An Outline of the history of economic thought - Chapter 3 pdf

The Corn Laws In England, the thirty years from the passing of the Corn Laws 1816 totheir repeal 1846 can be defined, in terms of economic theory, as ‘the Age ofRicardo’.. It was at the b

3 From Ricardo to Mill

3.1 Ricardo and Malthus

3.1.1 Thirty years of crisis

The thirty-year period from the Congress of Vienna (1815) to the 1848revolutions was of crucial importance for the history of Europe It is known

as the ‘Age of Restoration’ In reality, it was a period of deep economic andsocial changes and sharp political crises; a period full of conflicts, marked as

it was by the attempt of the aristocratic powers to restore the traditionalabsolutist order just when the Industrial Revolution was definitivelyundermining the economic foundations of that order It is not surprisingthat, by comparison with the almost total peace in European internationalrelations, there were almost permanent civil wars in the countries affected bymost intense conflicts and social change

Despite this, the Holy Alliance managed to maintain internal order in allthe countries it dominated—practically all the nations of Central andEastern Europe, including Italy and Germany In some of these countries,political uprisings led by democratic forces occurred repeatedly and withincreasing intensity during the thirty-year period until the great revolution-ary upheaval in 1848, but they were always defeated The reason for this canperhaps be traced to the small mass base that the existing social structuresoffered the democratic movements; and underlying this situation wasundoubtedly the slow process of capitalist accumulation and the relativebackwardness of the economic structures of these countries

The evolution of the political conflict assumed special characteristics in thetwo most advanced European countries, France and England Their politicalsystems were based on three great parties: reactionary, liberal, and demo-cratic These obviously assumed different names, programmes, and politicalstructures in the two countries over time, but the tripartite structureremained constant throughout the period Well-defined social forcesunderpinning this structure gave the parties stability and political context.These forces can be identified in Smith’s three social classes: the landlords,the bourgeoisie, and the proletariat

In the first phase, c.1815–30, which was the Age of Restoration in the strictsense, power was firmly held by the reactionary forces in the two countries.Against these, an alliance of the other two political forces formed, Whigs andRadicals in England and Orleanists and Republicans in France This alliance

provided the mass base which led, in 1830, to the July Revolution in Franceand the Whig election victory in England The result of the two victories wasthe institution of two constitutional parliamentary regimes, albeit with verylimited electoral bases In France, the wealth requirements and the votingage were lowered so as to raise the number of electors to 240,000, just oneper cent of the population! In England, where a parliamentary system hadexisted for some time, there was an electoral reform in 1832, which eradic-ated the system of ‘rotten boroughs’ (in which the sparsely populatedcountry boroughs, controlled by the landowners, were much more highlyrepresented in parliament than the more populous town electoral dis-tricts, where a majority of bourgeoisie and industrial proletariat lived).Furthermore, the number of electors was raised from 500,000 to 813,000.After the reforms the ‘industrialists’ were satisfied, the landowners gave uptheir hegemony, and the proletariat had to start all over again The demo-cratic party became more radical in a socialist sense, and this gave the lib-erals one more reason to break away from the alliance In England, some ofthe Radicals joined with the trade union movement to form the Chartistparty, a political group that fought for the extension of political rights to theworkers as a condition for the attainment of some more advanced economicand social goals In France, a socialist movement formed that tended todifferentiate itself more and more clearly from the liberal forces and, as inEngland, tried to unite democratic political claims with social-emancipationobjectives which were incompatible with the economic structure of a capit-alist system.

The class struggle, far from weakening, became more bitter after 1830.Above all, there was a qualitative change, with the conflict between thelandowners and the ‘industrialists’ becoming less important than thatbetween the popular masses and the privileged classes The end result was the

1848 revolution, which in France turned into a proletarian blood-bath andthe definitive attainment of the bourgeois hegemony over the whole society

In England, where the workers’ movement was stronger and everybody hadexpected a proletarian revolution, 1848 ended in a farce, with the pre-sentation of a Chartist petition to Parliament In both countries, 1848 closed

an era of conflict and opened one of social peace

3.1.2 The Corn Laws

In England, the thirty years from the passing of the Corn Laws (1816) totheir repeal (1846) can be defined, in terms of economic theory, as ‘the Age ofRicardo’ It was at the beginning of this period that David Ricardo proposedhis own economic theory; and whether the economists of the period exalted,discussed, misrepresented, or criticized the Ricardian approach, it is a factthat all the English economic research of those years was involved with it.Needless to say, the controversies were bitter; in fact, they were at least as

91

from ricardo to mill

strong as the political implications of the theories in question and the violentclass conflicts to which they referred.

The first fundamental class conflict involved workers and capitalists In thenext chapter we will discuss the theoretical formulations to which it gave rise.Here we will focus on another great conflict that marked English society in theperiod of its industrialization: that involving the landowners and the capit-alists The conflict mainly manifested itself in the battles for the control ofParliament, the real object of the fight being whether England should remain

an agricultural economy or should instead accelerate the rhythm of itsindustrial growth The Napoleonic wars, by drastically reducing the imports

of food supplies, had provoked a substantial increase in the prices of cereals, inparticular corn; the prices of manufacturing goods, on the other hand, hadincreased less rapidly than agricultural products and wages In 1816, at theend of a long period of war, the landowners managed to convince Parliament

to approve the famous new Corn Laws; tariffs were fixed at such a high levelthat corn, the foreign prices of which were much lower than the internal ones,could not enter the country at all The economic implications of this operationare clear, and can be summarized as follows The protectionist barriersallowed the maintenance of high land rents to the detriment of profits, giventhe rigidity of real wages The opposition of the manufacturers was strong, notonly because of the redistribution effects of the protectionist barriers but alsobecause these prevented English industry from taking advantage of its higherlevel of productivity with respect to its European competitors

