The nature of capital and income

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Multivolume work

Identifikator:: 1896933912

Document type:: Multivolume work

Author:: Keith, Arthur Berriedale http://d-nb.info/gnd/119086794

Title:: Responsible government in the Dominions

Place of publication:: Oxford

Publisher:: Clarendon Press

Year of publication:: 1912-

Collection:: Economics Books

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Volume

Identifikator:: 1896934455

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-236504

Document type:: Volume

Author:: Keith, Arthur Berriedale http://d-nb.info/gnd/119086794

Title:: Responsible government in the Dominions

Volume count:: Vol. 1

Place of publication:: Oxford

Publisher:: Clarendon Pr.

Year of publication:: 1912

Scope:: LI, 568 Seiten

Digitisation:: 2022

Collection:: Economics Books

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Document type:: Multivolume work

Structure type:: Chapter

Title:: Part I. Introductory

Collection:: Economics Books

rt? - Es Sec. 4] : °. CAPITAL 59 tinction between one kind of wealth and another. As a consequence, their studies of the problems of capital have been full of confusion Among the many confusions? * which have come from overlooking the time distinction between a stock and a flow was the famous wage fund theory, that the rate of wages varies inversely with the amount of capital in the supposed “wage fund.” Mac- Culloch wrote : 2 — “To illustrate this principle, let us suppose that the capital of a country appropriated to the payment of wages would, if reduced to the standard of wheat, form a mass of 10,000,000 quarters; if the number of laborers in that country were two millions, it is evident that the wages of each, reducing them all to the same common standard, would be five quarters.” “The wages would be five quarters” — thus MacCul- loch — but five quarters in what time? Five quarters per hour, per day, or per year? Divorced as it is from any time concept, this definition is meaningless. Even so acute a writer as John Stuart Mill unhesitatingly states:® — “Wages, then, depend mainly upon the demand and supply of labour; or, as it is often expressed, on the proportion between popu- lation and capital. By population is here meant the number only of the labouring class, or rather of those who work for hire; and by capital, only circulating capital, and not even the whole of that, but the part which is expended in the direct purchase of labour. To this, however, must be added all funds which, without forming a part of capital, are paid in exchange for labour, such as the wages of soldiers, domestic servants, and all other unproductive labourers. . . . With these limitations of the terms, wages not only depend upon the rela- tive amount of capital and population, but cannot under the rule of competition be affected by anything else. Wages (meaning, of course, the general rate [sic]). . . .” A little attention to business bookkeeping would have saved economists from such errors; for the keeping of rec- ords in business involves a practical if unconscious recog- ! See “What is Capital 2” loc. cit. * Principles of Political Economy, 1st ed., pp. 327-328, 2d ed., pp. 377-378. See Cannan, History of Theories of Production and Distri- bution, p. 264. ’ * Political Economy, Book II, Chap. XI, § 1.

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