Now, let's consider François Quesnay,
a very influential 18th-century French economist.
Quesnay was leader of the school of thought called the physiocrats,
and this gets off the ground in the late 1750s,
lasts for about 10 to 15 years,
but it leaves an indelible mark upon economic thinking for a long time.
Quesnay created a quantitative economic model,
which he called the 'tableau économique',
or in English, you could translate this as something like 'economic table'.
The major edition of this was created in the late 1750s,
and you can think of the tableau as representing
the circular flow of funds through an economy.
It seems the tableau was very much influenced
by Quesnay's background as a doctor
and his study of the circulation of the blood.
By the way, Quesnay worked for the king,
and he also was directly the doctor to the king's mistress.
Here's a reproduction of the tableau,
which is a somewhat strange zig-zag diagram,
but basically the zig-zags are tracing the flow of funds through an economy,
and the diagram is intended to be used for what we would now call
comparative statics.
That is, you would introduce some change in funds or economic activity,
at some point in the diagram,
and then by following the zig-zags,
you would trace how this would affect the overall economy.
I wish I could tell you there was some simple way
I could make this diagram more intuitive for you with an example,
but unfortunately that's not the case.
Historian of thought Mark Blaug edited two volumes on Quesnay,
and he started off his introduction with the following passage, and I quote:
"Quesnay is one of those economists that students,
and even many of their teachers, must leave unread.
So intricate is his reasoning, so convoluted are his calculations,
and so steeped is his every word in the outdated political philosophy
and economic circumstances of 18th-century France,
that only years of study can make any sense of his writings."
Nonetheless, there are versions of the tableau économique online,
and you can Google to them if you'd like to take a closer look.
In the tableau, there are three major branches of economic activity.
There are the landowners;
there's what Quesnay calls the productive class,
which is basically farm labor;
and there's also what he calls the sterile class,
which are traders and merchants.
Keep in mind that during Quesnay's time,
the French economy was largely agriculture,
and one of Quesnay's political enemies, Colbert, was going to great lengths
to boost industry, and in some regards, penalize agriculture.
So his advocacy of the economic dynamicy of agriculture
perhaps should be viewed in this context.
The details of the tableau really are tough going,
but I view Quesnay as mostly important for some of his big picture thinking.
For instance, the now common macroeconomic notion of an economy
as a circular flow really owes a lot to Quesnay and the tableau économique.
Later inspirations in 20th-century economics
also drew at least indirectly from the tableau,
and this here I'm referring to, the input-output tables,
say of Wassily Leontief,
the idea of building a computable general equilibrium model,
which is something quite modern.
And then just the general sense,
which you also find in Hayek to some degree,
of the notion as an economy which is something which involves
a computable process of some kind.
That too you can actually find in Quesnay.
Consistent with his view that agriculture is the truly dynamic sector
and the source of economic surplus,
Quesnay and many of the physiocrats advocated a single tax on land,
and this later became an influential policy prescription.
Also notable in Quesnay and some of the other physiocrats
is this notion that economics should be concerned with a theory of the origin
and distribution of the surplus from an economy.
This in part comes from Quesnay.
It proved to be a big influence on Turgot, on Adam Smith,
and above all on Karl Marx.
It's another sign of
just how much influence Quesnay and the physiocrats had.
Quesnay was an advocate of free trade,
but it wasn't the comparative advantage argument
that we later find in Ricardo and others.
So for Quesnay, exports are useful for maintaining the price of grain,
it's good to have a high and steady price of grain
because that keeps up the stability of the grain supply,
and Quesnay saw that as good for an economy.
In general, he favored high and stable prices for agriculture,
and he also has a general worry about whether or not
there will be enough aggregate demand in an economy
to keep up the supply of farm products.
These arguments did push France in a more a liberal direction
with regards to trade,
but it would be a mistake to think they're identical
to the later classical liberal 19th-century arguments for free trade.
It also would be a mistake to think of Quesnay
as some kind of theorist of laissez-faire.
He did on average favor a freer economy than many of his contemporaries,
but he also somewhat idealized the government of 18th-century China.
In general, he still wanted rulers at the center of the economy,
he simply had a different formula
for how the rulers could bring about stability and prosperity.
For further reading, well, you can, of course, google Quesnay,
and physiocrats, and tableau économique, and there's plenty on the web.
But if you'd like to read some historians of thought on the physiocrats,
the ones I recommend for a start or this list here:
Ronald Meek, Joseph Spengler, Mark Blaug, Warren Samuels, and Robert Eagly.
You can find their works online, some of these are gated through JSTOR.
But nonetheless, to really dig into the physiocrats,
outside commentary is extremely useful,
and those are some of the writers who have done a lot of good work
making Quesnay and the physiocrats more intelligible.