What is Economic Development?
Skip to main content All Articles Categories Archives e-paper Links May 10, 2026 Skip to main content Array Prabhat Patnaik WHEN Adam Smith’s opus in 1776 took an increase in wealth as the desideratum of a nation’s policy, he was not suggesting that the question of income distribution between different classes did not matter. Likewise David Ricardo was by no means unconcerned with an improvement in the living conditions of the workers. But Smith and Ricardo ignored income distribution to focus only on the size of a nation’s wealth (capital stock), which determined in turn the size of its national income, because income distribution in their view was not a matter of policy. In fact Classical Political Economy generally saw wages as being tied to a subsistence level because it believed, in accordance with the Malthusian theory of population, that an increase in wages above subsistence would raise population growth, so that labour supply would increase re...