Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Wealth

Last updated

Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Wealth (also translated as Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Riches) was a treatise written by the French Enlightenment philosopher and civil servant Anne Robert Jacques Turgot. First published in 1770, this work discusses several topics, among them agricultural society, capital, commerce, money, the nature of interest, and both personal and national wealth. [1]

Contents

History

Turgot wrote the Réflexions in 1766 for the benefit of two young Chinese scholars who had studied in Paris, Louis Ko (Gao Leisi, 1732–1790) and Étienne Yang (Yang Dewang, 1733–98), on the occasion of their return to China. [2] The text was published in 1770 during not only the height of the Enlightenment, but also the emergence of economics as a distinct social science. [3] Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations is seen as a key text in economics history - yet Condorcet writes in Life of Turgot that "This Essay [Turgot's Reflections] May be Considered as the Germ of the Treatise on The Wealth of Nations, Written by the Celebrated Smith". [4]

Summary

Turgot's piece consists of 101 individual sections. Throughout these sections, several major themes emerge.

Major component

The first major component of Turgot's theory is the importance of land and agriculture. For Turgot, his theories and work were often concerned with "the transformation of society from agricultural feudalism to modern capitalism" and the evolution of society from simply farmers focused on cultivation to the emergence of a new capitalist-entrepreneur class. [5] In his Reflections, Turgot notes the importance of an inequality of land among people - thereby spurring excess produce and providing excess laborers, thereby allowing for employment and wages - and the specialization of the land towards certain goods - thereby spurring commerce. Emphasizing the fundamental role that agriculture plays in his economic theory, Turgot writes, "Not only there does not exist, nor can exist, any other revenue than the clear produce of land, but it is the earth also that has furnished all capitals, that form the mass of all the advances of culture and commerce". [6]

Furthermore, another key part of this work was attempting to divide society based on their economic role. Turgot points out the basis of society as the husbandman, the farmer who works the land to supply his own consumption or the raw materials necessary for industry. [7] For Turgot, the husbandman "gives the first movement" and provides the genesis for all commerce and wealth. [8]

Two-class society

Turgot submits that society originally consisted of two classes: the productive, which he terms cultivators (i.e. the husbandmen), and the stipendiary, which he calls the artificers. The productive class provides societies with the food and raw materials necessary for an economy to function; the stipendiary processes and alters these goods into useful things for society, and through the act of selling these goods can receive the substance necessary to survive. [9] Within the cultivators grouping, Turgot makes further distinctions: undertakers (farmers) and "hired persons, servants, and day-labourers". Within the "industrious stipendiary class", Turgot likewise makes more detailed divisions: capitalists and labor ("workmen"). [10]

Three-class society

Farms eventually generate net produce - that which is not necessary for the survival of the husbandman landowner - which Turgot terms as revenue. [11] From this excess produce, there then emerges a third class in society: proprietors, or the disposable class (due to their disposable, excess produce). In Sections 20-28, he lists several different ways in which this proprietor class may utilize and receive revenues from their lands:

Commerce and prices

Turgot also explores the nature of commerce and the role that money plays in society. Commerce, he claims, began due to people's desires for certain goods that they could not produce or secure themselves, allegedly beginning with bartering of goods. Turgot notes that the value of a good in terms of another commodity may differ from person to person. [12] Through commerce, standardized market-prices for things emerge - the more active the commerce, the more prices will be determined and standardized. [13]

Money

Money helps standardize these transactions. Yet for money to be useful, Turgot identifies two key properties: it must be able to be used both as a measure and a representation of value. [14] For Turgot, gold and silver make sense as money: these metals are highly valued, their value can change based on the purity of the metal and its weight, and - because of its scarcity - they are valuable enough in small amounts that money based on these metals can be mobile and used in everyday commerce. [15] He concludes this theme by emphasizing the correlation between the prevalence of money and societal development. He writes, "The more money becomes a universal medium, the more every one is enabled, by devoting himself solely to that specifics of cultivation and industry, of which he has made choice, to divest himself entirely of every though for his other wants...It is thus, that the use of money had prodigiously hastened the progress of society". [16] By receiving payment through universally accepted representation of values, people are more readily able to buy goods that they desire yet may not be efficient or able to produce themselves, thereby allowing further specialization of labor in society to those processes that are most efficient.

Accumulation of capital

Another topic Turgot examines in detail is his perceptions of societal economic and technological advancement, and how capital is accumulated. For Turgot, everything begins with the cultivator, the farm, and achieving the first revenues (excess produce); excess produce represents the first capital. In Section 83, Turgot outlines the various ways that capital can be employed:

Although the various methods of employing capital have different returns, Turgot suggests that there is a relationship between these various uses of capital that influence the interest rate in the economy and return on these investments. [17]

Lenders

For the lender, the two main concerns are the interest rate of the loan and the default risk of making the loan. [18] Turgot sees no moral issue with a lender of money making money or requiring interest on the loan given that the money which the lender is offering is their own property, [19] nor does he believe that laws should regulate interest rates - instead, it should be supply and demand alone. [20]

