to make extensive use of deductive reasoning and arithmetical models to illustrate the anticipated reactions to juxtaposed market forces and responsive human action. His modes of analysis have become identified with economics as an academic discipline.

Like Smith, Ricardo believed that minimal government intervention best served an economy. His contributions to economics are numerous and include the theory of “hard money” to hedge inflation, the law of diminishing returns, developed along with his close friend the classical economist T. R. Malthus, and the labor theory of value.

One of Ricardo’s most significant contributions to economics is the law of comparative advantage as applied to international commerce, which grew out of Adam Smith’s division of labor and has become the central argument for free trade and open markets. It implies that countries best serve themselves when they trade with other countries abiding by their respective scales of efficiency. Besides being the most efficient method of international commerce, the comparative-advantage mode of trade also encourages international stability through multilateral business interests and global interdependencies. As Frédéric Bastiat, the French journalist and politician, wrote, “If goods do not cross borders, armies will.”

Throughout the years, several economists have elaborated on fundamental Ricardo themes and developed compelling theorems. Using Ricardo’s assertions about the interrelationships among capital, labor, output, and investment, the Nobel laureate F. A. Hayek posed the Ricardo effect, a retort to John Maynard Keynes’s accelerator principle. Robert Barro of Harvard University used Ricardo’s equivalence theorem to argue that the distinction between government taxing its citizens or deficit spending on credit is inconsequential to the long-term aggregate economy. Gordon Tullock, one of the founders of the public choice school, built upon Ricardo’s rent theory to explain his “rent-seeking” phenomenon, which illuminates the inequitable and monopolistic distribution of excessive gains derived through discriminate government subsidies.

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.

The entire series includes:

Volume 1: On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation
Volume 2: Notes on Malthus’s Principles of Political Economy
Volume 3: Pamphlets and Papers 1809-1811
Volume 4: Pamphlets and Papers 1815-1823
Volume 5: Speeches and Evidence
Volume 6: Letters 1810-1815
Volume 7: Letters 1816-1818
Volume 8: Letters 1819-1821
Volume 9: Letters 1821-1823
Volume 10: Biographical Miscellany
Volume 11: General Index

Additional Testimonials

This archive of correspondence, speeches, pamphlets, and economic works was edited by Piero Sraffa and published in hardcover by Cambridge U. Press between 1951-1973, for the Royal Economic Society. Now in an affordable paperbound edition, the 11-volume set begins with two lengthy economic studies: On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, published in three editions in 1817, 1819, and 1821 (a concordance of the editions is included), with a lengthy introduction by Sraffa: and Notes on Malthus’s Principles of Political Economy, also with an introduction by Sraffa. Four of the volumes contain Ricardo’s correspondence, both personal and professional, dating from 1810-1823. Sraffa has annotated the entire collection and provides various supporting tables and other material. Some facsimiles of the publications and correspondence are included.

Reference & Research Book News
August 2005