In a sense, but it is misleading. He is taking technology as constant. I does not matter whether there is one landlord or many. Each landlord still takes a rent equal to the productivity of the land.
Landlords were improving at the time because of the high tariff, which Ricardo opposed. Original Message: ----------------- From: Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2006 12:42:23 -0700 To: [email protected] Subject: [PEN-L] David Ricardo In his book THE UNDERCOVER ECONOMIST, Tim Harford writes: "... Ricardo treated the whole agricultural sector as if it were one vast farm with a single landlord. A unified agricultural sector has nothing to gain from improving the land's productivity ... But an individual landlord in competition with others would have plenty of incentive to make improvments." (p. 15) Is this an accurate description of Ricardo's theory? -- Jim Devine / "To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." -- Nuremberg Tribunal -------------------------------------------------------------------- mail2web - Check your email from the web at http://mail2web.com/ .
