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

Structure type:: Chapter

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

Collection:: Economics Books

CLARK'S REFORMULATION OF THE CAPITAL CONCEPT 139 (from Rieardo, J. S. Mill and Sydney Webb) and in three approving, (A. Smith, S. N. Patten, and Clark's co-worker, Giddings). The sources or the starting points of Clark’s own thought must be sought more widely in the circumstances of his life and of his surroundings. The first possibility might seem to be close at hand in the fact that Clark was an American. A scholarly study has recently shown * that with few exceptions writers on economics in the United States from Raymond in 1820 to Perry in 1877 (including Phillips, Wayland, Vethake, M. Wilson, Cordoza, Tucker, Carey, and Amasa Walker) defined capital as privately owned means of production, emphasized its valuation or price aspect, and included land among the concrete goods in which this value was embodied. Some of the exceptions serve to prove the rule, for these exceptions were men of English training or faithful disciples drawing their ideas directly from Ricardian text books. Such unorthodox views arose naturally in America where were lacking the artificial feudal legal limitations upon the sale of land, and where land- holders were not marked off socially from capitalist merchants as a separate class. Here land was readily bought and sold and was from the earliest settlement the chief object of investment with a view to speculative profit. This environment had prompted one American writer after another (apparently without mutual influence) to develop conceptions radically different from those of the English school. It might have likewise prompted Clark quite independently to his very similar thought. And there were particular circumstances at the time Clark was writ- ing, namely, the active discussion of Henry George's single tax proposal, which undoubtedly had directed Clark’s attention strongly to this problem of the capital concept. Of this, more later. But if Clark got this thought either directly or indirectly from American economists, it is not evident in his writings. The generation of young economists who in the seventies and early eighties brought a new spirit into American economic studies, did not develop the indigenous traditions, but unfortunately neglected them and turned to Germany for the new sources of their inspiration. At the same time there was in some quarters *J. R. Turner, The Ricardian Rent Theory in Early American Eco- nomics, 1921.

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