250 years - no progress?

Here’s a great site you might not be aware of – it’s got loads of full texts from the history of economic thought, along with philosophical works from Hobbes, Hume and many others.

There’s tons of fantastic stuff here. One important lesson is that we today are not necessarily wiser than people were centuries ago. For example, here’s David Hume in 1752 telling us not to worry about the US trade deficit:

There still prevails, even in nations well acquainted with commerce, a strong jealousy with regard to the balance of trade, and a fear, that all their gold and silver may be leaving them. This seems to me, almost in every case, a groundless apprehension; and I should as soon dread, that all our springs and rivers should be exhausted, as that money should abandon a kingdom where there are people and industry.

A big deficit, he says, would merely cause prices to fall, to a level from which demand for that country’s goods would rise. This mechanism is sufficient to stop people worrying about deficits between regions of the same country:

How is the balance kept in the provinces of every kingdom among themselves, but by the force of this principle, which makes it impossible for money to lose its level, and either to rise or sink beyond the proportion of the labour and commodities which are in each province?

A Yorkshireman, he continued, did not fret about Yorkshire’s deficit with London.

And here, Hume has a message for Peter Mandelson:

There are few Englishmen who would not think their country absolutely ruined, were French wines sold in England so cheap and in such abundance as to supplant, in some measure, all ale, and home-brewed liquors: But would we lay aside prejudice, it would not be difficult to prove, that nothing could be more innocent, perhaps advantageous. Each new acre of vineyard planted in France, in order to supply England with wine, would make it requisite for the French to take the produce of an English acre, sown in wheat or barley, in order to subsist themselves; and it is evident, that we should thereby get command of the better commodity.

250 years doesn’t get us much progress, does it?

Comments

[EU Serf]

The only difference is that the CAP has tilted the playing field against English wheat or Barley. Other than that we are still stuck with the same useless arguments.

[dearieme]

Progress? Once the leaders of our two principal parties had as advisers Hume and Burke. Recently it was Campbell and Platell. Progress?