Ricardo's Macroeconomics The Reinvention of Ricardo as an Applied EconomistDavis's

Timothy Davis has produced a well researched, well written and scholarly piece of work that merits serious attention by historians of economic thought. His principal aim is to reassess Ricardo's credentials as an “applied economist,” and to that end he devotes a couple of very useful chapters to a blow-by-blow account of the UK's turbulent economic history between 1815 and 1825, four chapters to Ricardo and, also usefully, a series of appendices relating to the vital economic statistics of the period. The Ricardo that emerges from this study is (almost) a paragon of “applied virtue.” Ricardo was, we are told (repeatedly), fully conversant with the available empirical evidence, his writings were directed to concrete economic problems (except for thePrinciples, apparently) and, most importantly of all, his empirical analysis was “exemplary” and fully “validated” by events. The only real blemish was his law-of-markets based assumption of full employment at a time of general economic “distress,” leading him to reject all proposals for “relief works,” which Davis finds “particularly unsatisfactory” and “remarkable” (he might well have said “inexplicable”) in view of Ricardo's (supposedly) keen appreciation of economic reality. All in all, however, Ricardo's “applied” credentials are rather impressive.