Essays of Benjamin Franklin

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Monograph

Identifikator:: 1752429486

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-127700

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Franklin, Benjamin http://d-nb.info/gnd/118534912

Title:: Essays of Benjamin Franklin

Place of publication:: New York

Publisher:: G. P. Putnam's Sons

Year of publication:: 1927

Scope:: xi, 273 Seiten

Digitisation:: 2021

Collection:: Economics Books

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Document type:: Monograph

Structure type:: Chapter

Title:: III. Letter concerning the gratitude of America

Collection:: Economics Books

234 ECONOMIC ESSAYS IN HONOR OF JOHN BATES CLARK four thirty and driving off immaculately dressed in his Buick, can scarcely help wondering whether a mistake was not made in clos- ing the canon with the book of the prophet Malachi. One more passage from Steward’s pamphlet deserves quota- tion: I submit, in conclusion, that the “Increase” of wages as a result of shorter hours does Nor mean an increase of the price of the article produced, as do strikes for higher Wages, when successful. In a reduction of Hours the Producer and Consumer will come together more frequently and stay longer, and the knowledge they will exchange will commence melting and dividing between them the profits of Capital. The Capitalist, as we now understand him, is to pass away with the Kings and Royalties of the past.? With which satisfactory conclusion we may leave Ira Steward and return to the American Federation and the student of eco- nomic theory. The standard of living or bootstrap theory of wages has not been popular with modern economists, though it may certainly claim a respectable father in the person of one David Ricardo. “The natural price of labor . . . varies,” as every student will recall, “at different times in the same country, and very mate- rially differs in different countries. It essentially depends on the habits and customs of the people.” * There is no need to enter into the refinements and contradictions of Ricardian theory. Grant only what is flatly stated in that passage, and it is only one step more to the position of the bootstrappers, namely, that labor can get more by demanding and taking more. That is what underlay the early eight-hour movement; that is what made the eight-hour idea so extraordinarily valuable to the builders of the American Federation. The productivity theorist who quar- rels with them for accepting this basic idea because, as the theorist says, it is not true, is simply missing the point. Whether or not the idea may be said to be true in the abstract, a plausible argu- ment, at any rate, may be made for the standard of living theory as explaining wages in New York cigar factories in the seventies and eighties, with an endless stream of European immigrants flowing through the city, and the margin of productivity a dim and distant thing on the western horizon. And whether or not Ibid.) p. 23. > Ricardo, Political Economy, Gonner’s ed., p. 7a.

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