Sir William Petty FRS was an English economist, physician, scientist and philosopher.
51 Facts About William Petty
2.
William Petty first became prominent serving Oliver Cromwell and the Commonwealth in Ireland.
3.
William Petty developed efficient methods to survey the land that was to be confiscated and given to Cromwell's soldiers.
4.
William Petty remained a significant figure under King Charles II and King James II, as did many others who had served Cromwell.
5.
William Petty is attributed with originating the laissez-faire economic philosophy.
6.
William Petty was born in Romsey, where his father and grandfather were clothiers.
7.
William Petty was a precocious and intelligent youth and in 1637 became a cabin boy, but was set ashore in Normandy after breaking his leg on board.
8.
William Petty befriended Hartlib and Boyle and became a member of the Oxford Philosophical Club.
9.
William Petty was one of the physicians involved in treating Anne Greene, a woman who survived her own hanging and was pardoned because her survival was widely held to be an act of divine intervention.
10.
William Petty was pulled to Ireland perhaps by a sense of ambition and desire for wealth and power.
11.
William Petty gained possession of the three baronies of Iveragh, Glanarought and Dunkerron in County Kerry.
12.
William Petty soon became a projector, developing extensive plans for an ironworks and a fishery on his substantial estates in Kerry.
13.
William Petty began by applying his political arithmetic to his own estates, surveying the population and livestock to develop an understanding of the land's potential.
14.
William Petty 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.
15.
William Petty was knighted in 1661 by Charles II and returned to Ireland in 1666, where he remained for most of the next twenty years.
16.
The events that took him from Oxford to Ireland marked a shift from medicine and the physical sciences to the social sciences, and William Petty lost all his Oxford offices.
17.
William Petty's 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.
18.
William Petty was a daughter of the regicide Sir Hardress Waller and Elizabeth Dowdall.
19.
William Petty had been previously married to Sir Maurice Fenton, who died in 1664.
20.
William Petty was given the title Baroness Shelburne for life.
21.
The first was Thomas Hobbes, for whom William Petty acted as personal secretary.
22.
William 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.
23.
William Petty was indeed writing before the true development of political economy.
24.
Nonetheless, William Petty wrote three main works on economics, Treatise of Taxes and Contributions, Verbum Sapienti and Quantulumcunque Concerning Money.
25.
William Petty then discusses general and particular causes of changes in these charges.
26.
William Petty 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.
27.
William Petty recommended that in general taxes should be just sufficient to meet the various types of public charges that he listed.
28.
William Petty recommended a much higher quality of statistical information, to raise taxes more fairly.
29.
In making the above estimate, William Petty introduced in the first two chapters of Verbum Sapienti the first rigorous assessments of national income and wealth.
30.
William Petty's theory produced estimates, some more reliable than others, for the various components of national income, including land, ships, personal estates and housing.
31.
William Petty then distinguished between the stocks and the flows yielding from them.
32.
William Petty would do this by either estimating it by exports or by deaths.
33.
Such a simple use of estimation could have easily have been abused and William Petty was accused more than once of doctoring the figures for the Crown.
34.
William Petty believed that there was a certain amount of money that a nation needed to drive its trade.
35.
The answer for William Petty lay in the velocity of money's circulation.
36.
William Petty explicitly stated in Verbum Sapienti "nor is money wanting to answer all the ends of a well-policed state, notwithstanding the great decreases thereof which have happened within these Twenty years" and that higher velocity is the answer.
37.
William Petty still included general productivity, one's "art and industry".
38.
William Petty involved himself in the debate on usury and interest rates, regarding the phenomenon as a reward for forbearance on the part of the lender.
39.
William Petty applied this to monopolies, controls on the exportation of money and on the trade of commodities.
40.
William Petty recognised the price effects of monopolies, citing the French king's salt monopoly as an example.
41.
William Petty described the phenomenon of the division of labour, asserting that a good is both of better quality and cheaper, if many work on it.
42.
William Petty said that the gain is greater "as the manufacture itself is greater".
43.
William Petty noted in Quantulumcunque concerning money that countries plentiful in gold have no such laws restricting specie.
44.
William Petty saw far more use in going to Holland and learning whatever skills they have than trying to resist nature.
45.
William Petty's breakthrough was to divide up the work so that large parts of it could be done by people with no extensive training.
46.
William Petty imagined a future in which "the city of London is seven times bigger than now, and that the inhabitants of it are 4,690,000 people, and that in all the other cities, ports, towns, and villages, there are but 2,710,000 more".
47.
William Petty expected this some time around 1800, extrapolating existing trends.
48.
William Petty is best remembered for his economic history and statistical writings, preceding the work of Adam Smith, and for being a founding member of the Royal Society Of particular interest were his forays into statistical analysis.
49.
Marx's high esteem of Adam Smith is mirrored in his consideration of William Petty's analysis, testified for by countless quotations in his major work Das Kapital.
50.
William Petty was a music professor before being apprenticed to the brilliant Thomas Hobbes.
51.
William Petty arrived upon his laissez-faire view of economics at a time of great opportunity and growth in the expanding British Empire.