Economic essays

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Monograph

Identifikator:: 1753623200

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-136107

Document type:: Monograph

Title:: Economic essays

Place of publication:: New York

Publisher:: Macmillan

Year of publication:: 1927

Scope:: viii, 368 S.; Ill., graph. Darst.

Digitisation:: 2021

Collection:: Economics Books

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Document type:: Monograph

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Title:: Clark's reformulation of the capital concept / Frank A. Fetter

Collection:: Economics Books

CLARK'S REFORMULATION OF THE CAPITAL CONCEPT 137 employing class) with “labor” (the wage earning class), it gives no hint or warning of the author’s purpose to replace with a new conception the conventional notion of capital as an economic factor of production. That came in 1888 seemingly out of a clear sky. Let us first restate, as briefly as we can, just what the thought was, and then seek to account for its appearance at that time. The more essential points in which Clark departed from the then prevalent views of capital may be reduced to five. He said: (a) The conventional capital concept is ambiguous, meaning both “pure” capital and concrete “capital goods.” (b) “Pure capital,” is a fund of value. (c) Land in all its forms is a part of concrete capital. (d) All concrete goods yield rents. (ej All pure capital yields interest. (a) Clark declared that economic science had and was using two unlike conceptions of capital, while believing that it had but one. Hence ambiguity, confusion, “logomachies.” Clark would frankly accept both concepts, clarify them, and distinguish them by somewhat different names. One is the abstract, the other is the concrete concept. The abstract conception, para- doxically, is the one “employed in business a hundred times where the concrete conception is employed once’; * whereas “the actual practice of economic science has been to first define capital in the concrete, and then, in the problems connected with it, to tacitly substitute again and again the abstract conception.” (b) Clark calls capital in the abstract sense “pure capital,” which is a “fund,” a “single entity” common to all the concrete forms of capital. This fund or entity is expressly declared to be “effective social utility,” but this mysterious notion is repeatedly spoken of more simply though somewhat puzzlingly as “the value that a business man invests” in the various instruments and materials he uses. This is the value conception of capital in contrast with the concrete goods conception as defined by the conventional definition of the older political economy. (c) Clark classed as concrete capital not merely the artificial, humanly “produced means of production,” but all instruments and materials, including land and all other natural agents. * Op. cit., pp. 11-12.

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