Bonus Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 268 of Jacob Viner’s 1968 International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences essay, “Mercantilist Thought,” as this essay is reprinted in the 1991 collection, edited by Douglas Irwin, Jacob Viner: Essays on the Intellectual History of Economics:

If it was relative status that solely or mainly mattered, economic damage to a rival country could logically be treated as equivalent to economic benefit to one’s own country, and famine abroad, to bountiful harvests at home. Such reasoning abounds in the mercantilist literature, and it was moral or sentimental revulsion against it more than superior economic analysis which brought much of the late eighteenth-century Enlightenment to the support of free trade ideas.

DBx: Of course the reaction to mercantilism did also produce, in the second half of the 18th century, superior economic analysis, none better than that of Adam Smith.