PERSON
David Ricardo
The political economist who reversed himself in print on the central question of his discipline—admitting that machinery could be “very injurious to the interests of the class of labourers”—and who built the cleanest apparatus ever devised for asking who gains and who loses when productive power increases.
David Ricardo is the rare intellectual whose central insight was a retraction. Having spent years assuring the world that the introduction of machinery served the interests of all classes, he added a chapter to the third edition of
On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation in 1821 in which he wrote that he had been wrong: substituting machinery for human labor could be “very injurious to the interests of the class of labourers,” not as a temporary
friction but as a structural possibility built into the arithmetic of how labor gets paid. That sentence, and the cold rigor with which he derived it, is the most relevant thing a classical economist ever did for the age of artificial intelligence. Ricardo’s four instruments—the
machinery question,
comparative advantage, the theory of rent, and the labor theory of value—map with unnerving precision onto the four live debates about AI