(born , April 18/19, 1772, London, Eng.—died Sept. 11, 1823, Gatcombe Park, Gloucestershire) British economist. The son of a Dutch Jew, he followed his father into the London stock exchange, where he made a fortune before turning to the study of political economy, in which he was influenced by the writings of Adam Smith.
His writings in support of a metal currency standard were influential. In his major work, The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817), he examined the movement of wages and the determination of value, asserting that the domestic values of commodities were largely determined by the labour required for their production. His Iron Law of Wages stated that attempts to improve the real income of workers were futile and that wages tended to stabilize at subsistence level. Though many of his ideas are obsolete, he was a major figure in the development of classical economics and is credited as the first person to systematize economics.
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