SirWilliamPetty

From UoWiki

The study of econometrics is usually traced back to Sir William Petty, one of the more fascinating characters of early modern England and a central figure in the 'quantification of reality' - who deserves his own write-up in the archives of the UO.

Born the son of a small-time merchant in Hampshire, Petty studied with Hobbes in Paris in the 1640s and worked on the illustrations for his 'Optics', then returned to England to become the first Professor of Anatomy at Oxford in 1648. There's a fascinating portrait of him from this period in the National Portrait Gallery, with a skull held Hamlet-like in one hand, an anatomy book with a diagram of the skull in the other: from the relative position of the hands, you could almost see it as the tipping of the scales from the world of Shakespeare (with 'more things in heav'n and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy') to the new world of scientific rationalism (Descartes' dreams interrupting the sleep of reason...). Petty was, naturally, a founding member of the Royal Society.

But his place as the founding figure of Econometrics began with his translation of his interests from the body physical to the body politic. Cromwell took him to Ireland as physician to the army, where he found himself in charge of carving up the conquered territory, securing extensive estates for himself in the process. His 'Political Anatomy of the State of Ireland' (posthumously published in 1672) combines the dispassionate language of scientific objectivity with the practise of expropriation by a colonizing power. Swift had a copy of his 'Essays' to hand when he wrote his 'Modest Proposal...' Petty himself proposed transporting three quarters of the Irish population and converting the island into a giant cattle ranch. A man ahead of his time, then.

(Unlike Swift, Marx was an admirer of Petty's: he's one of the few earlier economists he says anything complimentary about in 'Capital'.)