Sir William Petty
One of the earliest records of advances in economics related to statistics, later to become econometrics, can be attributed to the Oxford graduate Sir William Petty (1623-1687). Petty came from a relatively humble background and was largely self-taught initially, sufficient to study medicine at Oxford, and indeed become anatomy tutor at Brasenose College as well as being a physician.
As antecedents, he had acted as personal secretary to Thomas Hobbes through whom he was able to meet many of the prominent European philosophers of the time. At Oxford, he became a friend of Robert Boyle and was a member of the Oxford Philosophical Club, a precursor to the Royal Society of London of which he was a Founding Fellow. He seems to have been influenced by the empirical scientific approach of Francis Bacon, so Petty was a man with wide interests (see McCormick 2009).However, it was only after moving permanently to Ireland that he became interested in economics. These earlier influences had led to Petty deciding that mathematics and the senses must be the basis of all rational sciences based on Bacon’s Novum Organum. A desire to achieve that goal focused his interests on empirical phenomena that were measurable and so could be quantified, rather than merely described, leading to the creation of a new discipline that he called PoliticalArithmetick, published posthumously in a book of that title in 1690 (see Petty 1690). Consequently, Petty has a strong claim to be viewed as one of the first quantitative economists. He discerned what he viewed as a seven-year business cycle, suggesting a possible basis for systematic economic forecasts, although historically, cycles ‘vary greatly in duration and intensity’ (Zarnowitz 2004: 1). Petty was later to prove a considerable influence on Colin Clark, as we discuss in Section 3.
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