Daily Inspiration Quote by David Ricardo

Ricardo is doing something deceptively brutal here: he’s yanking economics away from the romance of rarity and the moral glow of hard work, and chaining it to a colder test - usefulness. Scarcity can make something expensive only if someone actually wants it. Labor can be heroic, backbreaking, even socially praised; it still doesn’t conjure value out of nothing. If nobody can be “gratified” by the thing produced, the market shrugs. That shrug is the point.

The intent is polemical as much as analytical. Ricardo is writing in a Britain being remade by industrial production, colonial extraction, and early consumer capitalism - a world newly obsessed with measuring wealth, pricing goods, and treating “value” as something objective rather than customary. He’s narrowing the definition so economics can behave like a science: first establish the precondition (utility), then argue about the determinants (scarcity, labor, etc.). Utility isn’t the whole story for Ricardo, but it’s the admission ticket.

Subtext: this is a warning to both moralists and misty-eyed producers. You don’t earn value simply by suffering to make something, and nature doesn’t bestow value simply by hiding something in a vault. The quote also quietly polices what counts as “real” economic activity: value is tethered to demand, to human desires and social habits, which means markets don’t just reflect needs - they manufacture and organize “gratification” too. Ricardo’s cool phrasing makes it sound neutral, but it carries an unsettling implication: capitalism is indifferent to effort unless it’s convertible into want.