Richard Cantillon
Richard Cantillon (c. 1680s–1734) enters this wiki as the eponym of the Cantillon effect: the first economist to analyze how newly created money spreads through an economy unevenly, enriching its early receivers at the expense of the late.
Place in This Wiki
Cantillon was an Irish-French banker and merchant who made — and kept — a fortune through John Law’s Mississippi scheme, whose collapse he foresaw. His one surviving work, the Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en Général (written around 1730, published 1755), is reconstructed for this wiki through Rothbard’s (Murray N. Rothbard) Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, which devotes a chapter to him as “the founding father of modern economics.”
The wiki uses one strand of that chapter: Cantillon’s demonstration that money is not neutral. Against the naive quantity theory, he showed that new money enters at particular points and raises prices step by step, in an order that redistributes real wealth toward those who receive it first — the analysis the Cantillon effect draws on. He stands in the pre-Austrian, subjective-value lineage the wiki traces from the Salamancans through Turgot, and his credit-and-interest analysis is, in Rothbard’s reading, an early anticipation of Austrian business cycle theory.
See Also
- The Cantillon Effect - the monetary mechanism named for him
- Economic Thought Before Adam Smith - Rothbard’s history, the source for this profile
- Murray N. Rothbard - the Austrian historian who reconstructs Cantillon’s analysis
- Austrian Business Cycle Theory - the cycle theory his credit analysis prefigures
Sources
- Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (Full Text Aggregate) - Rothbard’s chapter on Cantillon as “the founding father of modern economics,” the basis for this profile