Tozer on machinery

This paper examines John Edward Tozer's mathematical treatment of the classical approach to the machinery problem and his discussion of some arithmetical examples that had been presented by Barton, Sismondi, McCulloch and Ricardo. It is shown that Tozer (1) made a genuine contribution to the contemporary debates on the machinery issue, (2) anticipated modern formulations of the problem of the choice of technique, and (3) revealed a puzzling inconsistency in Ricardo's argument in the famous chapter ‘On Machinery’.