 Economists before Smith, such as Cantillon, Hume, James Steuart, and Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, discerned some of the key arguments for the gains from trade and the dynamics of economic growth that stemmed from the division of labor, population growth, economies of scale and, above all, capital accumulation (see Murphy 2009). Because of the growth of markets and factor mobility, eighteenth-century economists recognized the regional manifestation of a uniform wage and profit rate, and thus made insights not only about the inverse relationship between profits and wages but also about the tendency of the profit rate to decline over time. Above all, they did what is essential to most if not all philosophical thought—drive a wedge between appearance and reality—distinguishing prices from underlying values, and the nominal or money wage from the real wage, its purchasing power. Petty, Hume, and Smith firmly entrenched the central distinction of the nominal and the real in economic discourse while also grappling with efforts to measure inflation.