Life's Pleasures Quote by David Ricardo

Ricardo is quietly stripping the romance out of expansion and replacing it with a colder arithmetic: growth makes you eat down the quality of your options. The first settlers take the best plots closest to markets and labor. After that, “more food” doesn’t come from ingenuity alone; it comes from pushing cultivation outward to worse soil, longer distances, higher costs. The line reads like a calm observation, but its intent is disciplinary. It warns that prosperity carries a built-in penalty.

The subtext is his famous law of diminishing returns applied to land: each additional unit of food requires more effort because you’re no longer farming the easy acres. “Not so advantageously situated” is doing heavy lifting. It compresses transport costs, lower yields, greater risk, and the creeping fact that nature isn’t scalable the way factories are. In Ricardo’s framework, this shift doesn’t just make bread pricier; it reshuffles power. As cultivation moves to inferior land, the difference between good land and bad land becomes economically meaningful, generating rent for landowners and squeezing profits elsewhere.

Context matters: early 19th-century Britain, urbanizing fast, anxious about food prices, and fighting over the Corn Laws that protected domestic grain producers. Ricardo is furnishing ammunition: when food costs rise, wages tend to follow (workers have to survive), which compresses industrial profits and can slow accumulation. The sentence is a small, sharp wedge in a larger argument that capitalism’s engine can be throttled by the geography of its dinner.