William Petty


Sir William Petty was an English economist, physician, scientist and philosopher. He first became prominent serving Oliver Cromwell and the Commonwealth in Ireland. He developed efficient methods to survey the land that was to be confiscated and given to Cromwell's soldiers. He also remained a significant figure under King Charles II and King James II, as did many others who had served Cromwell. Petty was also a scientist, inventor, and merchant, a charter member of the Royal Society, and briefly a member of the Parliament of England. However, he is best remembered for his theories on economics and his methods of political arithmetic. He was knighted in 1661.

Life

Early life

Petty was born in Romsey, where his father and grandfather were clothiers. He was a precocious and intelligent youth and in 1637 became a cabin boy. His readiness to provide caricatures of fellow crew members won him few friends. He also learnt of his defective sight when he failed to spot a landmark he had been told to look for. The captain, who had by this time seen the landmark from the deck for himself "drubbed him with a cord". He was subsequently set ashore in Normandy after breaking his leg on board. After this setback, he applied in Latin to study with the Jesuits in Caen, supporting himself by teaching English. After a year, he returned to England, and had by now a thorough knowledge of Latin, Greek, French, mathematics, and astronomy.

Career

At Oxford

After the Third Siege of Oxford had resulted in the garrison surrendering to the parliamentarians on 24 June 1646, Petty arrived in the town and was offered a fellowship at Brasenose College and studied medicine at the University. He befriended Hartlib and Boyle and became a member of the Oxford Philosophical Club.

Musician, doctor, academic and surveyor

By 1651, Petty was an anatomy instructor at Brasenose College, Oxford, as deputy to Thomas Clayton the younger. With a second doctor, Thomas Willis, Petty was involved in treating Anne Greene, a woman who survived her own hanging and was subsequently pardoned because her survival was widely held to be an act of divine intervention. The event was widely written about at the time, and helped to build Petty's career and reputation. He was also appointed Gresham Professor of Music by the Corporation of the City of London in 1650, retaining the post until 1660.
In 1652, he took a leave of absence and travelled with Oliver Cromwell's army in Ireland as physician-general, responsible to Cromwell's son-in-law, Charles Fleetwood. His opposition to conventional universities, being committed to 'new science' as inspired by Francis Bacon and imparted by his afore-mentioned acquaintances, perhaps pushed him from Oxford. He was pulled to Ireland perhaps by a sense of ambition and desire for wealth and power. He secured the contract for charting Ireland in 1654, so that those who had lent funds to Cromwell's army might be repaid in land – a means of ensuring the army was self-financing. This enormous task, which he completed in 1656, became known as the Down Survey, later published as Hiberniae Delineatio. As his reward, he acquired approximately in Kenmare, in southwest Ireland, and £9,000. This personal gain to Petty led to persistent court cases on charges of bribery and breach of trust, until his death.
Back in England, as a Cromwellian supporter, he ran successfully for Parliament in 1659 for West Looe.

Projector

Petty gained possession of the three baronies of Iveragh, Glanarought and Dunkerron in County Kerry. He soon became a projector, developing extensive plans for an ironworks and a fishery on his substantial estates in Kerry. Although he had great expectations of his application of his scientific methods to improvement, little came of these. He began by applying his political arithmetic to his own estates, surveying the population and livestock to develop an understanding of the land's potential. The ironworks was established in 1660.

Natural philosopher

Despite his political allegiances, Petty was well-treated at the Restoration in 1660, although he lost some of his Irish lands. Charles II, at their first meeting, brushed aside Petty's apologies for his past support for Cromwell, "seeming to regard them as needless", and discussed his experiments into the mechanics of shipping instead.
In 1661 he was elected as a Member of Parliament for Inistioge in the Parliament of Ireland. In 1662, he was admitted as a charter member of the Royal Society of the same year. This year also saw him write his first work on economics, Treatise of Taxes and Contributions. Petty counted naval architecture among his many scientific interests. He had become convinced of the superiority of double-hulled boats, although they were not always successful; a ship called the Experiment reached Porto in 1664, but sank on the way back.

Ireland and later life

Petty was knighted in 1661 by Charles II and served as MP for Inistioge from 1661-66. He remained in Ireland until 1685. He was a friend of Samuel Pepys.
The events that took him from Oxford to Ireland marked a shift from medicine and the physical sciences to the social sciences, and Petty lost all his Oxford offices. The social sciences became the area that he studied for the rest of his life. His focus became greater income from Irish colonization, and his works describe that country and propose many remedies for what he characterized as its backward condition. He helped found the Dublin Society in 1682. Returning ultimately to London in 1685, he died in 1687. He was buried in Romsey Abbey.

