Ferdinand Lassalle’s Iron Law of Wages, following from Malthus, and David Ricardo’s Law of Rent are some of the very first relatively quantitative attempts at statements or observations of economics and can IMHO be considered a sort of ancestor of modern economics. In the Iron Law of Wages (coined by Lassalle in 1863 according to Wikipedia), as population increases, the labor supply increases and thus the wage price decreases – which does mean that we assume labor demand is unaffected by the size of the population and thus labor demand is effectively exogenous. Wages continue to decrease until they hit subsistence levels for laborers. A further decrease in wages…