Daily Inspiration Quote by David Ricardo

Ricardo is doing something deceptively radical here: stripping wages of their moral aura and treating them as a structural variable that moves with the machinery of an economy, not the virtue of its people. In one clean sentence, he rejects the comforting story that hardship is a temporary glitch of “bad times” and prosperity a reward of “good policy.” Wages rise and fall in every kind of society, he insists, even the ones congratulating themselves on progress.

The intent is analytical and political at once. Ricardo is writing in an early industrial Britain where “advancing” growth coexisted with grinding insecurity. By naming “stationary,” “advancing,” and “retrograde” states, he sketches a full business-cycle worldview before the term existed, then punctures the naïve assumption that growth automatically lifts pay. The subtext is anti-sentimental: wage levels aren’t proof of national character; they’re the outcome of bargaining power, labor supply, capital accumulation, and the relentless arithmetic of rents and profits.

It works because it sounds almost bland, like a textbook aside, while smuggling in a destabilizing premise: no social order gets to declare itself immune from distributional conflict. Even a booming economy can deliver falling wages if labor is abundant or if gains are captured elsewhere; even a stagnant one can see wage pressure if labor becomes scarce. Ricardo’s cool tone is the point. By refusing melodrama, he forces the reader to confront wages as a contested, moving line - and to stop treating “progress” as a synonym for fairness.