John Barton, 1789-1852.

English anti-classical economist, Quaker and well-traveled gentleman of independent means.

According to his brother, the poet Bernard Barton, the family fortune was built on a calico-printing machine innovation introduced by their grandfather.  Based on his estates in Chicester, Sussex, John Barton seemed to have dedicated himself to traveling abroad and writing sporadically on wide interests in botany and political economy. Other known activities include serving as a trustee of the Chichester Savings Bank and the Lancaster Mechanics Institute and resigning from the Society of Friends after an acrimonious dispute.  

Barton's Observations in 1817, followed up by his Inquiry in 1820,  knocked down a few of the sacred cows of the nascent Classical school.  His impetus was to dismiss the Malthusian population doctrine.  Barton noted that, empirically, the progress of population had preceded and been much faster than growth in wage income, so the former could not be conditional on the latter. Indeed, he claimed, we often find population growth strongest when wages are low.  He posited a curious theory of causation, emphasizing the connection between fertility and security of employment, rather than income. When wages are high, he argued, there is a tendency for employers to fire workers and rely on more labor-saving machinery.  And unemployment is a great deterrent for marriage and starting a family - as well as observed increase in the mortality rate (something Malthus himself had difficulty with).  Conversely, when wages are low, employment increases, so even if incomes are not particularly high, long-term income security is, and thus there is more confidence for workers to start families and thus population growth.  He ascribes the English population growth wave from the increase in precious metals from abroad, which had risen prices and profits and prompted employers to increase their scale of production and go on a hiring spree.

Barton's thesis hung on the point of permanent technological unemployment - that is that the introduction of labor-saving machinery would permanently displace workers that would not be absorbed by other branches of industry.  This seemed to echo working class sentiment at the time, which was exhibiting itself in the Luddite wave of machine-smashing.  It also seemed to undermine the confidence Classical economists had placed in the benevolent priestess of technical improvement, and the 'harmoniousness' of class interests in the progress of industry.  He also took a shot at Say's Law, emphasizing the loss of demand by unemployed would not be made up by investment.

Barton's essays were stumbled upon by Malthus and commented upon favorably by Sismondi, unfavorably by McCulloch.  Most famously, it provoked David Ricardo to respond to him in correspondence, then revise his own ideas on technological change and compose his famous Chapter 31 ("On Machinery") in the third edition of the Principles, confirming Barton's argument.

 Unlike many other economists, Barton put urgent emphasis on the policy role of emigration (esp. to Canada) in the defusing the population bomb (e.g. 1830), dismissing the Malthusian fear that so relieved, the population would just explode again. Barton also took issue with the free-traders in his 1833 tract, defending the existing Corn Laws on the basis of its differential effects, again notably on employment.  He conceded the cost and collective welfare gains from trade, but demanded that they be weighed against disruption and costs of unemployment, however temporary, in the countryside.  His 1847 tract linked the crisis in the British banking system with the repeal of the tariffs - a phenomenon he had predicted in letters to newspapers written before the fact in 1846.

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