<Table> <Tr> <Td> </Td> <Td> This section needs expansion . You can help by adding to it . (December 2009) </Td> </Tr> </Table> <Tr> <Td> </Td> <Td> This section needs expansion . You can help by adding to it . (December 2009) </Td> </Tr> <P> The concept of diminishing returns can be traced back to the concerns of early economists such as Johann Heinrich von Thünen, Jacques Turgot, Adam Smith, James Steuart, Thomas Robert Malthus, and David Ricardo . However, classical economists such as Malthus and Ricardo attributed the successive diminishment of output to the decreasing quality of the inputs . Neoclassical economists assume that each "unit" of labor is identical . Diminishing returns are due to the disruption of the entire productive process as additional units of labor are added to a fixed amount of capital . The law of diminishing returns remains an important consideration in farming . </P> <Table> <Tr> <Td> </Td> <Td> This article may lack focus or may be about more than one topic . Please help improve this article, possibly by splitting the article and / or by introducing a disambiguation page, or discuss this issue on the talk page . (September 2011) </Td> </Tr> </Table>

The law of diminishing return was proposed by