David Ricardo
(1772 — 1823)

David Ricardo, author of The Iron Law of Wages (1817) was a political economist, financial speculator and a friend of Jeremy Bentham and James Mill. In contemporary academic usage, classical utilitarians are sometimes said to believe in "hedonistic utilitariansm" - as distinct from so-called preference utilitarianism, etc. But Ricardo's own work was bleakly unhedonistic in tone: he was a pessimistic Malthusian who believed in low wages to discourage population growth of the working class.

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