• Oakwood High School, Dayton

• ECON ECONOMIC H

Analyze various arguments that emerged over the course of the nineteenth century about
how to improve the lives of European workers.

The Industrial Revolution caused a massive urban migration. As factories were built, and
businesses started, they need workers. With such a massive working population moving to the
city, the employers could set the wages low and determine the conditions of employment. The
working conditions were dangerous and the hours were long. This soon came to a head and the
workers joined together to create unions to fight for safer conditions, better hours, and
increased wages. Some reformers were looking for modest government reforms, while others
were flat out revolutionaries that wanted to throw out the whole system and start from scratch.
A core of conservatives didn’t think that reform was needed at all, they believed that the free
market system would balance out over time and provide for the poor as it had provided wealth
for them.
One of these conservative economists was David Ricardo. In Document 2, he states that
wages should not be controlled by the government and should instead be controlled by the free
competition of the market. He is a classical economist and supporter of laissez-faire, the free
market economy, and would therefore have studied the economy and collected facts that led
him to believe that the free market should continue. He went on to say that maybe the only
government intervention that was needed was to control the population of the poor. Thomas
Malthus, in Document 1, also opposed government intervention. He too was a conservative
classical economist and believed that the causes of poverty were social in nature and could not
be resolved by the government. In Document 6, John Stuart Mill, a member of the English
Parliament, also did not think that government intervention was needed. He wasn’t as ‘laissezfaire’ as the other two, as he did acknowledge the evils and injustices that the poor had suffered
under the current system, but he did believe that the current system of government was slowly
eradicating social injustice. He was, of course, a member of Parliament and surely wanted to
preserve his government power.