The battle lasted for about thirty years, but in the end the persuasive forceand pressure that the bourgeoisie managed to exercise at the political andcultural level led to the complete repeal of the Corn Laws The event, whichwas made possible by Ricardo’s decisive theoretical contribution, sanctionedthe definitive hegemony of the bourgeoisie in the English society

Ricardo’s principal opponent in this battle was Thomas Robert Malthus,who supported the landowners’ point of view in all the theoretical debates.The most important works of the two economists were published at aboutthe same time: Ricardo’s On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation

in 1817, Malthus’s Principles of Political Economy in 1820 In reality, theeconomic theories of Ricardo and Malthus developed together, intertwinedwith each other, having in common just enough of a methodological base toallow for dialogue, while finding themselves in conflict in regard to prac-tically every theoretical conclusion of any political importance For thisreason, the best way to understand the essentials of the two approaches is,perhaps, to study them together

3.1.3 The theory of rent

In 1815, at the climax of the debate on the Corn Laws, five pamphlets werepublished: two by Malthus, one by Edward West, one by Robert Torrens

and, finally, one by Ricardo The common ground these five papers had atthe analytical level, in spite of their theoretical and political differences, wasthe use of the theory of differential rent—a theory that seems to have beenformulated independently by the first three of these economists Ricardohimself had no hesitation in acknowledging Malthus as the founding father.However, we should not forget that the basic elements of the theory ofdifferential rent had already been proposed by James Anderson in 1777.

In order to understand the gist of Ricardo’s theoretical system, it is useful

to begin with an extremely simple model of an economy in which the cultural system only produces one good, let us say corn, by means of itself(seeds) and labour In fact, we are not doing much injury to Ricardo by usingsuch a simple model, as he himself implicitly used similar hypotheses in theabove-mentioned pamphlet

agri-The levels of net corn production, Ga, Gb, Gc, Gd, Gethat can be obtainedfrom five types of land, A, B, C, D, E, scaled in decreasing order of fertility,are shown in Fig 3 Let us assume that a fixed quantity of seeds and a fixedquantity of labour, say, one worker, are used on each acre of land If webegin from a situation in which only one kind of land, A, is cultivated, theproduction of corn net of seeds will be Ga Let us assume that it is necessary

to increase production If the cultivation is extended to land B, the netproduction will increase to Gaþ Gb, and if land C is also cultivated theproduction will be Gaþ Gbþ Gcand so forth A movement to the right alongthe horizontal axis implies an increase in production and an increase in theplots of land cultivated

Let us assume that on the least fertile of the cultivated plots there is norent; and that the real wage wris fixed If the plots of land of types A, B, C, D,and E are the only ones to be cultivated, the capitalist who works on the leastfertile plot, E, will produce an amount of corn (net of seeds) equal to Geandwill make profits equal to (Ge
wr) The other capitalists, working on themore fertile land, would obtain higher profits if they didn’t have to pay rent.For example, on land D the profits would be (Gd
wr)> (Ge
wr) On land Cthey would be greater than on D, and so forth In this case, however,competition will raise the demand for the more fertile plots; and this willallow the owners to extract higher rents; the more fertile the land, the higher therent In competitive equilibrium all the capitalists will earn the same profitrate since the product that can be obtained from intramarginal lands overand above that of the marginal land will be entirely swallowed up in rent InFig 3 the rents are represented by the shaded area, the total wages by thearea 0 wrwre, and the profits by the area wrp pwr This is the theory ofextensive differential rent.

The theory was criticized as it seemed to imply, against the evidence, that

no rent is paid on marginal lands Say criticized Ricardo in this way; Ricardofound it an easy task to defend himself, but did so only in a footnote in thesecond edition of the Principles, and in a rather too synthetic and obscureway, so that many economists continued to try to resolve the problem byusing the concept of ‘absolute rent’

In order to understand why differential rent is also paid on the marginalpieces of land, we only have to reinterpret it as ‘intensive rent’ In this case,Fig 3 should be read in the following way All the land available in a country

is cultivated For simplicity, let us assume that all the plots are equally fertile

In order to obtain increases in production, there must be further investment

of capital and labour on the already cultivated lands The histogram in Fig 3now represents the increments in production that can be obtained as theinvestment of capital and labour increases Let us assume that the capital:labour ratio is fixed Now the horizontal axis no longer measures the area ofthe cultivated land (all the available land being cultivated), but the level ofemployment A movement to the right along the horizontal axis no longerrepresents an extension of the cultivation given the labour : capital : landratios, but an intensification of the cultivation with increases in the labour:land and capital : land ratios It is assumed that, with the increase inproduction and employment, the productivity of the last employed workerwill fall Gais the productivity of the first worker, Gbthat of the second, and

so forth Therefore, the worker employed with the last investment unit,whose net productivity is Ge, will produce no rent Yet a rent will be paidwhich will be equal to the difference between the productivity of theintramarginal units and the productivity of the marginal one, as shown bythe shaded area This is the substance of the celebrated law of decreasingmarginal productivity of a variable input

3.1.4 Profits and wages

The reasoning with which Ricardo tried to demonstrate the necessity for theabolition of the Corn Laws is simple Given the limited amount of landsuitable for cultivation, if corn imports are impeded, this will force thenational economy to increase its production by intensifying investment inagriculture, thus increasing the rent share in the national income and dimin-ishing the profit share This slows capital accumulation, as most of thesavings necessary to finance investment come from profits In fact, the land-owners, who also earn very high incomes, do not save because the accu-mulation of wealth is not among their aspirations; on the other hand, theworkers, who earn subsistence wages, do not save because they have nothing

to save

Ricardo did not stop here With an excess of propagandist zeal, he eventried to extend this view to a very long-run horizon, formulating a law of thefalling rate of profit To do this, he simply assumed that technical progresswould not be able, in the long run, to overcome the economic consequences

of decreasing returns in agriculture He admitted that technical innovations,

by increasing the productivity of labour, could also induce increases inprofits He believed that such effects would only be temporary, however, asthe increases in profits themselves would stimulate further capital accumu-lation, thus increasing employment, and would therefore reactivate thecatastrophic effects of decreasing returns

