The Ricardians and the Decline of Ricardianism

Chapter Eight: The Ricardians and the Decline of Ricardianism

 

1. Identify the two major cultural journals that were favorable to Ricardo’s ideas. (Choose two.)

A         The Edinburgh Review, founded in 1802.

B          The Quarterly Review, founded in 1809.

C          The Westminster Review, founded in 1824.

 

2. Who chaired the first meeting of the Political Economy Club in 1821?

A         James Mill                                B          Thomas Tooke                         C          Robert Torrens

 

3. Who wrote Britain Independent of Commerce in 1807?

A         James Mill                                B          William Spence                        C          Robert Torrens

 

4. Which statement below is TRUE?

A         Machinery is an example of circulating capital, and sheet steel is an example of fixed capital.

B          Sheet steel is an example of circulating capital, and machinery is an example of fixed capital.

 

5. Robert Torrens

A          embraced the Ricardian theory of labor value       B          criticized the Ricardian theory of labor value

 

6. In the 1830s Torrens focused mainly on colonial policy issues, and in particular, he criticized the advocates of complete freedom in international trade, since by imposing customs duties a country is able to modify exchange ratios to its own advantage, and (choose one or both)

A         therefore, favored a policy or reciprocity, with customs abolished (or lowered) only towards countries adopting a similar policy

B          advocated the creation of an imperial free trade area

 

7. In the 1840s Torrens spent his energies above all on monetary theory and policy, as leading exponent, together with Lord Overstone, of

A         the banking school                                            B          the currency school

 

8. Samuel Bailey (choose one or more)

A         sketched out a subjective theory of exchange value in complete contrast to an analysis of exchange value that turned on the “difficulty of production” and which was common to Torrens and the whole classical tradition

B          distinguished between three classes of goods: those that are the object of a monopoly, those whose supply can be increased but only with an increase in costs, and finally those whose supply can be increased at will, costs remaining constant.

C          warned against the pretence of reduction ad unum involved in metaphysical notions of value

 

9. Whom may we call “Ricardians”? (Choose one pair of names.)

A         Robert Torrens and Samuel Bailey

B          John Ramsay McCulloch and Thomas De Quincey

 

10. McCulloch’s defense of the labor-contained theory of value contained an element of “real cost” that gradually transformed the Ricardian theory of value, related to the difficulty of production, into a theory of the cost of production that was developed by (choose one or both)

A         John Stuart Mill                                    B          Alfred Marshall

 

 

11. In De Quincy’s “Confessions of an English Opium Eater” (1821-22), the author tells how he was stirred from his drug-induced torpor thanks to the intellectual stimulus of reading (choose one)

A         Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations

B          David Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy and Taxation

C          John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy

D         Alfred Marshall’s Principles of Economics

E          P. H. Wicksteed’s The Common Sense of Political Economy

 

12. Bailey, De Quincey, and John Stuart Mill opened the way to the Marshallian notion of different levels of analysis. These were (choose one)

A         the very short period, the short period, and the long period

B          the short period, the long period, and the very long period

 

13. The so-called “Ricardian socialists” included (choose one or more)

A         John Bray                                B          John Gray                                C          Thomas Hodgskin

D         Karl Marx                                E          William Thompson

 

14. Who wrote The Right to the Whole Produce of Labour: The origin and development of the theory of labour’s claim to the whole product of industry (1886; second edition, 1891; English translation, 1899)?

A         Esther Lowenthal                                 B          Anton Menger

 

Questions 15-20.  Here are the names of six people, each of whom is the answer to one of the questions below.

A         John Bray                                            B          Patrick Colquhoun                    C          John Gray

D         Thomas Hodgskin                                E          Robert Owen                            F          William Thompson

 

15. Who was the leading figure in cooperativism?
16. Who was an Irish landowner and advocated cooperativism?
17. Who wrote Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital (1825), Popular Political Economy (1827), and Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted (1832)?
18. Who in particular went so far as to propose a society in which necessary labor was equitably shared among all, reducing the sacrifice each had to make in labour to a few hours a day?
19. Who wrote Labor’s Wrongs and Labor’s Remedy (1839)?
20. Who wrote A Treatise on the Wealth, Power and Resources of the British Empire (1814)?

