Quesnay’s Theory of Economic Growth

Abstract

Quesnay believed that population and output had been falling in France for a century. He thought that the population was 16 million in 1758, and that it had been 24 million a hundred years earlier, and about 19.5 million in 1701 (Q 513–4). His detailed Tableau in chapter 7 of Philosophie Rurale was intended to show that France could support a population of 29.9 million, while the population in his final Tableau of 1766 was said to be 30 million (Q 712 and 795). These figures, and what growing and declining population and output meant in human and national terms, explain Quesnay’s great concern with the causes of economic growth — and its opposite. He wished to explain the decline in France’s output, population and wealth that he believed had occurred, and to discover how this trend could be reversed.