Ri·car·do  (rĭ-kär'dō)  British economist whose major work, Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817), supported the laws of supply and demand in a free market. |
A British economist of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Ricardo was essentially a classical economist in the tradition of Adam Smith, but he expanded Smith's vision to forecast an eventual end to economic growth owing to the difficulty of increasing food production to keep up with population growth.
Note: With Thomas Malthus, he is credited with propounding the pessimistic views that earned economics the label of the “dismal science.”