Classical Economics

Classical Economics

Classical economics refers to work done by a group of economists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They developed theories about the way markets and market economies work. The study was primarily concerned with the dynamics of economic growth. It stressed economic freedom and promoted ideas such as laissez-faire and free competition.

The concern of the classical economists from Adam Smith to David Ricardo was the laws governing the emerging capitalist economy, characterized by wage labor, an increasingly sophisticated division of labor, the coordination of economic activity via a system of interdependent markets in which transactions are mediated through money, and rapid technical, organizational and institutional change. In short, they were concerned with an economic system in motion. (Kurz and Salvadori, 1998b, p. 3)

Classical economics is widely regarded as the first modern school of economic thought. Its major developers include  Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus and John Stuart Mill. However, Irving Fisher, Harriet Martineau, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, Edward C. Prescott, Robert Barro are classical economists. Among the three of them such as- Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus about their background and their contribution of economics write to the below. 

Thomas Robert Malthus

An 18th-century British philosopher and economist famous for his ideas about population growth. Thomas Robert Malthus was born into a wealthy family on 13 February 1766 at The Rookery near Wotton, Surrey and died in 1834. His father was a disciple of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose book émile may have been the source of the elder Malthus' liberal ideas about educating his son. In formal situations Robert Malthus used his full name, but in less formal correspondence referred to himself as T. Robert Malthus or Robert Malthus, and among family and close friends was always called Robert or Bob. He was died 23 December 1834.

 Malthus was the son of a clergyman and one of eight children. He was educated at home until he went to Jesus College Cambridge, in 1784. He studied a wide range of subjects and took prizes in Latin and Greek, graduating in 1788. He took his MA in 1791, was elected a Fellow of Jesus College in 1793 and was ordained as an Anglican minister in 1797. He became curate of the parish of Albury in Surrey in 1798, a post which he held only for a short time. In 1804 Malthus married Harriet Eckersall; from 1805 until his death. Cambridge and later became he was Professor of Modern History and Political Economy at the college of the East India Company at Haileybury except for a visit to Ireland in 1817, and a trip to the Continent in 1825 for health reasons. Malthus' appointment was the first time in Great Britain that the words "political economy" had been used to designate an academic office. In 1811 he met and became a close friend of the economist David Ricardo.

In 1819 Malthus was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society; in 1821 he became a member of the Political Economy Club, whose members included Ricardo and James Mill; in 1824 he was elected as one of the ten royal associates of the Royal Society of Literature. Malthus was one of the co-founders of the Statistical Society of London in 1834. In 1833 he was elected to the French Académie des Sciences Morales etc. Politiques and to the Royal Academy of Berlin. Although he wrote various papers, he never added substantially to what he had gathered in Essay on Population and Principles of Political Economy.

He wrote an unpublished pamphlet in 1796 called The Crisis which, among other things, took a favorable view of newly proposed poor laws, which were to set up workhouses for the poor. The opinions and teachings that Malthus developed reflect largely a reaction to his father's views and to the doctrines of the French Revolution and its supporters. Malthus' major contribution to economics was his theory of population, published in An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798 when he was 32. In it he theorized that populations will continue to grow until growth is stopped or reversed by disease, famine, war or calamity. He developed what is now referred to as the Malthusian growth model, an exponential formula used to forecast population growth. The book was published anonymously and became an important and integral part of classical liberal economic and social doctrines and was influential in the thinking behind the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act.