Thediscoveryof Comparative Advantage

Thus Jacob Viner (1937, p. 442) balanced the claims of E. R. A. Seligman for Robert Torrens against those of J. H. Hollander for David Ricardo. Lionel Robbins (1958) found rather more in Torrens, and J. Chipman (1965) also made much of his contribution. W. O. Thweatt (1976) made a small sensation when he attributed Ricardo’s formulation to James Mill, regarded only as a popularizer of Ricardo’s views. Thweatt further argued (1986) that the mistakes in Mill’s own book were made by his son, John Stuart Mill. The most recent commentators, Leonard Gomes (1987, pp. 136–44) and Andrea Maneschi (1998, pp. 51– 57), incline to the view that comparative advantage was ‘‘a case of multiple discovery,’’ as suggested earlier by George. J. Stigler (1980). I re-examine these issues of formulation, emphasis, etc. extending the window of 1815–17 to take in later writings by Torrens and by Mill and son. Questioning the ‘‘unquestionable’’ leads to the conclusion that the achievements of organization and system that Viner ascribed to Ricardo came later. Torrens, Ricardo, and the Mills all made contributions to the discovery of comparative advantage, not by a major multiple discovery but through a sequence of insights and arguments. Ricardo developed Torrens’s insight, that a country may import corn that is more costly to produce abroad, in the direction of a general demonstration that the law of value for domestic transactions does not hold for international ones. From the demonstration James Mill extracted the principle of comparative advantage and gave it ‘‘due emphasis.’’ Torrens had not formulated, nor even grasped the principle, while Ricardo had not appreciated there was a principle worth developing. It was from Mill’s Elements, and the works that followed, that