While Adam Smith accented the production of income, David Ricardo centered the distribution of income among landowners, workers, and capitalists. Ricardo saw an inherent conflict between landholders on the one hand and labor and capital on the other. He stated that the growth of population and capital, pressing against a fixed supply of land, thrusts rents and holds down wages and profits.


Thomas Robert Malthus used the idea of lessening returns to explain low living standards. Population, he argued, tended to increment geometrically, exceeding the production of food, which increased arithmetically. The force of a quickly acquiring population against a limited amount of land meant falling returns to labor.

The result, he arrogated, was inveterately low wages, which prevented the standard of living for most of the population from rising above the subsistence level.