ABSTRACT
Adam Smith’s treatment of profits and rent has been debated almost since the first publication of the Wealth of Nations . 1 Samuelson ( 1978 ; 1980 ), for example, has claimed that Smith and Ricardo shared a single model, and that the differences between them were either verbal or trivial. Hollander (e.g. 1980 ; 1987 , pp. 162-5) qualified this judgement by arguing that although Smith saw land scarcity as the ultimate cause or, at least, one of the causes of the fall in the profit rate, his account was incomplete and inconsistent. By contrast, Gee has argued that land scarcity plays no significant role in the main arguments of the Wealth of Nations , and that Smith’s rent theory is quite different from Ricardo’s. 2 The implicit framework of much of this debate has been the search for Ricardian arguments in Smith.