The distributive problem was posed by Ricardo in terms of the decreasingfunction linking wages to profits Let us reconsider the equation of labourcommanded which we presented on p 71 above:

p

w¼ l þp

wkð1 þ rÞrecalling that l and k are the labour and capital coefficients, r the rate ofprofit, w/p¼ wrthe real wage, and p/w the labour commanded by corn Theequation now refers to the production obtained from the marginal unit ofinvestment As a consequence of an intensification in cultivation, the pro-ductivity of the labour utilized at the margins will decrease and pass from 1/l

to 1/l0, with l0> l The real wages will not change Assume that the capitalcoefficient will not change either We have:

95

from ricardo to mill

In this theory, the level of real wages is taken as known To account forthis, Ricardo, following Torrens, made use of the Malthusian populationprinciple At each given moment, the market wage, which depends on theforces of supply and demand for labour, can be higher or lower thanthe natural wage In the first case, however, the increase in the workers’welfare will stimulate the birth rate and reduce the death rate In the secondcase, the opposite will occur Thus the supply of labour tends automatically

to adjust to demand When the population and the demand for labour grow

at the same rate, wages are at their natural level, i.e the one that guaranteesthe workers, besides survival, the possibility of reproducing themselves at therhythm required by the accumulation of capital While making the necessaryallowances for the possibility of secular change in the workers’ ‘habits andcustoms’, Ricardo defined the natural wage as a subsistence income, andpractically treated it as if it were an exogenous constant

3.1.5 Profits and over-production

Let us return to the problem of the Corn Laws and consider Malthus’sposition Ricardo had no difficulty whatsoever in acknowledging theMalthusian paternity of a great part of the theories we have discussedabove, especially in regard to the determination of rent and wages Malthus,

in turn, had no difficulty in accepting Ricardo’s basic conclusions The maindifference concerned the political implications of those conclusions: whileRicardo feared a fall in the rate of profit, Malthus was afraid of a rise.Malthus’s argument, cut down to the bone, runs as follows Both workersand landowners spend almost all their incomes on buying consumer goods.Therefore, wages and rents are resolved completely into effective demand Onthe other hand, profits are almost entirely saved and invested If the profit shareincreases in relation to the wage share, then the incomes paid to the workers(the wages fund) is not able to provide a level of aggregate demand sufficient torealize the value of the goods produced by them According to Malthus, thiswould lead to a lack of aggregate demand, unless the rent share were suffi-ciently high to compensate for that lack; in such a case, the demand that doesnot come from the productive workers would come from the unproductiveones employed at the service of landowners The Corn Laws were welcome,therefore, if they served to redistribute incomes from profits to rents

Ricardo had little difficulty in identifying the error in Malthus’s reasoning

In Notes on Malthus he reasoned as follows: ‘I may employ 20 workmen tofurnish me food and necessaries for 25, and then these 25 to furnish me foodand necessaries for 30—these 30 again to provide for a greater number’(II 429) Thus, the surplus earned by the capitalists does not reduce the aggreg-ate demand, for the simple reason that the investments are also demand.Malthus, to rebut this criticism, would have had to argue that the profitssaved are not necessarily spent; in other words, he would have had to

question the validity of Say’s Law In fact, he came close to doing this in aletter written to Ricardo himself in 1814, where he stated that he did notbelieve that ‘the power to purchase necessarily involves a proportionate will

to purchase ’ A nation must certainly have the power of purchasing allthat it produces, but it is easy to conceive it not to have the will (in Ricardo,Works and Correspondence, vi 132) Unfortunately, Malthus did not knowhow to make use of this insight The only effect his letter had was to putRicardo on guard and make him realize the key role Say’s Law could play inrebutting his rival’s argument In fact, the reply he gave to Malthus’s letter isextremely clear and can be summarized as follows: if there is the purchasingpower, there will also be the desire to purchase; savings decisions are motiv-ated by the desire for accumulation, so that they generate effective demandjust as much as consumption decisions In other words, savings are invest-ment, the decisions to save are decisions to spend Today it is clear that this isnot an economic law but only an arbitrary assumption This assumption isthe foundation of Say’s Law The ‘law’, after it was accepted by Ricardo andadvanced again in his Principles, became almost a dogma for classical eco-nomic theory Even Malthus remained imprisoned by it In fact, in hisPrinciples he did not reach the point of doubting the validity of thatassumption, so that his arguments on the lack of effective demand, in theend, came off worse

In order to avoid any misunderstanding, however, it is necessary to addthat Ricardo’s belief in the impossibility of ‘general gluts’ did not imply thethesis of full employment Say’s Law, in the use made of it by the classicaleconomists, only implied equality between aggregate supply and demand ofreproducible goods This equality can occur at any employment level It statesthat all the produced and earned incomes are spent, but says nothing aboutthe level of income Ricardo, like all classical economists, was convinced that

in a competitive regime, not altered by State intervention (for example, bythe Poor Laws), there could be no permanent unemployment in the very longrun This was not due to Say’s Law, however, but rather to the Malthusianpopulation principle: in the long run the permanently unemployed would beunable to survive However, in the chapter ‘On Machinery’ added to thethird edition of the Principles, Ricardo admitted that technological progresscould force people out of work by replacing workers by machines, withoutthe rhythm of accumulation of fixed capital being able to reabsorb them inthe short run Note that this short run must only be considered as not longerthan the period necessary for the operation of the population principle: itcould well be as long as twenty years or so!

