Gray's critique of laissez-faire capitalism is usually associated with the school of Ricardian socialism and he was one of the earliest writers to advocate a centrally-planned economy.
He was, by his own admission, a poor scholar, who spent most of his time fishing, climbing trees and playing marbles, and his final school report described him as "possessing abilities, rising barely to mediocrity".
He later wrote, "I saw clearly that goods of every description are made either because they are ordered, or because there is every prospect of their being so; and continued reflection satisfied me that this state of things ought to be reversed,— that production, instead of being the effect of demand, ought to be the cause of it".
This desire can only be achieved when basic human wants are satisfied, and the fact that there is so much misery in the world proves that society is constructed upon the wrong principles.
[10] The productive classes, Gray calculated, only received about one-fifth of the wealth that they created, the other four-fifths being taken from them by rent, interest and capitalist profits.
[11][12] Although he disassociated himself from Owenite views on the formation of character, Gray praised Owen's economic ideas, which he said would abolish the artificial limit of production and give producers the wealth they create.
Due to production problems, the pamphlet had only limited distribution in Britain, but sold well in the United States and has been credited with influencing the development of socialist ideas in both countries.
In 1829 he suffered a mental breakdown, from which his brother helped to nurse him back to health;[25] in 1830 he was briefly imprisoned for debt, following the failure of his project to establish a printers' hall where businesses could share modern machinery;[26] and in 1831 his wife, Caroline, died.
Although Gray wrote that his views were "substantially the same as those which I entertained many years ago",[29] his criticisms of Owenism were more sharply expressed than in his Lecture on Human Happiness.
[30][31] He strongly objected to Owen's policy of equal distribution of property,[32] and dismissed as delusional the Owenite belief that a person's character had to be improved before they could become wealthy.
[35] Gray's plan involved the creation of a National Chamber of Commerce (NCC), which would exercise complete control over the cultivation, manufacture and distribution of food and all other goods.
[43] Gray's subsequent writings were primarily concerned with elaborating his views on the defects of the existing monetary system and the importance of production becoming the cause of demand.
In An Efficient Remedy for the Distress of Nations (1842) production would still be controlled by the NCC, but retail distribution would be in private hands and prices would be regulated only by competition amongst the vendors.
[48] In an attempt to give maximum publicity to his ideas, Gray paid for 1200 copies of Lectures to be distributed to Members of Parliament, the House of Lords, newspaper editors and other influential people.
Between 1854 and 1866 he owned an estate of 26 acres at Bonaly Tower, near Edinburgh, before retiring to Upper Norwood in Surrey, at that time a very wealthy area, where he died in 1883.