The Distribution of Wealth: A Theory of Wages, Interest and Profits |
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actual AECD amount of capital apportion capi capital-goods capitalists cause circulating capital commodity competition concrete condition consumption cost create dollars ductive dynamic earnings economic effect element embody employers entire entirety entrepreneurs equal existence fact final increment final productivity final unit final utility fixed capital fraction fund gain grade groups and sub-groups income incre increase increment of capital increment of labor industry influence instruments of production justment kind labor and capital land last unit law of final law of rent law of value less marginal measured ment move movements natural no-rent nomic normal owner permanent product of labor productive power profit quantity rate of wages reduce rent social capital social labor society static adjustment static law static standards sumers supply things tion true capital unit of capital unit of labor wages and interest wealth whole workers
Popular passages
Page 3 - He proposes to prove the general thesis, that, "where natural laws have their way, the share of income that attaches to any productive function is gauged by the actual product of it. In other words, free competition tends to give to labor what labor creates, to capitalists what capital creates, and to entrepreneurs what the coordinating function creates.
Page 117 - The capital of the world is, as it were, one great tool in the hand of working humanity — the armature with which humanity subdues and transforms the resisting elements of nature.
Page v - IT is the purpose of this work to show that the distribution of the income of society Is controlled by a natural law, and that this law, if it worked without friction, would give to every agent of production the amount of wealth which that agent creates.
Page viii - It was the claim advanced by Mr. Henry George, that wages are fixed by the product which a man can create by tilling rentless land, that first led me to seek a method by which the product of labor everywhere may be disentangled from the product of cooperating agents and separately identified...
Page 335 - ... original and indestructible" properties of the soil. This usage probably would never have grown up if the science of political economy had originated in America, where land has always been a commercial article, and where the man who buys a piece of it reckons whether he can get as good interest on his investment in that form as he can in any other. It is true that the return on land and the return from capital can be stated, either of them, as a percent or as a lump sum.
Page 120 - We may think of capital as a sum of productive wealth, invested in material things which are perpetually shifting — which come and go continually — although the fund abides. Capital thus lives, as it were, by transmigration, taking itself out of one set of bodies and putting itself into another, again and again.29 Thus, permanent capital "transmigrates" from one material embodiment to another as financial resources are withdrawn from one use and invested in another.
Page 4 - The welfare of the laboring classes depends on whether they get much or little; but their attitude toward other classes, — and, therefore, the stability of the social state — depends chiefly on the question whether the amount that they get, be it large or small, is what they produce. If they create a small amount of wealth and get the whole of it, they may not seek to revolutionize society; but if it were to appear that they produce an ample amount and get only a part of it, many of them would...
Page 96 - ... wages. There are machines that have outlived their usefulness to their owners, but still do their work, and give the entire product that they help to create to the men who operate them. There are railroads and steamship lines that pay operating expenses only. There are stocks of merchandise so full of remnants and unstylish goods that it barely pays salesmen to handle them. Everywhere, in infinite variety and extent, are no-rent instruments ; and if labor uses them, it gets the entire product...
Page 403 - Thus, an invention makes it possible to produce something more cheaply. It first gives a profit to entrepreneurs and then, in the way that we have described, adds something to wages and interest.
Page 29 - We saw that what are called natural standards of values, and natural or normal rates of wages, interest, and profits, are, in reality, static rates. They are identical with those which would be realized if a society were perfectly organized, but were free from the disturbances that progress causes. Far more than classical economists were aware of is involved in a thorough-going study of what they called natural values. Reduce society to a stationary state...