Daily Inspiration Quote by David Ricardo

Ricardo is doing something sly here: he’s stripping the moral drama out of “higher wages” and treating it as a technical shock that ripples unevenly through an economy. The line reads dry, but its intent is sharp. He’s warning that you can’t talk about wage increases as if they raise “prices” in some uniform, democratic way. The effect depends on time - specifically, how long capital stays tied up before it’s “used up” and has to be replaced.

The subtext is an argument about who bears the cost of labor getting more expensive. If a good is produced with machinery that wears out quickly, the producer has to replace that machinery often. Those replacement cycles force wage costs to show up faster and more directly in the cost structure. With long-lived machinery, a chunk of production costs is effectively locked in the past: the machine was built under yesterday’s wage regime, and its value gets dripped into today’s output over time. That creates a lag, and it creates asymmetry - not just across goods, but across industries and the owners of different kinds of capital.

Context matters: Ricardo is writing at the moment when industrial machinery is remaking British production, and classical economists are trying to turn political fights over wages, rents, and profits into laws of motion. This sentence is a quiet rebuke to simplistic policy talk (then and now): “raise wages” is not a single lever with a single outcome. It’s a stress test that reveals which sectors are exposed, which are insulated by durable capital, and how distributional conflict hides inside what sounds like a neutral price story.