born June 4, 1694, near Paris, France
died Dec. 16, 1774, Versailles
French physician and economist.
He served as consulting physician to Louis XV at Versailles, where he developed an interest in economics. In his Tableau économique (1758), he described the relationship between the different economic classes of society and the flow of payments among them, and he developed the concept of economic equilibrium used by many later economic analysts. An advocate of laissez-faire economic policy, he became the intellectual leader of the physiocrat , the first systematic school of political economy .