Cloth for wine

Fragments from the history of a “non-trivial but true” economic doctrine

Abstract

The principle of comparative advantages is a key concept in classical economics, which explains the mutual advantage in international trade. While the theorem is commonly attributed to Ricardo, the question of priority has been debated for over two centuries. In the 20th century, Robert Merton’s sociology of science hypothesized about “multiple discoveries”, which he considered to be the dominant pattern in scientific research. Some historians of economic thought have identified the principle of comparative advantage as one of the multiple discoveries in economics. This paper examines the texts on trade advantages published by Ricardo and his contemporaries (Robert Torrens, Heinrich von Storch, and an anonymous English pamphleteer) and describes the fluctuating views of Torrens and John Stuart Mill in the first phase of the priority debate. The next section reviews the historiography of the “four magic numbers” in Ricardo’s example, which has been debated among historians of economics. Different versions of two basic narratives have been formulated, one accepting Torrens’ claim to priority and the other attributing the substantive development of the theory of comparative advantage to Ricardo, but no consensus has been reached.