Family

William Petty married Elizabeth Waller in 1667. She was a daughter of the regicide Sir Hardress Waller and Elizabeth Dowdall. She had been previously married to Sir Maurice Fenton, who died in 1664. She was given the title Baroness Shelburne for life. They had three surviving children:
Neither Charles nor Henry had male issue and the Shelburne title passed by a special remainder to Anne's son John Petty, 1st Earl of Shelburne, who took his mother's surname, and whose descendants hold the title Marquis of Lansdowne. Her grandson William Petty, 2nd Earl of Shelburne, praised her as a woman of strong character and intelligence, the only person who could manage her bad-tempered and tyrannical husband.

Economic works and theories

Two men crucially influenced Petty's economic theories. The first was Thomas Hobbes, for whom Petty acted as personal secretary. According to Hobbes, theory should set out the rational requirements for "civil peace and material plenty". As Hobbes had centred on peace, Petty chose prosperity.
The influence of Francis Bacon was also profound. Bacon, and indeed Hobbes, held the conviction that mathematics and the senses must be the basis of all rational sciences. This passion for accuracy led Petty to famously declare that his form of science would only use measurable phenomena and would seek quantitative precision, rather than rely on comparatives or superlatives, yielding a new subject that he named "political arithmetic". Petty thus carved a niche for himself as the first dedicated economic scientist, amidst the merchant-pamphleteers, such as Thomas Mun or Josiah Child, and philosopher-scientists occasionally discussing economics, such as John Locke.
He was indeed writing before the true development of political economy. As such, many of his claims for precision are of imperfect quality. Nonetheless, Petty wrote three main works on economics, Treatise of Taxes and Contributions, Verbum Sapienti and Quantulumcunque Concerning Money. These works, which received great attention in the 1690s, show his theories on major areas of what would later become economics. What follows is an analysis of his most important theories, those on fiscal contributions, national wealth, the money supply and circulation velocity, value, the interest rate, international trade and government investment.
Many of his economic writings were collected by Charles Henry Hull in 1899 in The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty.
Hull, in his scholarly article 'Petty's Place in the History of Economic Theory' proposed a division of the economic writings of Petty in three groups:
  • the first group, written when Petty had returned to London after finishing his "Down Survey" in Ireland, consists mainly of A Treatise of Taxes & Contributions and Verbum Sapienti. These texts relate to the discussions about fiscal issues, following the Restoration and the expenses of the first Dutch war.
  • the second group holds The Political Anatomy of Ireland and Political Arithmetick. These texts were written some ten years later in Ireland. As Hull writes, the "direct impulse to their writing came from Dr. Edward Chamberlayne's Present State of England, published 1669".
  • Again ten years later the third group of pamphlets was written, that were contributions to the dispute whether London was a larger city than Paris, and that are titled the Essays in Political Arithmetick by Hull. This group of pamphlets had a close relation to John Graunt's Observations upon the Bills of Mortality of London.
  • The Quantulumcunque concerning Money, can probably be considered as belonging to a group of its own.
The division given here was still used by scholars at the end of the twentieth century.

Fiscal contributions

By Petty's time, England was engaged in war with Holland, and in the first three chapters of Treatise of Taxes and Contributions, Petty sought to establish principles of taxation and public expenditure, to which the monarch could adhere, when deciding how to raise money for the war. Petty lists six kinds of public charge, namely defence, governance, the pastorage of men's souls, education, the maintenance of impotents of all sorts and infrastructure, or things of universal good. He then discusses general and particular causes of changes in these charges. He thinks that there is great scope for reduction of the first four public charges, and recommends increased spending on care for the elderly, sick, orphans, etc., as well as the government employment of supernumeraries.
Petty was interested in the extent to which taxes could be raised without inciting rebellion On the issue of raising taxes, Petty was a definite proponent of consumption taxes. He recommended that in general taxes should be just sufficient to meet the various types of public charges that he listed. They should also be horizontally equitable, regular and proportionate. He condemned poll taxes as very unequal and excise on beer as taxing the poor excessively. He recommended a much higher quality of statistical information, to raise taxes more fairly. Imports should be taxed, but only in such a way that would put them on a level playing field with domestic produce. A vital aspect of economies at this time was that they were transforming from barter economies to money economies. Linked to this, and aware of the scarcity of money, Petty recommends that taxes be payable in forms other than gold or silver, which he estimated to be less than 1% of national wealth. To him, too much importance was placed on money, "which is to the whole effect of the Kingdom… not one to 100".