"Father of political economy," pioneer of measuring the state by numbers
A seventeenth-century English physician, statistician, and economist, called by Marx the "father of political economy." He founded "political arithmetic," arguing that a state’s wealth, population, and taxation should be studied objectively by number, weight, and measure rather than idle talk — the earliest attempt to study the economy as a measurable science. He also put forward a plain labor theory of value, holding that "labor is the father of wealth, land its mother," planting the earliest seed for the labor theory of value of Ricardo and Marx.
Petty left an oft-quoted line: "Labor is the father of wealth, land is its mother." He was the first to ask gravely: where does the value of wealth come from? His answer pointed to labor. Developed by Adam Smith and Ricardo and pushed to the extreme by Marx, a seventeenth-century metaphor planted one of the most central threads of the next two hundred years of economics.
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.