The 19th-century English economist W.S.Jevons revisited the work of Gregory King. A seventeenth-century follower of Sir Francis Bacon, King had described in a brief empirical observation how price correlated with supply. The history of seventeenth-century commercial mathematics, this essay suggests, provides essential background for understanding the empirical observation which Jevons received from King. The 17th century was the pivot time during which new techniques appeared in higher mathematics, calculus and mathematical probability among them. Higher mathematics incorporated innovations which had previously appeared in commercial mathematics, Arabic numerals, pen and paper calculations, new notations, etc. At the same time, ancient Greek higher mathematics continued for a while, and Gregory King also borrowed some calculations from James Ussher who used ancient Greek higher mathematics. King learned Bacon's empirical method from John Graunt and Sir William Petty, and all three represented a stage of political arithmetic which was midway between Bacon's simple empiricism on the one hand and later mathematical probability and random sampling on the other hand. In this midway stage, statesmen made policy while taking care to obtain data from professional advisors whom they employed. The advisors based their advice at first on a combination of observation, skill, and intuition, but then later they added commercial arithmetic.
This essay discusses first English and then world economic history, starting with the Black Death of 1348–1400AD. When the English population and wealth both increased after 1400, the structure of English development by the year 1700 became a little bit like a spiral, this paper says. The aggregate size of wealth increased, but there was little commensurate change in the distribution of wealth. The eighteenth-century English elite absorbed the elites of Wales and Scotland, and then the Protestant elite of Ireland. Then, on the same model of absorption, an English-speaking elite later came to dominate world wealth. As the world population increased in the early modern period, and as aggregate wealth increased apace, the distribution of world wealth became approximately what the distribution of wealth had been in England in 1700. A tiny group of very wealthy people had controlled the wealth of England in 1700. In the late twentieth century, the English elite absorbed the world elite many of whom adopted the English language and much of English culture. They often sent their children to study in Britain or America. Now this tiny elite group, English in language and usually English in culture, controls much of the wealth of the world while at the same time the ongoing increase in population has produced a huge number of very poor people.
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