David Ricardo

David Ricardo (1772–1823) was an English political economist, the most rigorous theorist of the classical school. The son of a Sephardic Jewish stockbroker from Amsterdam, he entered the business at fourteen, was cut off when he married a Quaker, and made a fortune on the stock exchange, partly by speculating on the outcome of Waterloo. Reading Adam Smith turned him to economics, and pamphlets on currency and the corn laws led to On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation in 1817, which set out the labor theory of value, the theory of rent and comparative advantage. He sat in Parliament from 1819 as a free trader.