Time & Perspective Quote by David Ricardo

Ricardo is doing something deceptively aggressive here: he’s asking you to stop looking at the messy, human parts of production so he can make a cleaner claim about value over time. By waving off “skill and intensity of labour” as a constant that “operates equally at both periods,” he clears the deck for a comparison that treats labor as a stable yardstick. That move is the engine of classical political economy: reduce the riot of market life into a few variables sturdy enough to argue with.

The intent is methodological. Ricardo wants a theory that can compare prices across decades without getting trapped in endless caveats about workers getting better, machines getting faster, or tasks getting harder. The subtext is a wager: for many commodities, differences in labor quality won’t distort the big picture, so you can bracket them and still talk rigorously about “real” changes in value. It’s a kind of intellectual triage, and it’s why his writing reads like a man trying to make economics behave like physics.

Context matters. Ricardo is writing in early industrial Britain, when “skill” was being reorganized by factories, specialization, and mechanization. Claiming skill and intensity can be ignored isn’t neutral; it quietly downplays how technological change and the division of labor reshuffle who counts as skilled, whose work is intensified, and how gains are distributed. The line works rhetorically because it sounds modest (“needs scarcely to be attended to”) while smuggling in a powerful simplification: that labor can be treated as comparable across time even as capitalism is busy making it less so.