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.