Carl Linnaeus on Economic Theory

The Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) is probably best known today as the originator of taxonomy.

This method involves dividing animals and plants into different related groups. What is less well-known is that Linnaeus posthumously published a book in 1749 called The Economy of Nature. Moreover, he occasionally made extremely positive statements about economics. Lisbet Koerner in Chapter 5 of her 2001 book “Linnaeus: Nature and Nation,” puts his views on economic theory into context.

A few quotations from Linnaeus sometimes pop up in economics writing. As Koerner points out, he wrote in a 1740 essay: “No science in the world is more elevated, more necessary, and more useful than Economics, since all people’s material well-being is based on it …” Or in a 1759 talk, he said: “Therefore nothing else could have come about among mankind apart from the birth of that science, which is called Economics.” Or in a 1746 speech: “The most savage wilderness, where hardly a sparrow can feed itself, can through good economics become the most wonderful land.”

However, when comments like these are quoted, it might be wise to suspect that they have been cribbed from a quotation dictionary or the internet, rather than based on a deeper reading of Linnaeus on economics. As a broad perspective , Linnaeus believed that all the areas of the world had different natural advantages for crops and other outputs, and that every area had pretty much everything it needed. Koerner calls this perspective “Edenic,” with the implication that all nations around the world can find what they need to flourish within their own geographic boundaries: as she puts it: “[H]e derived the more stringent hypothesis that every country possesses all the natural resources necessary for a multifunctional economy.” Thus, Linnaeus wrote at one point: “[O]ur own economy is nothing else but knowledge about nature adapted for man’s needs.”

However, in the mid-19th century, Linnaeus is also writing at a time when foods and goods from Asia are already well-known across Europe, and foods and goods from the “New World” of North and South America are beginning to be well-known. This caused him considerable concern. Koerner writes: “He even urged Scandinavians to return to the old `Gothic foods,’ such as acorns, pork, and mead.”

In addition, Linnaeus was innumerate and obsessed with gold. Koerner writes: “Linnaeus was obsessed by gold. `Does it not make all things into slaves? And where it is missing, is not everything missing?’ He loved handling gold coins, and was fond of displaying his hoard to his penniless students. Being innumerate, he counted great sums by one measure only: `a barrel of gold.’”

With these background beliefs, Linneaus was a true mercantilist of his time: that is, he favored exporting goods to accumulate more gold (or other precious metals), but opposed importing goods because paying for them might decrease the national store of gold. Koerner writes:

Linnaeus felt that states should be autarkies, withdrawing altogether from the commercial bonds tying them to peoples and places not politically subjugated to them. He artlessly elaborated his reasoning on this to the Academy of Science in 1746: `Everything that we buy from abroad is therefore more expensive, since we must fetch it from far away, and pay others who harvest it.’ …

Linnaeus was a state interventionist, too. Without pondering the matter deeply, he supported tariffs, levies, export bounties, quotas, embargoes, navigation acts, subsidized investment capital, ceilings on wages, cash grants, state-licensed producer monopolies, and cartels. To use modern analytical terms, he supported legislated market imperfections favoring domestic producers over foreign competitors and local consumers. …

This view also colored Linnaeus’ visit of 1746 to the Alingsås textile factory, an enterprise founded with much fanfare in 1724. After twenty years of state subsidies and trade barriers, this family-owned garment industry loomed, cut, and sewed only a few pieces of badly made garments, unable to compete with either smuggled foreign goods or homespun peasant wares. Yet Linnaeus, who was a friend of the owner (a fellow member of the Swedish Academy of Science), saw no problems with the losing enterprise. He gloried in the fact that “our own countrymen”—or “Swedish hands in Sweden”—now produced cloth as good “as ever other nations abroad.”

Linnaeus did not envision economic progress very clearly, but when he did, he had nothing to say about technological progress or international trade, but instead focused on “transmutationist botany,” the idea that if only other plants from around the world could be brought to Sweden, and grown there, then Sweden’s natural advantage would be able to shine. Koerner describes this view:

In the field of economic science Linnaeus always favored those of his students who specialized in transmutationist botany, a science that assumed that nature was so malleable that by means of floral transplants naturalists could assure independent yet complete state economies. For he believed that in order to accommodate the political fact that nations prosper best in a state of self-sufficiency, God had so created the natural world that each principality duplicated in miniature the world economy. Nature provided all the ingredients necessary for a complex and complete economy within each geographic area constituting an independent commonwealth.

As an example, Linnaeus once wrote about how wonderful it would be if Sweden would start growing tea, so that it would not have to trade for tea. Toward the end of his life, he described one of his legacies as having brought 600 plants to Sweden.