Turgot sees the interest rate as an incredibly central and important part of a nation's economy. He writes, "The price of the interest may be looked upon as a kind of level, under which all labour, culture, industry or commerce, acts...It is the abundance of capitals that animates enterprize; and a low interest of money is at the same time the effect and a proof of the abundance of capitals". [21] Beyond the supply and demand for capital, another influence on the interest rate is the culture and economy of the nation: the more a people indulge in luxury, the higher interest rate since that consumption uses up the potentially capital available for lending. [22]

Legacy

Turgot noted a few qualities that would later become fundamental to economic thought, including the principle of diminishing returns to production; in interest theory, Turgot explored important elements such as time-preference and the availability of loanable funds. [23]

Turgot has also been credited as having contributed to economics' understanding of demand for capital. Groenewegen notes how Turgot understood the "[role] of capital in the productive process", how increased industrial activity and divisions of labor have increased the demands for capital investment, and how the investment return to a capitalist is influenced by several factors - among them, interest, depreciation and a risk premium. [24] Furthermore, Groenewegen notes that Turgot's theories on the income and saving relationship was unique among his contemporaries - in particular Cantillon and Hume. [25]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Finance</span> The academic discipline studying businesses and investments

Finance is the study and discipline of money, currency and capital assets. It is related to, but not synonymous with economics, which is the study of production, distribution, and consumption of money, assets, goods and services . Finance activities take place in financial systems at various scopes, thus the field can be roughly divided into personal, corporate, and public finance.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Physiocracy</span> School of thought in economics

Physiocracy is an economic theory developed by a group of 18th-century Age of Enlightenment French economists who believed that the wealth of nations derived solely from the value of "land agriculture" or "land development" and that agricultural products should be highly priced. Their theories originated in France and were most popular during the second half of the 18th century. Physiocracy became one of the first well-developed theories of economics.

This aims to be a complete article list of economics topics:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Interest</span> Sum paid for the use of money

In finance and economics, interest is payment from a borrower or deposit-taking financial institution to a lender or depositor of an amount above repayment of the principal sum, at a particular rate. It is distinct from a fee which the borrower may pay the lender or some third party. It is also distinct from dividend which is paid by a company to its shareholders (owners) from its profit or reserve, but not at a particular rate decided beforehand, rather on a pro rata basis as a share in the reward gained by risk taking entrepreneurs when the revenue earned exceeds the total costs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anne Robert Jacques Turgot</span> French economist and statesman (1727–1781)

Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Baron de l'Aulne, commonly known as Turgot, was a French economist and statesman. Sometimes considered a physiocrat, he is today best remembered as an early advocate for economic liberalism. He is thought to have been the first economist to have recognized the law of diminishing marginal returns in agriculture.

In economics, capital goods or capital are "those durable produced goods that are in turn used as productive inputs for further production" of goods and services. At the macroeconomic level, "the nation's capital stock includes buildings, equipment, software, and inventories during a given year."

In economics, time preference is the current relative valuation placed on receiving a good or some cash at an earlier date compared with receiving it at a later date.

In classical economics, Say's law, or the law of markets, is the claim that the production of a product creates demand for another product by providing something of value which can be exchanged for that other product. So, production is the source of demand. In his principal work, A Treatise on Political Economy, Jean-Baptiste Say wrote: "A product is no sooner created, than it, from that instant, affords a market for other products to the full extent of its own value." And also, "As each of us can only purchase the productions of others with his own productions – as the value we can buy is equal to the value we can produce, the more men can produce, the more they will purchase."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard Cantillon</span> Irish-French economist and banker (c. 1680 – 1734)

Richard Cantillon was an Irish-French economist and author of Essai Sur La Nature Du Commerce En Général, a book considered by William Stanley Jevons to be the "cradle of political economy". Although little information exists on Cantillon's life, it is known that he became a successful banker and merchant at an early age. His success was largely derived from the political and business connections he made through his family and through an early employer, James Brydges. During the late 1710s and early 1720s, Cantillon speculated in, and later helped fund, John Law's Mississippi Company, from which he acquired great wealth. However, his success came at a cost to his debtors, who pursued him with lawsuits, criminal charges, and even murder plots until his death in 1734.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Economic system</span> System of ownership, production, and exchange

An economic system, or economic order, is a system of production, resource allocation and distribution of goods and services within a society. It includes the combination of the various institutions, agencies, entities, decision-making processes, and patterns of consumption that comprise the economic structure of a given community.

Capital accumulation is the dynamic that motivates the pursuit of profit, involving the investment of money or any financial asset with the goal of increasing the initial monetary value of said asset as a financial return whether in the form of profit, rent, interest, royalties or capital gains. The aim of capital accumulation is to create new fixed and working capitals, broaden and modernize the existing ones, grow the material basis of social-cultural activities, as well as constituting the necessary resource for reserve and insurance. The process of capital accumulation forms the basis of capitalism, and is one of the defining characteristics of a capitalist economic system.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Circular flow of income</span> Model of the real economy

The circular flow of income or circular flow is a model of the economy in which the major exchanges are represented as flows of money, goods and services, etc. between economic agents. The flows of money and goods exchanged in a closed circuit correspond in value, but run in the opposite direction. The circular flow analysis is the basis of national accounts and hence of macroeconomics.

