PREFACE.

...proved to be essential for increasing the food supply. This established a unified law that created a perfect harmony among all real and lasting human interests, directly opposing the conflicts taught by Mr. Malthus.*

This major law was first announced nearly twenty-five years ago.† While working to prove it, the author felt constantly driven to use facts from the physical sciences to illustrate social phenomena. This led him to notice the close connection between physical and social laws. Reflecting on this, he was soon led to express the belief that a closer examination would—

* Since Adam Smith assumed that cultivation always began with the richest soils, Mr. Malthus adopted that idea as the basis for a law of population which required that many men, women, and children should "regularly die of poverty original: "want"." Mr. Ricardo then refined this system, providing a theory of rent. Through this, he tried to prove that as it became necessary to farm lower-quality inferior soils and as labor became less and less productive, the landlord's share of the produce increased. This left steadily less and less for the unfortunate worker, making their eventual enslavement more likely with every passing hour. From then on, all the distress and poverty in England were treated as the natural result of having to farm "inferior soils." This idea was pushed so far that people often suggested the solution to these problems was to stop farming all such low-quality land.

However, when the time came that this theory was shown to be completely baseless, critics then claimed that this fundamental question—which is as vital to providing a perspective in Social Science as Copernicus Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), the astronomer who proved the Earth revolves around the Sun, fundamentally changing our understanding of the universe. was to astronomy—was actually unimportant and could be ignored. Yet the essence of the Ricardo-Malthusian doctrine is still kept in the core assumption of the current system: namely, that as population and wealth increase, the returns from agricultural labor constantly decrease (see pages 17–18). No claim could possibly have less factual support than this. So that the reader may judge this for themselves, along with the accuracy of the views presented here, the history of how the earth was settled is reproduced in Appendix B.

† The Past, the Present, and the Future, Philadelphia, 1848.