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Wealth and Want | |||||||
... because democracy alone is not enough to produce widely shared prosperity. | |||||||
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All Things Bright and Beautiful - the verse we don't sing:
Economists will recognize his
analysis as a precursor to the
modern marginal productivity theory of functional distribution. His
story is framed in the language of what is today called classical
political economy, though George was careful to avoid inconsistencies
of definition and reasoning which, he showed, had led other
economists astray.
A central feature of the British classical school was the classification of productive resources into three "factors of production" - labor, land, and capital. Most classical economists had conceived of these in terms of three great social classes (the workers, the landed aristocracy, and the capitalists). George, on the other hand, identified them as functional categories, distinguished by the conditions under which the factors are made available for production. In a competitive economy, the
earnings of the factors of
production measure their separate contributions to the value of the
product. Payments for the use of labor are called wages; payments for
land are called rent; the income of capital is interest. In George's
terms, the distress of the working classes had to do with a
persistently low level of real wages. "Why," he asked, "in spite of
increase in productive power, do wages tend to a minimum which will
give but a bare living?" Read the whole article
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Wealth
and Want
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www.wealthandwant.com
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... because democracy
alone hasn't yet led to a society in which all can
prosper
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