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

Collection:: Economics Books

52 ECONOMIC ESSAYS IN HONOR OF JOHN BATES CLARK except that prices, shares in distribution and the allotment of productive factors are not at their static levels, and then to focus attention on the processses by which the ensuing adjust- ments will be made as economic forces seek their levels. Car- ried out with vision and imagination, such a study would go a long way toward the development of dynamics. Dynamics, then, is not limited to the examination of the dis- crepancies between actual values and their static levels. Nor is its study of processes to be confined within the subject-matter of value and distribution as such; since these processes reach out into all aspects of life. To illustrate this, we might start with the narrowest possible problem that can be called dynamic: that of discrepancies between actual values and their static levels, and see how far this problem will carry us in the search for a solution. Why do prices seldom reach their supposed static level and never remain there? The answer involves the whole baffling prob- lem of the business cycle. Among the causes of this phenomenon are, apparently, original disturbances from outside the economic system proper; such as wars or climatic cycles affecting agricul- ture; but the character of the cycle is more directly determined by the processes through which the business system adjusts itself to these disturbing forces. Here it appears that there are not merely forces of the kind which may be described as self-limiting, but others of the cumulative sort, and that the self-limiting factors do not operate effectually until after the cumulative forces have driven things so far that a reaction is produced, which in turn goes so far as to produce another revulsion. The study of this process leads into the realms of the credit mechanism—or organism—markets and contracts, the interrelations of debtor and creditor interests, and of buyer and seller interests, technical factors governing the behavior of costs of production under con- ditions of varying output, forms of contracts governing the finan- cial incidence of these variations, the relative responsiveness of labor costs to such changes and, underlying this, all the elements of bargaining position, customary standards and other psycho- logical elements influencing the behavior of wages, and many other factors. In short, the problem reaches out into the fields of technical production, of human nature and of social institutions. We are carried, for instance, into a treatment of wage levels (and

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