An Utterly Incomplete Look at Research from 1823

This series looks at research from years past. I survey a handful of books and articles in a particular year from math, economics, philosophy, international relations, and other interesting topics. This project was inspired by my retrospective on Foreign Affairs' first issue from September 1922.

1823 ∙ 1824 ∷ 1873 ∙ 1874 ∷ 1923 ∙ 1924

For our areas of interest, research in the English-speaking world during the early 1820s was heavily focused on economics. This is largely a result of numerous public debates regarding economic policy in Britain such as the Bullionist Controversy and the various Corn laws. Political economists carried out these debates in periodicals, pamphlets, and the occasional tome of a text. Unsurprisingly, economics items compose half of the selections below.

Research in the 1820s comes across as a sort of stylistic crossroads. Some authors feel archaic and belong to a prior era, while others feel as though their writing would fit in with research from the 1870s or later. If I had to point to a single element to distinguish these groupings, it would be the former’s overly formalistic style of argument. Let us consider an additional comparison with other years I’ve covered. Both this year and 1873 feature the deaths of eminent economists: David Ricardo in the present year and John Stuart Mill in 1873.

Despite the prevalence of economics on this list (or due to it), I most enjoyed Charles Babbage’s analysis of betting strategies and Thomas De Quincey’s look at the psychology of a pivotal scene in Macbeth. If I’ve missed anything interesting from 1823 that you enjoy, feel free to shoot me an email at brettcmullins(at)gmail.com.

Economics
The Measure of Value by Thomas Malthus
Inquiry Into the Principles of Population by Thomas Wooler
David Ricardo by John Ramsay McCulloch
Tooke’s Thoughts on High and Low Prices by John Stuart Mill
Louis Say’s Political Economy

Philosophy
A Grammar of Infinite Forms by William Howison
The Utility of Knowledge by John Stuart Mill

Math
Questions connected with Games of Chance by Charles Babbage

Other Topics
On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth by Thomas De Quincey
Niebuhr’s Roman History

Economics

The Measure of Value

Author: Thomas Malthus

Link: Google Books

While Thomas Malthus is best known today for his theory of population growth, he also wrote on political economy more generally throughout the early nineteenth century. The Measure of Value is an addendum of sorts to his 1820 Principles of Political Economy. This pamphlet argues in favor of labor as an absolute standard to measure the value of a commodity.

Malthus’ innovation here seems to be the idea that the value of labor is constant - at least with respect to agricultural labor which he explicitly assumes all labor is similar to. This constancy allows for comparisons of prices among similar goods over time and place for varying market conditions. He illustrates these ideas with a table of scenarios; however, it’s difficult to follow how columns are calculated and what’s meant to be conveyed. Several articles such as this paper by Giancarlo De Vivo reproduce this table and attempt to make sense of it.

Malthus’ arguments seem a bit muddled as to whether he is talking about measuring the market value of a good, determined by supply and demand, or an intrinsic value. It is clear, however, that Malthus rejects David Ricardo’s intrinsic labor theory of value advanced in his On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817). Ultimately, neither view caught on as economists turned to more subjective/market theories of value by the mid-1820s such as Samuel Bailey’s A Critical Dissertation on the Nature, Measures, and Causes of Value (1825). John Stuart Mill’s harsh but fair review in the Morning Chronicle is worth a read.

Inquiry Into the Principles of Population

Author: Thomas Wooler

Publication: The Black Dwarf

Link: Internet Archive Part I - Part II

This is a two-part discussion of the Malthusian idea of regulating the size of the population from the editor of The Black Dwarf. Advocates of this idea posit that the population is at or beyond the subsistence level and humanity would benefit by limiting its size. Part I introduces Wooler’s anti-Malthusian view and prints in full Francis Place’s article Depression of the Bulk of the People: Causes and Remedies, which advocates for the availability of contraceptives to limit population growth and is a typical example of this line of thought.

Part II rebuts Malthus’ and Place’s theory of population. Rather than population size putting downward pressure on wages, Wooler argues that it’s the structure of the economic system that keeps laborers at or below subsistence wages. Instead of too much labor, the owners of capital keep too much of the value generated by labor. This view is emblematic of a strain of early 19th century radicalism in the UK.

A common example in this debate is Ireland, which was both poor and highly unequal at the time. Some advocates of Malthus’ view argue that imposing population control would ease the plight of the people. Wooler contends that the capitalist class in Ireland has so much power relative to the weak government that it would keep wages at sufficiently low levels irrespective of the size of the population. There were more than a few potshots at the Irish in this discussion.

Eminent Characters Deceased: David Ricardo, Esq. M. P.

Author: John Ramsay McCulloch

Publication: The Edinburgh Annual Register

Link: Google Books

This article surveys the life and work of the economist David Ricardo upon his death in 1823. Ricardo’s first writings on political economy appeared in 1809 on the Bullionist Controversy, a debate about whether bank notes should be convertible into gold, which had been suspended following a bank run at the turn of the 19th century. Ricardo decidedly advocated for the requirement of convertibility to be restored in several well-received pamphlets and essays as well as by serving on a government committee about the issue.

