The Philosophical Breakfast Club (18 page)

N
OT LONG AFTER
Malthus’s book appeared, a wealthy stockbroker named David Ricardo, on holiday in Bath, picked up Adam Smith’s
The Wealth of Nations
, the same work that had inspired de Prony’s great table-making project. Smith’s book, first published in 1776, had not been particularly influential on the field of economics when it appeared, but by 1800 it was considered the classic text of the discipline—in part because politicians as diverse as the Whig leader Charles James Fox and the head of the Tories, William Pitt the Younger, lauded Smith’s work, and claimed to be guided by it in setting economic policy.
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By 1814 many people believed that Smith had founded the discipline, ignoring a long tradition of political economy prior to his work. Smith’s metaphor of the “invisible hand”—first used in his book
Theory of Moral Sentiments
, to describe the self-regulating nature of the marketplace, caused by the confluence of
self-interest, competition, and supply and demand—fit the times, both for Whigs and Radicals such as Fox, Godwin, Thomas Paine, and their followers, who saw free trade as an extension of individual liberty, and for the conservative Tories and theologians who recast the invisible hand as the working of God’s will. (Many political economists of the day argued that riches were a sign of God’s favor, and that God Himself had ordained that there be poverty, so that people would have incentive to work hard.)

Smith had been Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. When he began to write about political economy, he did not see this as a change of subject matter. For Smith, political economy was a “moral science,” in the sense that it concerned not only economic matters but also ethical ones. Smith believed that one could not discuss markets without discussing morality. Economic growth was only possible if certain moral values were cultivated, such as frugality and industry. And economic growth alone was not the be-all and end-all—the political economist must consider not only what policies would make a nation rich, but what policies would make its inhabitants happy and virtuous.

Ricardo admired
The Wealth of Nations
, but he began to conceive of political economy in a radically different way. Economics was not a branch of moral philosophy, he believed, but a kind of science. Indeed, Ricardo thought that economics should be molded into “a strict science like mathematics.”
¹⁴
The political economist, like the mathematician, must ignore social, political, and moral factors, which Ricardo felt were irrelevant to the material well-being of the nation. The role of the political economist, in his view, was to tell nations how to increase their wealth, not how to create just societies filled with contented citizens.
¹⁵

Ricardo believed that economics should proceed as geometry does: by first positing truths called “axioms,” which are not discovered by studying the world or performing experiments, but are known simply by rational thought or by definition (such as the axiom “all triangles have 180 degrees”), and next by using deductive reasoning to reach theorems (“all right triangles have 180 degrees”). Ricardo hoped to use this method to produce universal laws governing the production and distribution of wealth. He argued that all economic theory must start from the axiom that “men desire to obtain as much wealth with as little effort as possible.” From this axiom Ricardo claimed that universal economic laws could be deductively inferred. One of these was the law that the market price of labor (what is actually paid for a day’s work) would always tend toward
the natural price (what would be required to keep a laborer and his family alive, what we would call “subsistence wages”). This conclusion, known as the “iron law of wages,” implied that a worker could never expect to earn more than the barest amount needed for survival, and led Ricardo to his belief that laborers were doomed to a bleak existence.

Ricardo further believed that there would always be conflict between the different classes of a society. When the cost of “corn” (the agricultural staples, including wheat and oats) was high, the landowner benefited, as he could get away with charging more in rent from his tenant farmers. Yet when corn was expensive, the farmers had to pay more in rent to the landowner, and all laborers had to pay more for their bread. So the landowner was the only one happy when corn prices were high; indeed he had incentive to keep it that way, even at the expense of others.

Jones and Whewell read Ricardo’s book when it first appeared, sending their opinions of it back and forth in letters between Cambridge and Ferring, where Jones was living at the time. The two were disturbed by Ricardo’s view that economic science need not be concerned with what was good for a society and its people. As Bacon had proclaimed, science should bring about “the relief of man’s estate.”
¹⁶
Knowledge of economic laws could and should be deployed to improve the lot of the masses. Indeed, what was the point of the wealth of a nation if not to make its people happy, or at the very least to reduce the numbers of people living in direst poverty?