3.1.6 Discussions on value

The two economists found themselves in conflicting positions also in regard

to value Malthus accepted Smith’s theory of price as a sum of incomes

97

from ricardo to mill

and, together with it, the measure of value in labour commanded It seemed tohim that the notion of labour commanded could serve excellently todemonstrate the argument about the lack of effective demand In fact, theexistence of a profit implies that the labour commanded by the goods whichmake up the national product is higher than the labour commanded bythe wages fund utilized to produce them This does not mean, as we have seen,that aggregate demand is insufficient Malthus argued just this, however, and,

in doing so, slid from the concept of ‘natural price’ to that of ‘market price’ Heoften used the expression ‘necessary price’, apparently as a synonym of

‘natural price’ In reality, he was simply referring to the price necessary tostimulate a level of production equal to demand If the demand was too low,the price of the goods would not allow for the payment of the costs of pro-duction and normal profits In this way production would be discouraged

If Say’s Law is not assumed, this argument is applicable to all the goodsproduced Thus a lack in effective demand can trigger a deflationary processthat can affect both the quantities produced and the prices In this case,however, we are dealing with market prices, not natural prices Malthusshould have limited himself to studying phenomena of disequilibriumdynamics in order to demonstrate his arguments about general gluts In fact,his use of the concept of ‘labour commanded’ (which is a natural price) inrelation to demand phenomena did nothing but increase the confusion.Ricardo, who undertook all his own studies in terms of natural prices,found it easy to identify this confusion Moreover, while Malthus calculatedthe price of the goods by adding up wages, profits, and rents, Ricardomaintained that rents do not enter into the calculation of prices, as these aredetermined at the margin of the cultivated land and therefore do not includethe cost of the use of land

In any case, in regard to value, Ricardo had already chosen Smith as hisfavourite target Apart from the question whether rent is or is not an element

in the cost of production, Ricardo rejected the additive theory of price, as itconflicted with the explanation of profits as residual income We have alreadytouched on this problem in the previous chapter At this point, the theory ofprofit as a residue can be formulated and solved in a very simple way by thecorn model In such a case, problems of valuation of the goods do not arise,and the distribution of income can be determined in physical terms Toappreciate this it is only necessary to take the equation on p 95 and normalize

it with the price of corn With a few simple algebraic passages we obtain:

The existence of a decreasing function linking wages to profits is a mental element of Ricardo’s economic theory.

funda-Problems arose when this argument had to be demonstrated in ananalytical context in which wages are made up of different goods Thedifficulty took various forms in Ricardo’s analysis First, when wages increase,the prices of goods must change Smith believed that they would increase Inthis case, how is it possible to argue that profits would decrease? Second,when the prices of all the goods vary, it would seem that the value of the onechosen as a measure would also vary How is it possible to distinguishthe variations of the former from those of the latter? Ricardo believed that

he could overcome these difficulties by using a measure of value which isindependent from the distribution of income For this reason, he rejected themeasure in labour commanded, which is not independent In the first section

of the first chapter of the Principles he adopted, as a first approximation, ameasure in embodied labour, which is, in fact, independent from incomedistribution Actually, the labour embodied in the net product depends solely

on the techniques in use and does not change with changes in the way inwhich that product is distributed Unfortunately, however, the exchangevalues of the goods change with the distribution of income Therefore they

do not depend only on the labour embodied in them

Ricardo realized this problem and fought with it for all his life He arrived

at the solution when he admitted that values depend on the labour embodied

in the goods and on the time required to bring them to the market, or, rather,

on the different proportions in which the various goods are produced withlabour and means of production The solution consists in expressing that

‘time’ and those ‘proportions’ in terms of the time-structure of the labourinputs The simplest way to understand this is to consider two goods whichare produced only by labour; the techniques with which the goods are pro-duced differ with regard to the time in which labour is kept invested in theproduction processes p1and p2are the monetary prices of the two goods, l1and l2the two labour coefficients l1is invested for t1years, l2for t2 Now let

us assume the monetary wage, w, is paid in advance Then the two prices,expressed in labour commanded, are:

p1

w ¼ l1ð1 þ rÞt 1

p2

w ¼ l2ð1 þ rÞt 2The relative value of the two goods is:

p1

p2¼l1

l2ð1 þ rÞt 1
t 2

It depends on the labours embodied, l1/l2and the times of their investment,

t , t Note that the relative price is a ratio between the labours commanded

99

from ricardo to mill

This should have been the solution to Ricardo’s problem In fact, themeasure in labour commanded does not conflict with the conception of profit

as a residue, nor with the thesis of the existence of a decreasing functionlinking profits to wages

However, Ricardo did not manage to solve this problem satisfactorily,even though he glimpsed the solution The factor that prevented him fromtaking the decisive step was the notion of ‘absolute value’ This notiondefines a property of the goods which is intrinsic and independent of theirexchange relations—a property linked to their production conditions but not

to the way in which the goods themselves are distributed among the socialclasses This property of goods however, if it exists, cannot have anything to

do with value; yet Ricardo continued to search for the ‘real’ value in it And,even though he was aware of the difficulties involved with the notion of

‘absolute value’ he never abandoned it Rather, he attempted to get aroundthe problem by seeking an ‘invariable measure’ of value: a good that, beingproduced in ‘average’ conditions with respect to the whole system, wouldpossess the virtue, if taken as a numeraire, of making the value of the netproduct, and of the income shares of the various classes, coincide with thequantities of labour employed in their production If the value of net outputwere measured in terms of a good produced with a technique in which theratio between ‘immediate labour’ and ‘accumulated labour’ is equal to that

of the whole economic system, then the following phenomenon would occur:the increase in the prices of some goods would be compensated by the fall inprices of some others, in such a way that the value of the net product wouldnot change Ricardo knew that such a measure did not exist in nature, butpersisted in seeking a definition that would be acceptable at least theoretic-ally He was fooling himself: such a measure is a chimera—in the words ofCannan—or, according to Marx, a ‘squaring of the circle’

3.2 The Disintegration of Classical Political Economy

in the Age of Ricardo

3.2.1 The Ricardians, Ricardianism, and the classical tradition

As we have already mentioned, from 1815 to 1848 Ricardo dominatedEnglish economic thought This does not mean that a dominant Ricardianorthodoxy had formed, nor that the economists of the period were agreedabout the foundations of economic science On the contrary, it was a period

of ideological turbulence, lively debates, theoretical and political tions, and incurable conflicts The central position of Ricardo in this period,

opposi-at least in Greopposi-at Britain, was due only to the fact thopposi-at no economist couldignore his thought; or rather, that nobody was able to define his own posi-tion without referring to Ricardo’s, including those who accepted his

authority, those who rejected and criticized it, and, finally, those who tried touse it for ends that Ricardo himself would have repudiated.

