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:: The relation between statics and dynamics / John Maurice Clark

Collection:: Economics Books

50 ECONOMIC ESSAYS IN HONOR OF JOHN BATES CLARK re Of these six groups of questions, one is in its very nature static—the search for “natural” levels of prices, etc. Two are in their very nature dynamic—the study of “whence” and “whither,” and that of departures from the “natural” levels of things. These three between them constitute the more impar- tially descriptive section of the inquiry. The other three groups of questions are evaluative—the relation of economic quantities to utility and to human welfare, the theory of national efficiency and the justification of the underlying institutions. The more one considers these questions, the more is one convinced that in this realm dynamic considerations are paramount; until one may even doubt whether the questions have workable meaning apart from dynamic change. But the question of utility and welfare has received a static answer in the marginal utility theory; and the static economics colors the view of the other two questions, as we shall see. With Smith and Ricardo there was a loose and uncertain con- nection between the law of the natural level of price, on the one hand, and the three evaluative problems, on the other. Price did not measure utility; and while wages-cost was thought to be an approximate measure of labor’s sacrifices of production, even this idea did not stand the scrutiny which led to Mill’s statement that the hardest work is often the poorest paid, and to Cairnes’ theory of non-competing groups. Ricardo specifically separated “value” from “riches,” or the abundance of goods. So long as the search for “natural levels” of price and of the shares of distribution is in a rudimentary stage, and its premises not fully realised or expressed, it remains simply one out of a number of major prob- lems, each of which is dealt with in such terms as appear appro- priate. The static character of the one problem does not neces- sarily govern the treatment of the others. The comparative inde- pendence of the theory of value and the theories of welfare and of efficiency is a striking feature of the early classical economics. The early theory of institutions was static in a slightly differ- ent sense. They were taken for granted as natural, and even after Bentham dethroned this view, private property and con- tract were looked at as “unit characters,” so to speak: things with fixed characteristics, which might be wholly kept or wholly discarded in favor of public ownership or communism, and which were to be justified or condemned in toto. An evolutionary view,

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