William Petty's followers made a trade of estimating national population, income and taxable wealth from hearth-tax rolls, burial registers and trade ledgers — Gregory King's 1696 tables of England's social classes were consulted for a century. The craft had no successor title: its estimation work was absorbed into government statistics, and its policy ambitions into political economy, leaving the name behind by the time the first census offices opened.
Political arithmetician no longer exists as a living trade. Here is what erased it, and which profession took on the work.
1500 – 1776
Mercantilists and political arithmetic
As nation-states and ocean trade grew, merchants and royal advisers produced pamphlet after pamphlet urging trade surpluses and bullion accumulation — the loose doctrine later called mercantilism. The lasting methodological leap came from William Petty, a physician who surveyed conquered Ireland and then, in the 1670s, invented "political arithmetic": estimating England's population, income and wealth from hearth-tax rolls and burial records. In France, the physiocrats around royal physician François Quesnay, whose 1758 Tableau économique traced income circulating between classes, became the first self-conscious school of economists.
What else was happening then
1776
The Wealth of Nations
Adam Smith publishes An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in London on 9 March 1776. Opening with a pin factory whose ten workers make tens of thousands of pins a day through the division of labor, it argues that self-interested exchange under competition, not gold hoards or state direction, creates a nation's wealth. The first edition sells out in six months.
1817
Ricardo's comparative advantage
London stockbroker-turned-theorist David Ricardo publishes On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, showing with a two-country example of English cloth and Portuguese wine that trade benefits both sides even when one country makes everything more efficiently. Two centuries later, comparative advantage remains the profession's standard case for open trade.
Where that work lives now
The scholar of scarcity — from Adam Smith's pin factory to the central-bank decision room, still asked to predict what no model fully captures.
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