If we are allowed to be schematic and synthetic, it is possible to group theEnglish economists of the period into three large groups: the Ricardians, theRicardian socialists, and the ‘anti-Ricardians’ We must immediately pointout that we are not dealing with three schools of thought, but only with threedifferent attitudes that unite economists of rather heterogeneous ideas Wewill discuss the third group in the next section, and the second in Chapter 4.The first group was composed of the true followers of Ricardo: economistswho, although not forming a school of thought, tried, however, each in hisown way, to propagate Ricardo’s ideas and to build a sort of scientificorthodoxy on them One was James Mill, a personal friend and a greatsupporter of Ricardo, who proposed his own version of the law of markets It

is also worth mentioning a textbook presentation of Ricardian economics byJohn Ramsay McCulloch, the methodological work of Thomas De Quincey,and an attempt at a mathematical formulation made by William Whewell.Here we must also mention Robert Torrens, an economist who disagreedwith Ricardo on various rather important questions, but whose theoreticalposition was not substantially different A major dispute concerned thetheory of value Torrens criticized the labour theory of value immediatelyafter the publication of Ricardo’s Principles; and his criticism played animportant role in adding to Ricardo’s theoretical uncertainty He insisted onthe uselessness of a theory of absolute value Value, he maintained, isbasically exchange value and depends on the costs of production; which arenothing more than the capital advanced to sustain production, including thatused to pay labour The values of the goods depend on capital, and aredetermined in such a way to allow the payment of a uniform rate of profit oncapital

Perhaps it is true, as some people argue, that Ricardianism only tuted an incident in the normal evolution of orthodox economic theory, anexception, a particular phenomenon, restricted historically to the first half ofthe nineteenth century and geographically to England Or perhaps it is true,

consti-as others maintain, that it represented a deviation, a new budding, from themain trunk of the development of economic ideas; a trunk whose roots goback to The Wealth of Nations or, rather, to one of the two basic components

of Smith’s thought, the theory of competitive equilibrium The branch fromwhich Ricardianism budded was impeded in its development as an ideology

of capitalist accumulation, but, instead, was later to blossom as socialisteconomic theory Perhaps both points of view are right; they are not, in fact,incompatible

There is, however, a third historical interpretation of Ricardianism thatdoes not seem acceptable to us; an interpretation which reduces it to a normalphase in the evolution of orthodox economics It does not seem reasonablebecause it tends to reduce Ricardo’s theory to the theory of rent, interpreted

101

from ricardo to mill

as a first application of the principle of decreasing marginal productivity offactors On the other hand, if this interpretation were correct, why did theEnglish forerunners of neoclassical economics, whom we shall discussshortly, have to attack Ricardo’s ideas in order to be able to assert their own?

It is easier to understand the matter if we cross the Channel to considerwhat was happening on the Continent There were important forerunners ofneoclassical theory also in France and Germany, but they did not need tobring about a revolution against the dominant economic thought in theirrespective countries to assert their own ideas In fact, the most important ofthese precursors, Cournot and Dupuit in France and von Thu¨nen and Gossen

in Germany, are not considered as being opponents of classical economics.The reason is that, in England, with Ricardo, the macroeconomic component

of the classical tradition prevailed, the one based on the theory of surplus,whereas in the rest of Europe, with Say, Soden, and Lotz, the microeconomiccomponent dominated, the one based on the theory of the individualisticcompetitive equilibrium Thus the Continental forerunners of neoclassicaltheory, in developing the empiricist, mechanistic, and individualisticpremisses of Smithian liberalism, were able basically to remain withinorthodoxy and tradition

These four great economists, however, were almost completely ignored

by their contemporaries The main reason for this was that they took theContinental classical tradition to its extreme logical conclusions and purified

it from its ‘classicity’, and therefore were not acknowledged by those whowere faithful supporters of the classical tradition In effect, these four

‘forerunners’ were working in the opposite direction from that attempted byRicardo; they tried to free the individualistic and microeconomic compon-ents of the Smithian approach from the theory of surplus, the equilibriumapproach from the theory of conflict; but they were ahead of their times Wewill discuss them in sections 3.2.3 and 3.2.4

3.2.2 The anti-Ricardian reaction

It was probably the socialist utilization of Ricardo’s theory of value anddistribution that induced many economists to reject it en bloc Theseeconomists formed a heterogeneous group, one which it has only been possible

to define in negative terms, as the ‘anti-Ricardian reaction’ However, theymade more original theoretical contributions than did the Ricardians—contributions that make them the precursors of the later neoclassical the-oretical system

In regard to value, the anti-Ricardian attack was initiated by SamuelBailey, who criticized the idea itself of ‘absolute value’ According to Bailey,

it is only possible to speak of ‘relative value’, a concept that does not denoteanything positive or intrinsic, but just the quantitative relationship betweentwo goods which are made objects of exchange Now, if it only consisted of

this, it would not have been a decisive criticism In the Ricardian theoreticalsystem absolute value, as well as the invariable measure of value, are notessential, and it is possible to dispose of them without losing any of thearguments that Ricardo considered particularly important in regard to thedistribution of income However, Bailey also hinted at another idea, one thatwas much more dangerous: that the value of a good is nothing more than thevaluation given to it by the economic agents, and that, as a consequence,

