Profits Depend On High Or Low

From Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817), Chapter 6, "On Profits." Ricardo was mapping the chain of economic dependencies that connected food prices to wages and wages to profits — what he called the "natural wage" logic. His model predicted that as population grew, cultivation would extend to less fertile land, raising food prices, raising wages, and squeezing profits — a pessimistic long-run prognosis for capitalism that Adam Smith had not fully developed.