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CLARK'S REFORMULATION OF THE CAPITAL CONCEPT
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(Incomes) when accruing separately throughout th Si the
valuation of those same services when discounted and su led up.
at an instant of time. Capitalization thus does involve a tome
parison of a financial fund (the single present worth) and a flow
(a series of future worths) of the very same things, namely,
valuations of services. Only through the common element, valua-
tion, do capital as a valuation fund and income as a valuation
flow become comparable.?
The text of Fairchild, Furniss and Buck, eminating from Yale,
starts in the old paths, formally defining capital as a third factor
of production, produced instruments of production. The tool, the
indirect agent, seems to be the typical capital in mind in the
historical survey, and the older definitions are repeated.” “Land,
labor and capital” are presented in the familiar roles of the three
factors of production.® But the first time that there is any real
occasion to use the capital concept, a simple footnote makes
kindling wood of these museum pieces and the reader is informed
that “In the present discussion we shall use the term capital
including land as well as man-made instruments. The term is
generally so used in discussions of investments.” * Thereafter
capital appears as a fund of value, an investment fund, expressed
in terms of dollars. Yet from time to time the discarded notion
of the difference between land and man-made capital instruments
is weakly reéchoed.® The treatment of interest and capital seems
pretty nearly in accord with that of Fisher.
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8. Other Representative Opinions
Professor Seligman, a colleague of Clark’s at Columbia, took °
an advanced position on the concept of value, as well as on the
* The thought is hardly to be avoided that some of the peculiar ideas
regarding savings and income to which Fisher has adhered so uniquely
despite criticism are traceable to this confusion of definitions. We refer
especially to his reiterated proposition that “savings are not income.” As
a financial fact, there can be no saving and addition to capital value until
there is first a property right to an income calculable in monetary terms
(a financial present worth) to be saved. Hence to deny that monetary
savings are monetary income is in simple common sense to deny a faut
accompli; it is to assume the existence of the effect before its cause.
* Elementary Economics (1926), Vol 1, p. 32 ff.
® Idem., p. 40.
“ Idem., Vol. 1, p. 355.
* Eg. Vol. 2, pp., 163 and 189.
® Principles of Economics (1905), see pp. 17, and ch. xiv, p. 204. on “The
Capitalization of Value.”