‘value’ only denotes an effect produced in the mind This meant that it wasnot absolute value in itself that created problems, but rather the theory thataimed at explaining value in objective terms, i.e in terms of the productionconditions of goods This path was followed by other critics of Ricardo.Nassau William Senior, for example, stated that value depends on theconditions both of supply and of demand He treated the former in terms ofthe limitation that supply places on the satisfaction of demand, while he linkedthe latter to the utility of the demanded goods Senior also came close to theidea of decreasing marginal utility when he declared: ‘not only are there limits

to the pleasure which commodities of any class can afford, but the pleasurediminishes in a rapidly increasing ratio long before those limits; twoarticles of the same kind will seldom afford twice the pleasure of one’ (p 11).The principle of decreasing marginal utility was in the air; all the anti-Ricardian economists were pondering it Longfield, whom we will discusslater, approached it with his analysis of the influence that the ‘intensity ofdemand’ can have on prices Richard Whately and William Forster Lloyd,the two successors to Senior in the chair of economics at Oxford, alsogot very close to it The former even proposed reducing economics to

‘catallactics’, the science of exchange The latter went so far along this paththat he should be given credit for having invented the principle of marginalutility In effect, the formulation of the principle Lloyd gave in A Lecture onthe Notion of Value (1834) was fairly clear and well defined; value depends on

‘a feeling of the mind, which shows itself always at the margin of separationbetween satisfied and unsatisfied wants’ (p 9), so that the demand for goodsdepends on the satisfaction they procure, and will vary in relation to thequantities the subject already holds

All these attempts to explain value in subjective terms were motivated bythe need to reject the labour theory of value The latter, in the hands of theRicardian Socialists, had become a fearful political instrument, in that itseemed to imply that labour is the only source of value and therefore, sinceprofit is a residue, it also seemed to demonstrate the exploitation of labour.Hidden behind the rejection of the objective theory of value was a rejection

of the residual theory of profit In fact, it was not that hidden Samuel Readwas explicit in the formulation of this anti-Ricardian research programme.Just as explicit was George Poulett Scrope in his condemnation of the labourtheory of value as the basis of the theory of exploitation Profit, according tohim, must be considered as a legitimate income, in that it is necessary to

103

from ricardo to mill

remunerate the capitalist for the period of time during which capital isemployed.

This was the road also taken by Senior: to try to explain profit as a mium for the sacrifice sustained in putting capital at the service of produc-tion Here is the famous theory of ‘abstinence’, mother of all the neoclassicaltheories of capital Senior began by postulating that labour and land are theonly original productive forces He also maintained that the utilization ofcapital increases the productivity of those primary factors But a sacrificemust be made in order to supply capital, and this represents a third pro-ductive requisite: abstinence, the postponement of pleasure caused by the act

pre-of saving Profit is its remuneration The rate pre-of profit will therefore depend

on the average period of capital anticipation

Here we have, in fact, two different explanations One is of a psychologicalnature, and treats the remuneration of capital as depending on the sacrificesustained in supplying it; the other, of a technological nature, makes theremuneration of capital depend on the contribution by investments tothe increase in the productive efficiency of the other factors Senior favouredthe first explanation The second was developed further by SamuelMountifort Longfield who suggested that the use of machines ease theoperations of the worker; so that profit, being the sum paid for the use of themachines, should be regulated by the efficiency with which the machines easeproductive activity, that is, by the efficiency of capital

Several decades had to pass before a clear distinction could be madebetween the psychological and the technological theory; it was only after themarginalist revolution that it was possible to integrate them into a unitaryview capable of explaining the supply of capital in psychological terms andthe demand in technological terms

3.2.3 Cournot and Dupuit

It was Say who carried the classical tradition forward in France As we havealready mentioned, he had freed himself both from the labour theory ofvalue and from the theory of labour commanded, theories that he replaced

by an explanation that relied heavily on the forces of demand and theinfluence of utility as the main determinants of prices

Augustin Cournot followed Say in his rejection of every theory of valueintended as a search for the causes of value He even rejected (and this is whatdifferentiates him from Say) a utility theory of value—a rejection motivatedabove all by the measurement difficulties connected with utility However, he

is linked to Say by the importance he attributed to demand in the tion of prices Cournot was the first scholar to be interested in the firm assuch, to study its behaviour in different market situations and to pose theproblem of the determination of the scale of production It is not surprising,therefore, that his great work received no attention for several decades

(which induced him to abandon economic research) In Recherches sur lesprincipes mathe´matiques de la the´orie des richesses (1838) he made the firstrigorous formulation of a demand function (which he called the loi du de´bit);

a function which he used to determine the price and quantity produced undermonopoly

It is the theory still found today in microeconomic textbooks The polist faces a demand function of the type D¼ f(p), where p is the price ofthe good By multiplying the demand by the price, the total revenue,

mono-R¼ pf(p) is obtained; and from this, differentiating with respect to price, themarginal revenue function, R0¼ f(p) þ pf0(p) Cournot proved that themonopolist’s profit, given by the difference between revenue and costs, is atits maximum when the marginal revenue is equal to the marginal cost

By introducing a second entrepreneur into the model, Cournot also laidthe foundations of the theory of duopoly, even if the results he obtained inthis case are less general than those obtained in his theory of monopoly Inorder to explain the behaviour of the two agents, Cournot constructed two

‘reaction curves’ The reaction curve of a duopolist shows the quantity heoffers in relation to each level of quantity offered by the other Assumingthat the market-demand curve is given, that each of the two agents, at eachprice level, takes the level of production of the competitor as given, and thatthe costs of production are zero, Cournot proved that there is a uniqueequilibrium point, at which the decisions of the duopolists are compatible.Cournot’s duopoly model is illustrated in Fig 4 The supply of duopolist

A, Sa, is shown on the horizontal axis, the supply of duopolist B, Sb, on the

Fig 4

105

from ricardo to mill

vertical axis QaQ0ais the reaction curve of the first duopolist, QbQ0bthat ofthe second If A offers the quantity H, B will offer K But then A will modifyhis own decisions and offer H0 B, however, corresponding to H0, will offer

K0 The process will go on until it reaches point C, towards which the processwill converge even if it begins from a point to its left This is a stableequilibrium, known today as the ‘Nash–Cournot equilibrium’