 

21. Which statement about Nassau William Senior (1790-1864) is FALSE? (Choose one.)

A         He was professor of political economy at Oxford.

B          He proposed a subjective theory of value based on scarcity and utility.

C          He considered utility to be a subjective judgement that differs from one person to another.

D         He touched upon the principle of decreasing marginal utility.

E          He defined wealth to include all goods and services that were useful and scarce.

F          He held that the objective of each person was “to obtain, with as little sacrifice as possible, as much as possible of the articles of wealth.”

G         He interpreted the rewards to the factors of production to be determined by the same mechanism as prices.

H         He believed that wages were the reward for the workers’ toil.

I           He believed that profits were the reward for the negative utility borne by capitalists in abstaining from consumption.

J           He believed that the right to profits extended to capitalists’ heirs.

 

 

 

 

22. Nassau William Senior was

A         opposed legal recognition of the workers’ associations but was quite favorable to social legislation ranging from housing and health to state-funded education, free elementary education for all, and constraints on child labor.

B          supported legal recognition of the workers’ associations but was opposed to social legislation ranging from housing and health to state-funded education, free elementary education for all, and constraints on child labor.

23. Senior was opposed to the reduction of working hours by law to ten hours a day and maintained that the whole profit—necessary for capitalists to be induced to bring productive activity under way—stemmed from the “eleventh hour.” In his Letters on the Factory Act (1837) he supported his thesis based on numerical examples assembled for the purpose, and for this he was subjected to the irony of (choose one)

A         David Ricardo                          B          John Stuart Mill                        C          Karl Marx

24. Who in Lectures on Political Economy (1834) presented the essential elements of the marginalist theory of value, including the idea of wages regulated by the marginal productivity of labor?

A         Richard Whately                      B          William Forster Lloyd              C          Mountifort Longfield

25. In his Lectures on Commerce (1835) Mountifort Longfield developed the Ricardian theory of international trade and took endowments of labor and land as elements determining the international specialization of labor, and thus anticipated the work of (choose one or both)

A         Bertil Ohlin                                          B          Paul A. Samuelson

26. Charles Babbage (1791-1871) argued that the division of labor and the consequent mechanization of production would

A         inevitably impoverish increasing masses of the population and make work less interesting

B          ultimately enrich increasing masses of the population and make work more interesting

27. In his famous pamphlet on “Utilitarianism” (1861), Mill defended (choose one)

A         consequentialism                                  B          deontological morals

28. In that essay he also (choose four)

A         endorsed Jeremy Bentham’s idea that human feelings could be reduced to different quantities of a one-dimensional magnitude, pleasure (or, in the negative, pain)

B          abandoned the sensistic view of human nature underlying Bentham’s theories

C          made a clear-cut distinction between utilitarianism as a moral criterion and utilitarianism as interpretation of individuals’ behavior

D         recognized that habit, rather than conscious felicific calculus, accounted for a large part of human actions

E          asserted that when we wish to pass moral judgements, the utilitarian criterion was to be applied not to some immediate sensistic “pleasure” but to a more complex mixture of feelings and reason, situation at a higher level

29. Mill’s view of acting man (and woman)

A         linked back with Adam Smith’s work

B          anticipated William Stanley Jevons’s sensistic idea of an automaton maximizing happiness conceived as a one-dimensional magnitude

30. Mill’s definition of political economy

A         was limited to a specific aspect of human nature, namely the desire to possess wealth

B          embraced the idea of rational man in every department of life

31. In Principles of Political Economy (1848) Mill (choose four)

A         built on the framework of Ricardian thought

B          accepted Senior’s theory of abstinence

C          supported cooperativism and profit-sharing

D         explained that market prices were determined by supply and demand

E          brought scarcity and utility to the center of the theory of value

32. Today John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) is more remembered for his work in

A         economics than in politics and philosophy

B          politics and philosophy than in economics