But this was not their only complaint. They agreed with Ricardo that political economy was, and should be, a science. They believed, however, that it was not a deductive science like geometry, but an inductive science, like geology. Empirical evidence was required to invent economic theories, which could then be tested by comparing predictions derived from them to what actually occurs. Only then should the economist be confident that his laws were true. Just as the geologist could not work from his armchair, but must go into the field with his hammer, chipping away at rock formations and examining geological strata, so, too, the political economist could not merely propose a priori axioms and deduce conclusions from them. Rather, the economist must study the economic conditions that prevailed in the past, and the particular behaviors and motivations of people under those conditions, in order to draw conclusions about the present and future economic situation. And just as the structure of geological strata—those layers of rock with shared
characteristics distinct from other, contiguous layers—differs in various parts of the world, so, too, economic conditions are not the same everywhere. Thus the economist must study not only his own society, but others elsewhere around the globe.

In 1826, after Jones had moved to his new parish in Brasted, Whewell sent him a large map, telling him to “paint [it] in the most brilliant colors by which rent can be represented” in each part of the world, just like William Smith’s stupendous colored map of the geological strata in England (1815)—the first national-scale geological map ever produced.
¹⁷

Drawing the connection between geology and political economy was not merely a rhetorical move on Whewell’s part: many scientific men of the day saw strong parallels between those disciplines, and there was a great deal of interaction between geologists and economists. Economic topics—related to agricultural questions concerning soil type and climate, and to industrial issues having to do with mineral and hydrocarbon extraction—were often discussed at the meetings of the Geological Society of London. Ricardo himself often attended these meetings, as did Jones and, of course, Whewell. Richard Whately, Professor of Political Economy at Oxford, sat in on Buckland’s geology lectures at the university. Whewell’s friend the geologist Charles Lyell was frequently in the audience of J. R. McCulloch’s London lectures on political economy. George Poulett Scrope was both a geologist (who served as secretary of the Geological Society, along with Lyell, in 1825) and an economist who wrote so many leaflets on economic issues that he was known as George “Pamphlet” Scrope.
¹⁸
Years later, at the thirtieth-anniversary meeting of the Geological Society, Jones gave a “truly elegant speech” on the similarity of the sciences of geology and economics—elegant enough that it was remembered by Lyell, even though after the meeting he and some others went off to Lord Cole’s for dinner, wine, cognac, and cigars, the enjoyment of which caused Lyell to be ill for five days.
¹⁹
(Unfortunately, no written record of Jones’s extemporaneous speech survives.)

Because of the close relation between political economy and geology, it was even more worrisome that political economy was being presented by Ricardo and his followers as a deductive science. The members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club were concerned that the natural sciences would be tarred with the same deductive brush. The appeal of a deductive method in general was already being proclaimed by writers such as Thomas De Quincey, who lauded this approach to science in his
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
, which became a literary sensation on its publication in 1821. Before Ricardo came on the scene, De Quincey wrote, “All other writers had been crushed and overlaid by the enormous weight of facts and documents; Mr. Ricardo alone had deduced,
a priori
, from the understanding itself, laws which first gave a ray of light into the unwieldy chaos of materials, and had constructed what had been but a collection of tentative discussions into a science of regular proportions now first standing on an eternal basis.
²⁰

By demonstrating that political economy was a true Baconian science, Whewell and Jones believed they could transform the public’s view of all the sciences. Political economy was thus the ideal place to initiate the reform of science they had been planning since their Cambridge days. Whewell and Jones would lead the way, but Babbage and Herschel would soon join in.