Two important observations should be made The first concerns whethersuch an equilibrium exists In general, the marginal costs curves of the duo-polists and the market-demand curve may be such that the reaction curves

do not meet in the positive quadrant or that they are parallel By assumingzero costs, Cournot avoided this inconvenience Under such a hypothesis, infact, the equilibrium conditions depend solely on the two marginal-revenuecurves; but these are equal, since the goods supplied are homogeneous; inthis case the two reaction curves are symmetrical and intersect in the positivequadrant The second observation concerns stability In equilibrium, theexpectations of each duopolist about the behaviour of the other are con-firmed This is so in the sense that, if A expects B to produce exactly K0and Bexpects A to produce exactly H0, Cournot’s equilibrium is that whichemerges from such a duopoly situation But if the firms have expectationsthat do not coincide with (H0K0) an adjustment process needs to be con-sidered The essential characteristic of the process of approaching the equi-librium point, according to Cournot, is as follows: each firm makes a series

of mistaken assumptions about the behaviour of the other, but the size ofthese errors gradually diminishes in intensity until a situation is reached inwhich the expectations of reciprocal behaviour become correct At this pointthe adjustment process stops This is the sense in which the Nash–Cournotequilibrium is stable

Another French forerunner of neoclassical theory is Jules Dupuit who, in

De l’utilite´ et de sa mesure (1844) and other papers published in journals,tackled precisely the problems avoided by Cournot He endeavoured tostudy the social benefits derived from public goods such as canals or bridges,and, above all, to evaluate the net social gains generated by variations in tollsand rates Dupuit was not perfectly aware of the problems he had raisedregarding the measurement of utility and the possibility of making inter-personal comparisons of utility; but his analytical contribution was never-theless remarkable He constructed a demand curve, interpreting it in terms

of utility Then he defined marginal utility and distinguished it from totalutility He assumed that the authority which supplies a good lowers thecharge for it as the quantity supplied increases, so that the marginal utility ofthe good falls together with its price The public benefit is measured by thesum of the intra-marginal utilities ‘Relative utility’, given by the differencebetween total utility and marginal utility multiplied by the quantity of thegood offered, will increase as the price decreases In this way Dupuit provedthat, if marginal utility is decreasing, the social benefit increases with the

increase in the quantity offered The reasoning is very similar to that whichWest, Malthus, and Ricardo had used to account for the increase in rentpayments in relation to the increases in agricultural production It is not bychance that, a few decades later, Marshall renamed ‘relative utility’ as

‘consumer rent’

Dupuit also conceptualized ‘producer surplus’, which, given an increasingcost curve, is the difference between the total revenue of the firm and theoverall marginal costs The total social benefit will be given by the sum of thetwo surpluses, that of the consumer and that of the producer It is to Dupuitthat we owe the invention of costs-benefits analysis

3.2.4 Gossen and Von Thu¨nen

Also in Germany in this period, economists were working on the problems ofvalue and utility We have already mentioned the tendency of Smith’s earlyGerman followers, such as Soden and Lotz, to distinguish between ‘positive’value, which is linked to the utility of goods, and ‘comparative’ value, which

is equivalent to Smith’s ‘exchange value’ There were basically two problemsthat two generations of German economists grappled with: how to determineexchange value on the grounds of ‘positive’ value, and how to explain theformation of the latter in purely subjective terms From the point of view ofthe history of ideas, the solution of the problem was impeded by theSmithian origin of the notion of ‘exchange value’ In fact, Smith maintainedthat this kind of value is a relationship between two quantities of goods, andtherefore that it is an objective variable

The solution was reached by Hermann Heinrich Gossen in 1854 InEntwicklung der Gesetze des menschlichen Verkehrs, und der daraus fliessendenRegeln fu¨r menschliches Handeln, Gossen argued that ‘absolute value’ doesnot exist, and that value depends on a relationship between a subject and anobject This relationship is based on utility Gossen worked on the presup-position that the goal of an economic agent is to obtain maximum pleasure

He also formulated two laws that still today form the basis of the neoclassicaltheory of consumer behaviour The first law establishes the principle ofdecreasing marginal utility: the pleasure obtained from a good decreases asthe amount consumed increases until, eventually, satiety is reached Thesecond law is more important In fact, it is a theorem derived from theassumption of maximizing behaviour and from the law of decreasing mar-ginal utility It states that the individual will choose to demand the variousgoods in such proportions that the satisfactions per unit of value they givehim are equal at the moment at which he stops consuming them; or, rather,that the individual will continue to exchange two goods until the values ofthe last units he possesses of them become equal

Even if his explanation was a little imprecise, it remains true that Gossenhad in mind what today is known as the theorem of equality of the weighted

107

from ricardo to mill

marginal utilities Gossen also attempted to extend this theory to the laboursupply by introducing the concept of ‘disutility’ Finally, it is worth men-tioning that Gossen was the first economist who used the metaphor ofRobinson Crusoe to explain the consumer’s rational behaviour, a metaphorwhich will successively play an important role in the neoclassical theoreticalsystem.

