What was Turgot's contribution to economics?

0:00Turo is magnificent. He's great. He's one of my really favorite characters in history of thought. Considering also the fact that he was, first of all, he spent very little time in economics. He was a busy top bureaucrat and then-governor. And most of his time, intellectually, he was spending on other things, history, linguistics, sort of an all-around type. Rowan read a lot on that topic. Economic topics, he was the only sort of good offhand. He was pressed into it when he had to tell somebody something. For example, his Reflections on Wealth, his longest book, which is about 50 pages, was written under severe time pressure. He was trying to form questions to ask two Chinese students in France about Chinese economy, preparing them to ask about French economy. And so he wrote this as sort of an outline to himself, as a memorandum himself of preparing questions to ask.

0:45This was a great work on wealth and capital theory, et cetera. So he wrote all of his stuff on a severe time pressure, sort of dashed it off, and it was absolutely magnificent. He's got the whole Austrian stuff in there, not only laissez-faire, complete laissez-faire, without any of Smith's evasions, qualifications, etc. But also he's got Austrian time preference theory, he's got Austrian von Boehm-Bawerkian capital theory, he's got money in process analysis, he's got the whole business. And done with brilliance, just sort of in passing almost, a few clauses.