Pietro Verri

Pietro Verri (12 December 1728 – 28 June 1797) was an Italian philosopher, economist, historian and writer.

Born in Milan, then under Austrian rule, to a conservative noble family, he received a strongly religious education, from which he began to rebel when he reached his twenties. He volunteered to serve in the Seven Years' War in order to escape his father's decision to register him for legal studies, but quit after a year. In his early life he translated Destouches' works (1754) and wrote satirical almanacs (Borlanda impasticciata, Gran Zoroastro and Mal di Milza) which scandalized the Milanese society. In 1761, together with his brother Alessandro, he founded a literary association, the Società dei Pugni ("Society of the Fists"), and, from 1764, published the magazine Il Caffè ("The Coffeehouse"), where some 40 articles by him on various subjects appeared and which became an important reference on Enlightenment Milan. Other figures who wrote on it include his brother Alessandro, the famous philosopher Cesare Beccaria, Alfonso Longo and Pietro Secchi. :)

In 1764 he also entered the public administration, where he distinguished for his reforming attitudes: in particular, he proposed the abolition of the exaction of taxes through intermediaries. After a documented Bilance on the Commerce of the State of Milan, in 1769 Verri published one of his most notable works, the Elementi del Commercio ("Elements of Commerce"), inspired by a wide interpretation of liberalism in commerce. This was followed by the Meditazioni sull'economia politica ("Meditations on Economic Politics", 1771), where he enunciated the laws regulating supply and demand (also in mathematical form), explained the role of money as "universal good", and supported laissez-faire in trade, arguing that balance of payments equilibrium is achieved by GDP adjustments rather than by exchange rate adjustments; as such, he was a precursor of both Adam Smith and marginalism.

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