Surplus product is a concept theorised by Karl Marx in his critique of political economy. Roughly speaking, it is the extra goods produced above the amount needed for a community of workers to survive at its current standard of living. Marx first began to work out his idea of surplus product in his 1844 notes on James Mill's Elements of political economy.

Returns, in economics and political economy, are the distributions or payments awarded to the various suppliers of a good or service

The history of economic thought is the study of the philosophies of the different thinkers and theories in the subjects that later became political economy and economics, from the ancient world to the present day in the 21st century. This field encompasses many disparate schools of economic thought. Ancient Greek writers such as the philosopher Aristotle examined ideas about the art of wealth acquisition, and questioned whether property is best left in private or public hands. In the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas argued that it was a moral obligation of businesses to sell goods at a just price.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Outline of economics</span> Overview of and topical guide to economics

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to economics:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tableau économique</span>

The Tableau économique or Economic Table is an economic model first described by French economist François Quesnay in 1758, which laid the foundation of the Physiocratic school of economics.

Throughout modern history, a variety of perspectives on capitalism have evolved based on different schools of thought.

In economics, the theory of fructification is a theory of the interest rate which was proposed by French economist and finance minister Anne Robert Jacques Turgot. The term theory of fructification is due to Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk who considered Turgot as the first economist who tried to develop a scientific explanation of the interest rate.

This glossary of economics is a list of definitions of terms and concepts used in economics, its sub-disciplines, and related fields.

References

  1. D., Groenewegen, Peter (2002). Eighteenth century economics : Turgot, Beccaria and Smith and their contemporaries. London: Routledge. pp. 21–23. ISBN   978-0203458785. OCLC   647434163.
  2. Me Nguyen; Benoît Malbranque (25 May 2014). "Les Chinois de Turgot". Institute Coppet.
  3. D., Groenewegen, Peter (2002). Eighteenth century economics : Turgot, Beccaria and Smith and their contemporaries. London: Routledge. p. 3. ISBN   978-0203458785. OCLC   647434163.
  4. "Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Riches (1898 ed.) - Online Library of Liberty". oll.libertyfund.org. Retrieved 2018-12-01.
  5. S., Todd Lowry (1987). Pre-Classical Economic Thought : From the Greeks to the Scottish Enlightenment. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands. p. 204. ISBN   9789400932555. OCLC   851383823.
  6. Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Reflections on the Formation and the Distribution of Riches, trans. William J. Ashley (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1898). §100. https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/122
  7. Turgot, Reflections on the Formation and the Distribution of Riches, §5
  8. Turgot, Reflections on the Formation and the Distribution of Riches, §7
  9. Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques (1793) [1770]. "§8". Reflections on the formation and distribution of Wealth. London: J. Good. p. 10. Retrieved 20 March 2023.
  10. Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques (1793) [1770]. "§61". Reflections on the formation and distribution of Wealth. London: J. Good. p. 65. Retrieved 20 March 2023.
  11. Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques (1793) [1770]. "§14". Reflections on the formation and distribution of Wealth. London: J. Good. p. 15-16. Retrieved 20 March 2023.
  12. Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques (1793) [1770]. "§31". Reflections on the formation and distribution of Wealth. London: J. Good. p. 31-33. Retrieved 20 March 2023.
  13. Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques (1793) [1770]. "§34". Reflections on the formation and distribution of Wealth. London: J. Good. p. 35-37. Retrieved 20 March 2023.
  14. Turgot, Reflections on the Formation and the Distribution of Riches, §39
  15. Turgot, Reflections on the Formation and the Distribution of Riches, §42, 44
  16. Turgot, Reflections on the Formation and the Distribution of Riches, §48
  17. Turgot, Reflections on the Formation and the Distribution of Riches, §88
  18. Turgot, Reflections on the Formation and the Distribution of Riches, §72
  19. Turgot, Reflections on the Formation and the Distribution of Riches, §74
  20. Turgot, Reflections on the Formation and the Distribution of Riches, §76
  21. Turgot, Reflections on the Formation and the Distribution of Riches, §90
  22. Turgot, Reflections on the Formation and the Distribution of Riches, §81
  23. S., Todd Lowry (1987). Pre-Classical Economic Thought : From the Greeks to the Scottish Enlightenment. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands. p. 204. ISBN   9789400932555. OCLC   851383823.
  24. Groenewegen, P. D. (June 1971). "A Re-Interpretation of Turgot's Theory of Capital and Interest". The Economic Journal. 81 (322): 337–338. doi:10.2307/2230075. ISSN   0013-0133. JSTOR   2230075.
  25. Groenewegen, P. D. (1971). "A Re-Interpretation of Turgot's Theory of Capital and Interest". The Economic Journal. 81 (322): 327–340. doi:10.2307/2230075. JSTOR   2230075.