Economic essays

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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

150 ECONOMIC ESSAYS IN HONOR OF JOHN BATES CLARK general purchasing power.” * He declares that the idea of interest is strictly applicable only to fluid capital, evidently meaning readily available purchasing power. “The rate of interest is a ratio and the two things which it connects are both sums of money.” > Thus it appears that after many contradictory assertions and formal definitions that reaffirm the older Ricardian scheme, Marshall really uses capital in nearly all his discussions of price and of business problems in his later editions as an individual (acquisitive) concept, expressed in (market) valuation terms. Yet unsuspecting students still are led to seek in Marshall a source of theoretical illumination instead of a smoke cloud. Eri Re. a 7. The Yale Economists The influence of Clark’s views of capital showed itself at Yale within the following decade in the writings of A. T. Hadley and of his younger colleague, Irving Fisher. Hadley published in 1895 * a noteworthy article marked by an insight and a clarity in nearly every feature in advance of its date, and by a realism in advance of Clark’s abstraction of an entity of pure capital. Hadley recognized both the broad social and the narrow indivi- dual conception of wealth, and the broad and the narrow concep- tion of capital. “Individual wealth is more accurately designated as property.” “The capital of an individual is more accurately designated as an investment.” “A title to property is not neces- sarily productive as held by Clark.” Here Hadley briefly, but in essence, anticipated what Veblen (and in part Davenport) developed many years later regarding the contrast between acquisition and production, while avoiding Veblen’s exaggeration of the contrast and his caricature of the profit motive. Hadley’s text Economics published the next year, reproduced in its first chapter "(on Public and Private Wealth) the substance of this article, but with certain additions (unfortunate, in our view) involving, as Hadley says,* “a combination of the ideas of Knies and Newcomb,” but for which he acknowledges his chief indebted- ness to be due to his colleague, Dr. Irving Fisher. The essential addition due to Fisher was a distinction between yi 1E.g. idem. p. 411. ® Idem., p. 412. if Yale Review, Vol. 4, pp. 156-170, “Misunderstandings about economic terms.’ t Tn a footnote, p. 5.

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