Another important forerunner of neoclassical theory was Johann Heinrichvon Thu¨en In the first part of Der Isolierte Staat (1826), he put forward atheory of the location of productive activities based on the implicit use of thenotion of ‘opportunity cost’ Besides this he developed the theory of differ-ential rent, proving that the level of production of a good, given demand, will

be determined in such a way as to make the price equal to the productioncost of the most disadvantaged firm The surplus earned by the producerswith lower costs is the rent

In the second part of Der Isolierte Staat (1850), von Thu¨nen extended thisreasoning to labour and capital, formulating for the first time a completetheory of distribution based on the marginal productivity of factors Heargued that an increase in the utilization of capital and labour increases boththe production and the costs, and that it will continue so long as the marginalproductivities of factors are higher than their prices

Von Thu¨nen considered capital as a homogeneous factor of production,consisting of the quantity of past labour employed in the production of themeans of production He measured it in ‘labour years’ He assumed that itsuse would raise the productivity of current labour, but at a decreasing rate

He calculated the returns of capital by differentiating a certain function atthe point at which the derivative vanishes This is the income function of theproducer of capital, whose income is determined, in this way, at its maximumlevel The result reached was notable at the analytical level, even though itstheoretical relevance was limited by the particular hypotheses and the specialform of the function with which von Thu¨nen worked

From those particular hypotheses, von Thu¨nen also derived a specialformula for the ‘natural’ wage, w*, namely, w*¼ ap, in which a representsthe subsistence level of consumption and p labour productivity He was sostrongly convinced of the importance of the formula that he wanted itinscribed on his tomb Apart from the strangeness of the formula, vonThu¨nen’s concept of ‘natural wage’ deserves to be remembered above all forits originality: wages do not depend on the supply and demand of labour, noronly on the subsistence needs of the workers; they are a geometrical average

of the needs and productivity of labour, and represent what must be paid tothe worker in order to leave him indifferent between the choice of remaining

a worker and that of becoming a capitalist-farmer (in the hypothesis thatsuch a possibility of choice exists and land is not scarce) Von Thu¨nen’snatural wage is a normative concept It is a ‘just’ wage in a precise sense: it iswhat allows the agricultural wage-earner to obtain the maximum returns

from his own savings (equal to w*
a) and, at the same time, what allows theindependent farmer to maximize the earnings of his own investments Inother words, according to von Thu¨nen, if the natural wage, w*, prevailed, theworker would be a wage-earner out of free choice and not because he wasforced to by need.

3.2.5 The Romantics and the German Historical School

The most ambitious attempt to criticize classical political economy did notcome from any of the pre-neoclassical ‘heretics’ but from the HistoricalSchool, which, by putting Smith, Richardo, Say and all their followers in thesame bag, criticized the idea itself that an autonomous economic science waspossible

In order to understand the sense of the historicist opposition to politicaleconomy, we must begin from its philosophical roots While classical eco-nomics had its origins in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, Germanhistoricism descended directly from early nineteenth-century Romanticism

It was especially in Germany that Romanticism had been accompanied by anirrationalist and organicist Weltanschauung In economics it grew togetherwith the first aristocratic and reactionary opposition to capitalist develop-ment; and with Fichte, Gentz, and Mu¨ller it opposed laissez-faire economicsand political liberalism, both for the political consequences they implied andfor the philosophical premisses from which they came The individualist andrationalist connotations of those premisses were thoroughly rejected On thecontrary, the members of this school exalted the ideas of the organic unity ofthe nation, of the superiority of collective over individual goals, and of thehistorical and geographical specificity of the institutions of each country.This theoretical position has left us the bare bones of an interesting ‘State’theory of money, which, if purified of the mystical elements that hampered it

in those times, turns out to be in certain respects more modern than manyclassical theories, especially in its recognition of the conventional andinstitutional nature of the means of exchange

Georg Friedrich List can be associated with this stream of thought,although he did not share its reactionary political attitudes and itsirrationalist philosophical premises In Das nationale System derpolitischen Oekonomie (1841), List accepted a great many of the analyticalpremisses of classical theory However, he rejected en bloc its free-tradeimplications, for which he substituted a strongly mercantilist point of viewand a theory of economic growth that gave great importance to thefunctional interdependence of industries and the need for uniform growth inthe agricultural and industrial sectors List not only did not reject capitalism,but tried to construct a theoretical system that, especially in its implicationsfor trade policy, was intended to be used to foster German capitalist growth.The famous infant–industry protection strategy was brought to Europe by

109

from ricardo to mill

List who, as a political exile in the United States, had been the secretary toHenry Clay, the true inventor of that strategy In common with theRomantics, List held the idea of the superiority of the nation’s interests overthose of individual citizens.

The major impact of Romantic philosophy in the field of economicsoccurred with the Historical School, a school that attempted to attackdirectly the epistemological foundations of political economy Though there

is certainly a connection between the German Historical School andRomanticism, there are many differences between them For example, unlikethe Romantic economists of the preceding generation, such as Gentz andMu¨ller, the members of the Historical School were not all politically con-servative In fact, some criticized political economy and liberal thought from

a left-wing standpoint

The origin of the German Historical School goes back to Grundriss zuVorlesungen u¨ber die Staatswirtschaft nach geschichtlicher Methode (Com-pendium of Lectures on Public Economics according to the Historical Method)(1843) by Wilhelm Roscher The other two founders of the school, BrunoHildebrand and Karl Knies, pushed the criticism of classical political eco-nomy much further forward than Roscher had dared to do These threeauthors are the main exponents of the so-called ‘Old Historical School’ Thisexpression distinguishes them from the historicists of the following genera-tion, who formed the ‘Young Historical School’; its principal exponent wasGustav Schmoller, of whom we will speak in the next chapter Here wepresent the fundamental arguments of the historical school, without dwelling

on differences of opinion among individual members (which were, however,quite marked)

The basic historicist criticism of political economy touched upon itsattempt to establish universal economic laws With specific reference to theSmithian approach, the historicists denied that economic laws had the sameproperties as ‘natural laws’ They did not deny the possibility of discoveringcertain economic regularities, and they also admitted that such regularitiescould be called ‘laws’; but they did not believe that these were universallyvalid, nor that they were independent of the historical and geographicalconditions in which they operated

The historicists were more interested in what they called ‘laws of opment’, that is, the regularities followed by the historical evolution ofpeoples and nations; but here, too, they avoided constructing universal laws.Above all, they denied the possibility of discovering economic laws bydeduction Only the inductive method was allowed: the laws of developmenthad to be constructed by induction and analogy on the basis of the greatestpossible quantity of empirical and historical data It is clear that this type ofcriticism impinged not only on the theoretical tenets of Smith and Ricardo,but more generally on the simple idea that economics is a science of the sametype as the natural sciences and therefore, as was to emerge later in the