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

96 ECONOMIC ESSAYS IN HONOR OF JOHN BATES CLARK rofesses to have written for students of business, the more remote from actual business usage his conception of capital is likely to be. How long must it continue to be a sort of ritual for the writer f economic text books to at first repeat piously old definitions from which all vital meaning has departed (if they ever had any) nly to throw them aside later when the time comes to use them. Must every year the minds of thousands of beginning students of economics be crammed with this useless intellectual lumber? n what other field of study could such a practice continue? he way to consistency and clearness has been clearly shown by the labors.ot the past generation. Ambiguity must be anished from economic terminology. Wealth and capital are ot the same or even related as genus and species. Capital is essentially an individual acquisitive, financial, investment owner- hip concept. It is not coextensive with wealth as physical bjects, but rather with legal rights as claims to uses and incomes. t is or should be a concept relating unequivocably to private property and to the existing price system. Social capital is but a mischievous name for national wealth. The so-called, misnamed, “interest problem” is not to be conceived of as correlated with a arrow class of artificial goods but rather as the time-value element permeating all cases of valuation of groups of uses differ- ing in time. The admission of these and a number of logically i: truths is partially, haltingly, inconsistently implied in much of the current treatment of the fundamentals. When will it be made frankly and clearly? When will the dead hand of Ricardianism be lifted from our economic texts? John Bates Clark in his young manhood struck straight and telling blows for a newer, truer and more realistic conception of distributive theory. He did not attain an ultimate goal, but he: advanced in the right direction, showing the way to us. The sincerest tribute that we, and that men of younger generations, can render to him is to seek and to find the truths implicit in the work of the notable era of which he was so large a part

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