W
HEWELL INSTRUCTED
J
ONES
that his job was to write a book showing the proper inductive method to use in economic science. Meanwhile, Whewell would write a series of papers criticizing Ricardo’s deductive method. In those papers, which he wrote in 1829 and 1831 (a later series appeared in 1848 and 1850), Whewell employed his considerable mathematical skills to translate Ricardo’s laws into mathematical formulae. He engaged in a two-pronged attack on Ricardo. First, Whewell showed that even if Ricardo’s initial axioms were true—which Whewell did not think was the case—Ricardo’s reasoning to his conclusions was flawed. Further, Whewell complained, even if his reasoning had been valid, his starting axioms were so far from the truth that his conclusions bore almost no similarity to “the actual state of things.”
²¹
It was the first time that anyone had ever put economic theory into mathematical form. Whewell, for this reason, is considered the “father” of mathematical economics—ironically so, as Whewell doubted that economic science could ever be wholly mathematical, because the social considerations he believed were irreducibly part of the science could not be formulated numerically.

It was not easy to get Jones to write his book. In addition to his depression, Jones also suffered from what seems to have been the worst case of writer’s block in history, coupled with bouts of bad health: pleurisy (a painful inflammation of the membrane around the lungs), gout (a form of metabolic arthritis), rheumatism, and other illnesses, exacerbated by
Jones’s excessive weight and his heavy drinking. Whewell counseled his friend to watch his weight, which would soon balloon up to 225 pounds.
²²
Over the years Whewell urged Jones to cut down his consumption of alcohol from three glasses a meal to only two.
²³
He needed to start living a “wholesome life,” Whewell warned.
²⁴

In letter after letter, for nine years, Whewell badgered, bullied, and begged Jones to complete his book. Jones would later joke that his book was Whewell’s “foster child.”
²⁵
Whewell worried that the longer Jones waited, the more entrenched the Ricardian system would become (and, indeed, this is what happened). “It will be both more easy and more honorable to knock down Ricardo’s errors while they are new,” he told Jones in 1822.
²⁶
Several years later Whewell hopefully inquired, “I hope to find the demolition of the Ricardians very forward if I see you, for it is a proper adventure for you to set out to kill such a dragon as that system.”
²⁷
By 1828 Whewell reminded Jones “how ripe the world is for your speculations, and how they will become less striking and original by all delay.”
²⁸
Later still, Whewell fulminated at the “monstrous inactivity of your authorly functions … a vile and detestable piece of procrastination.”
²⁹
Soon, however, Whewell realized the depth of Jones’s psychological distress about the book, and his tone softened considerably. “I had no notion that your birth-throes would have been so painful,” Whewell apologized. “Why should you not lay aside the cultivation of your task ’till all the goblins have disappeared?”
³⁰

Admittedly, Jones’s task was not an easy one. He needed to gather the empirical evidence that would provide the data for his inductive inferences. Jones told Whewell he was “searching the museums and libraries for old tracts and pamphlets from 1688 to 1776.”
³¹
He hoped such texts would provide him with evidence of how people’s economic behavior had changed over time, and how it had stayed the same, what kinds of systems of production of income and distribution of income had been in place, and what kinds of relationships between landlords and renters had existed. Just as a drop of water, when viewed through a microscope, is found to teem with life, Jones believed that history—when viewed correctly—“teems everywhere with facts” which can be used in constructing economic theories.
³²

Information about the present state of things around the world was also necessary. In his peripatetic summer wanderings over these years, Whewell took notes for Jones’s book on the economic conditions of the
people he met: peasants in rural Switzerland, herdsmen on the German Alps who lived in cow huts and ate only curds and whey, and Italian workers on a new Alpine road.
³³
He told Jones excitedly about a village in the Netherlands, where there were “no poor and no rich”—everyone lived well enough, in clean, spacious houses.
³⁴
During one coach trip a servant girl told him about her wages; at a stop to change horses a Belgian lamented the high duty on distillation; over dinner at an inn, an ex–Benedictine monk explained how the convent land was farmed, and the wages of the lay brethren.
³⁵
Herschel helped too. On a trip to Amsterdam, he found books on Dutch and Portuguese commerce that he brought home for Jones.
³⁶
Babbage’s brother-in-law, the member of Parliament Wolryche Whitmore, sent Jones some useful economic data about England. Jones himself would gather his own evidence on trips to Wales, Normandy, Paris, and the Rhine.