The Political Economy Club is the world's oldest economics association that was founded by James Mill. [1] It was founded in 1821 in London with David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, and Robert Torrens, [2] because there were not any professional associations for free trade economists to peer-review their work. [3] Despite Mill's exclusive limit to 30 members: [4] the Political Economy Club was a predominant influence on 19th century economics.
On 18 April 1821, Swinton Holand held at his house the first meeting of the Club. A second larger meeting was held at Freemasons' Tavern, London, on 30 April. [5] The club now meets monthly at Brooks's Club to hear the members' papers and dine.[ citation needed ] The founding participants' disagreement on the formulation of their fundamental axioms provoked Ricardo to privately express his infamous assertion of the 'non-existence of any measure of absolute value'. [6] There were subsequently founded the less exclusive Section F of the BAAS (founded 1832), and the Statistical Society of London (founded 1834), and the Cobden Club (founded 1866), and the British Economic Association (founded 1890). [7]
David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, James Mill, Colonel Thomas Moody, Kt., Robert Torrens, Thomas Tooke, John Stuart Mill, John Ramsey McCulloch, Nassau Senior, John Elliott Cairnes, Henry Fawcett, William Newmarch, Samuel Jones-Loyd, 1st Baron Overstone, Jane Marcet, [9] George Warde Norman, William Blake, Walter Coulson, George Pryme, George R. Porter, William T. Thornton, Walter Bagehot, and Jean-Baptiste Say.
Later: William Stanley Jevons, Thomas Edward Cliffe Leslie, Walter Coulson, Robert Mushet, Henry Parnell, James Pennington, John Horsley Palmer, and Thomas Perronet Thompson. Others were drawn from outside the ranks of economists, including G. G. de Larpent, George John Shaw-Lefevre, John Abel Smith, Henry Warburton, Lord Althorp, William Whitmore, W. B. Baring, Poulett Thomson, Sir Robert Wilmot-Horton, Lord Monteagle, Charles Hay Cameron, James Deacon Hume, George Grote, James Morrison, Edwin Chadwick, Sir Robert Giffen, Charles Buller, and Sir William Clay.
Significant elections after 1840 include Robert Lowe, Sir G. C. Lewis, Rowland Hill, Stafford Northcote, George J. Goschen, William Ewart Gladstone, and W. E. Forster. [10]
To celebrate the PEC's bicentennial, an open international essay competition was announced in 2020 for the 2021 year. [11] Candidates were asked to choose one of two titles. These were:
David Ricardo was a British political economist, politician, and member of Parliament. He is recognized as one of the most influential classical economists, alongside figures such as Thomas Malthus, Adam Smith and James Mill.
Thomas Robert Malthus was an English economist, cleric, and scholar influential in the fields of political economy and demography.
Classical economics, classical political economy, or Smithian economics is a school of thought in political economy that flourished, primarily in Britain, in the late 18th and early-to-mid-19th century. Its main thinkers are held to be Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, David Ricardo, Thomas Robert Malthus, and John Stuart Mill. These economists produced a theory of market economies as largely self-regulating systems, governed by natural laws of production and exchange.
The iron law of wages is a proposed law of economics that asserts that real wages always tend, in the long run, toward the minimum wage necessary to sustain the life of the worker. The theory was first named by Ferdinand Lassalle in the mid-nineteenth century. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels attribute the doctrine to Lassalle, the idea to Thomas Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population, and the terminology to Goethe's "great, eternal iron laws" in Das Göttliche.
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/her 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."
John Ramsay McCulloch was a Scottish economist, author and editor, widely regarded as the leader of the Ricardian school of economists after the death of David Ricardo in 1823. He was appointed the first professor of political economy at University College London in 1828. He wrote extensively on economic policy, and was a pioneer in the collection, statistical analysis and publication of economic data.
Thomas Tooke was an English economist known for writing on money and economic statistics. After Tooke's death the Statistical Society endowed the Tooke Chair of economics at King's College London, and a Tooke Prize.
John Elliott Cairnes was an Irish political economist. He has been described as the "last of the classical economists".
Richard Jones was an English economist who criticised the theoretical views of David Ricardo and T. R. Malthus on economic rent and population.
Samuel Hollander, is a British/Canadian/Israeli economist.
The book An Essay on the Principle of Population was first published anonymously in 1798, but the author was soon identified as Thomas Robert Malthus. The book warned of future difficulties, on an interpretation of the population increasing in geometric progression while food production increased in an arithmetic progression, which would leave a difference resulting in the want of food and famine, unless birth rates decreased.
The High School of Glasgow is a private, co-educational day school in Glasgow, Scotland. The original High School of Glasgow was founded as the choir school of Glasgow Cathedral in around 1124, and is the oldest school in Scotland, and the twelfth oldest in the United Kingdom. On its closure as a selective grammar school by Glasgow City Corporation in 1976, it immediately continued as a co-educational independent school as a result of fundraising activity by its Former Pupil Club and via a merge by the Club with Drewsteignton School. The school maintains a relationship with the Cathedral, where it holds an annual service of commemoration and thanksgiving in September. It counts two British Prime Ministers, two Lords President and the founder of the University of Aberdeen among its alumni.
Robert Torrens was a Royal Marines officer, political economist, part-owner of the influential Globe newspaper, and a prolific writer. He also chaired the board of the London-based South Australian Colonisation Commission created by the South Australia Act 1834 to oversee the new colony of South Australia, before the colony went bankrupt and he was sacked in 1841. He was chiefly known for championing the cause for emigration to the new colony, and his name lives on in Adelaide's main river, the Torrens, the suburb of Torrensville and a few other places.
James Bonar was a Scottish civil servant, political economist and historian of economic thought.
Robert Mushet (1782–1828) was a Scottish official of the Royal Mint, and writer on financial topics.
William Blake was an English classical economist who contributed to the early theory of purchasing power parity.
Joseph Lowe was a Scottish journalist and political economist, well known for his pioneer treatment of indexation. Maurice Kendall called him the generally recognised "father of index numbers".
John Cazenove (1788–1879) was an English businessman and political economist.
Principles of Political Economy Considered with a View to their Applications, simply referred to as Principles of Political Economy, was written by the nineteenth-century British political economist Thomas Malthus in 1820. Malthus wrote Principles of Political Economy as a rebuttal to David Ricardo's On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. While the main focus of their work is to explain economic depressions in Europe and the reasons why they occur, Malthus uses his scholarship to explore price determination and the value of goods.
A history of economic thought is a book by the Russian economist Isaak Illich Rubin (1886–1937). A second revised edition published in Russian in 1929 was first translated into English by Donald Filtzer and published in 1979. The book covers the period from mercantilism in the 16th century to the decline of the classical school of political economy with writers like John Stuart Mill in the mid-19th century. It critically appraises the theories of major writers, and places their thought in the context of the economic and social changes of their day. It adopts a Marxist standpoint in making critiques, but Marx's work is not itself discussed at any length. The book ends with the state of economics as Marx found it when he first turned to it in the mid-19th century. Rubin's other major work, Essays on Marx's theory of value, takes up Marx's own contributions.