Who Were the Sea Peoples?

"But it seems very strange and incorrect to consider mere labour as wealth. No one would give anything for it if he were sure that it would yield no gratifying result. It is in the expectation of this result alone that labour is employed. The sick man employs a physician, not because he's pleased with the trouble which he gives him, but because he expects that his health may be benefited by the advice which he receives." -- Principles of Political Economy , pp. 28-29

"The same tendency to simplify and generalize, produces a still greater disinclination to allow of modifications, limitations, and exceptions to any rule or proposition... "To explain myself by an instance. Adam Smith has stated, that capitals are increased by parsimony, that every frugal man is a public benefactor, and that the increase of wealth depends upon the balance of produce above consumption. That these propositions are true to a great extent is perfectly unquestionable. No considerable and continued increase of wealth could possibly take place without that degree of frugality which occasions, annually, the conversion of some revenue into capital, and creates a balance of produce above consumption; but it is quite obvious that they are not true to an indefinite extent, and that the principle of saving, pushed to excess, would destroy the motive to production. If every person were satisfied with the simplest food, the poorest clothing, and the meanest houses, it is...

The first business of philosophy is to account for things as they are; and till our theories will do this, they ought not to be the ground of any practical conclusion... a frequent appeal to this sort of experience is pre-eminently necessary in most of the subjects of political economy, where various and complicated causes are often in operation, the presence of which can only be ascertained in this way. A theory may appear to be correct, and may really be correct under given premises; it may further appear that these premises are the same as those under which the theory is about to be applied; but a difference which might before have been unobserved, may shew itself in the difference of the results from those which were expected; and the theory may justly be considered as failing, whether this failure arises from an original error in its formation, or from its general inapplicability, or specific misapplication, to actual circumstances. -- Principles of Political Economy , pp. 8-9

"In political economy, the desire to simplify has occasioned an unwillingness to acknowledge the operation of more causes than one in the production of particular effects; and if one cause would account for a considerable portion of a certain class of phenomena, the whole has been ascribed to it without sufficient attention to the facts..." -- Principles of Political Economy , p. 5 Amen, Reverend Malthus!

Say (when he was still fighting Sismondi), Ricardo, Mill and others often blamed gluts on "sectoral imbalances," denying there could be any such thing as a general glut: we could have too many guns and not enough butter, or vice versa, but never an overproduction of goods in general. The solution was always to produce more of the good relatively under-supplied, which could be used to buy up the glut of the one relatively over-supplied. The curious thing about this is that it seems to assume sticky prices: otherwise, the price ratio of the two goods could simply change until the market cleared, and there would be no need to produce more of the one under-supplied: it is only under-supplied at some price . But once we assume sticky prices, we seem to have posited the condition needed for a general glut: goods in general have been produced at costs that cannot be recovered, but rather than dropping their prices and accepting a loss, producers sit on inventory. I have to look...