McCulloch calls Ricardo’s 1817 On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation the most important book on political economy outside of The Wealth of Nations. In its description, McCulloch largely focuses on Ricardo’s labor theory of value. In 1819, Ricardo joined the House of Commons, and, though reluctant initially, became a convincing orator in Parliament. He continued writing on economic matters and maintained his seat until his death.

Tooke’s Thoughts on High and Low Prices

Author: John Stuart Mill

Publication: Globe and Traveller and Morning Chronicle

Link: Liberty Fund Part I - Part II

This is a positive review and summary of Thomas Tooke’s Thoughts and Details on the High and Low Prices of the last Thirty Years (1823). In this book, Tooke combats popular views about the fluctuations in prices following the resumption of convertibility of the British currency into gold in 1821 as the resolution of the Bullionist Controversy. Tooke seeks to explain why prices were high following the suspension of convertibility in 1797 but low following the resumption, particularly for agriculture. While popular views attributed the fluctuation either wholly to devaluation of paper money or wholly to adventures in warring on the continent, Tooke attributes most of the variation to the seasonal trends in crop yields though acknowledges contributions from the hypothesized causes as well.

Louis Say’s Political Economy

Publication: North American Review

Link: JSTOR

This is an unsigned review of Louis Say’s Considerations sur l’industrie et la legislation sous le rapport de leur influence sur la richesse des Etats et examen critique des principaux ouvrages qui ont paru sur l’economie politique (1822). Say was the brother of the classical liberal economist Jean-Baptiste Say, and, not so uncommonly, held views contrary to his brother. Say’s book provides commentary and critique on various political economists from François Quesnay and Adam Smith to the early 1820s.

This review focuses on two aspects of Say’s book: the critique of Smith’s argument for the division of labor and policies of the French Viscount Auguste Louis Philippe de Saint-Chamans. Say breaks down Smith’s famous pin factory example from The Wealth of Nations (1776) to show some absurdity in the productivity estimates. In doing so, Say attributes the productivity gains not to specialization but to the employment of machinery. The reviewer contends that Say is caught up on the details and missing the point but that Smith tends to be a bit loose with his examples.

Philosophy

A Grammar of Infinite Forms; or, the Mathematical Elements of Ancient Philosophy and Mythology

Author: William Howison

Link: Google Books

For these surveys, I almost never include books or papers that I haven’t finished reading. When something is too boring or otherwise unbearable, I’ll drop it and move on. For this short book, however, I’ve made an exception. I was only able to make it about one third of the way through its 150 or so pages before giving up and skimming the rest.

This book is worth discussing, however, because there’s not much information about it or its author online and what it’s trying to do is interesting, though a bit farfetched. A Grammar of Infinite Forms develops an ontological argument that the number of kinds are limited and are based on mathematical/geometrical ideas or objects. Moreover, these mathematical ideas were encoded in various systems of ancient mythology. By connecting mathematical primitives to characters and themes in various myths, we can better understand metaphysics, mathematics, and the thought of ancient peoples. Or, at least, this is a charitable reconstruction of the argument.

Howison envisions these connections quite literally. For instance, he maps Mercury to the syllogism, since “Mercury was called the interpreter” of the gods in the Roman pantheon. In the syllogism of Aristotelian logic, Mercury acts as the minor premise which connects the main premise to the conclusion.

Overall, though, Howison’s arguments are disjointed, often unfounded, and really difficult to follow. We are treated to this amusing quip on the nature of continuity:

Nevertheless, the nature of continuity is a mystery which can never be understood.

At the same time, Augustin Cauchy’s Le Calcul infinitésimal (1823) rigorously defines continuity for real-valued functions similar to the epsilon-delta definition used today in his treatment of the differential and integral calculus.

Note that this William Howison was not the engraver of the same name, time, and place. This William Howison lived in Edinburgh too, but was a philosopher and poet and a friend of Sir Walter Scott.

The Utility of Knowledge

Author: John Stuart Mill

Link: Google Books

This is a transcript from a short speech given at the Mutual Improvement Society in 1823 responding to the view of Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality which argues that life was preferable prior to the modern state. Taking a utilitarian perspective, Mill argues that the revival of art and science leading to the modern state increased happiness beyond prior stages through “increase of wealth and the diffusion of information”.

Math

An Examination of some Questions connected with Games of Chance

Author: Charles Babbage

Publication: Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh

Link: HathiTrust

Much of the early work on probability occurred in the context of gambling. This paper considers properties of strategies for betting on repeated events such as coin flips and roulette spins. In particular, Babbage asks what we can learn about a betting strategy if it resulted in $p$ wins and $q$ losses.

He first considers the popular martingale strategy, where one bets the same amount following a win but doubles the stakes with each loss. The idea is that one will eventually win again in which case the winnings from the final bet would offset each of the prior losses. So long as one has access to enough funds and games to bet on, this strategy has a positive expected value. Note though that is limit is almost always assumed on either or both.

Can we determine how well a martingale strategy performed from a summary of the bet results? No, because wins earlier on when the stakes are lower are less valuable than wins later when the stakes are higher. In this sense, wins aren’t exchangeable. Babbage, then, constructs strategies where this exchangeability property holds to show such a strategy is possible.