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

138 ECONOMIC ESSAYS IN HONOR OF JOHN BATES CLARK (d) Clark correspondingly widened the meaning and applica- tion of the term rent beyond that of the orthodox English economics, making it apply to the “sums earned by outward and material instruments of production” of any and every kind, u.e., the earnings of concrete capital. The rent law is universal. (e) Clark called the earnings of “pure capital” interest, and he conceived of this as rent (value) expressed as a percentage of the value of the abstract capital. Thus interest, as Clark wished to express it, did not consist of uses, yields, earnings, or incomes other than those composing rents, but simply was rent, expressed as a price in relation to the price of the instruments that embody the fund. That these ideas appeared at that time to be radical novelties in American and English economic theory, is evident. The vigor and incisiveness of their statement helped them to command immediate attention even from those who were not ready to accept them as true. It must have been obvious that their acceptance would involve sweeping changes in the structure of the then accepted theory of distribution, with its sharp division between (natural) land and (artificial) capital as factors of pro- duction, and between rent (of land) and interest (on capital) as forms of “earnings” or incomes. Clark himself began at once to shape and build a structure of distributive theory but faintly forecast in his earlier essays, and increasingly to this day these ideas have exercised an influence upon theoretical opinion. a rh 2. Possible Sources; the American Tradition Ideas departing so far from prevalent opinion rarely if ever spring as pure inventions of the moment from one mind. Nor does a change in the content and direction of an individual’s thought, as marked as that of Clark at that time, occur without some influence from other thinkers or from environing conditions. But to trace such influences to their sources seems, in the case of Clark, at first unusually difficult. His literary style is didactic rather than polemical, and his thought seems to move along positive lines hardly at all conscious either of his forerunners or of hostile opinions, once he has formulated his own views. His writings give slight internal evidence of the sources of his thought. In the monograph in question the only references to the opinions of others are in minor matters, in three cases dissenting,

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