The nature of capital and income

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Monograph

Identifikator:: 102659555X

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-82920

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Fisher, Irving http://d-nb.info/gnd/118533541

Title:: The nature of capital and income

Place of publication:: New York

Publisher:: The Macmillan Company

Year of publication:: 1923

Scope:: XXI, 427 Seiten

Digitisation:: 2019

Collection:: Economics Books

Usage license:: Get license information via the feedback formular.

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Document type:: Monograph

Structure type:: Chapter

Title:: Introduction. Fundamental concepts

Collection:: Economics Books

Sc. 8] WEALTH 17 Towa and Texas can be appraised within ten or fifteen per cent, in the backward parts even an expert's valuation is often proved wrong by more than fifty per cent. In some cases, in fact, where a sale of the article is scarcely conceiv- able, an appraisement is almost out of the question. To estimate the value of the Yellowstone Park is impossible, unless we allow ourselves a range of several hundred per cent. Similar wide limits must be allowed when we try to value free human beings. We can often give a lower limit, but seldom an upper one. The estimates may vary enormously with the point of view. It is sometimes said, “If I could buy Mr. So-and-So at my valuation and sell him at his, Id get rich.” It would be wrong, however, to conclude, as some writers have, that because we cannot value them accurately, public parks or freemen cannot be called wealth. When the slaves in the South became free- men they ceased to be appraised as wealth. The result has been somewhat confusing to our census statistics. The Manufacturers’ Record of Baltimore recently issued figures showing a sharp drop in the assessed valuations of wealth in the South after the war, and the inference was drawn that wealth had immensely decreased. But a large part of this so-called decrease consisted merely in the change of ownership of slaves from their old masters to themselves, and the consequent omission of them from the statistics. Various writers, from Petty down to Engel and Nichol son, have tried to assess the value of human beings. Professor Nicholson estimates roughly that the English nation is worth at least five times the value of other ex- isting wealth in England.! Such calculations are of course of more theoretical than practical moment. They are also necessarily inaccurate, and involve in each case some par- ticular supposition as to the purpose of the appraisement; for instance, whether it is to indicate the earning power of the population, their value to themselves, or to others. 1 Economic Journal, March, 1891, p. 95.

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