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History of Economic Analysis part 49

History of Economic Analysis part 49. At the time of his death in 1950, Joseph Schumpeter-one of the major figures in economics during the first half of the 20th century-was working on his monumental History of Economic Analysis. A complete history of humankind's theoretical efforts to understand economic phenomena from ancient Greece to the present, this book is an important contribution to the history of ideas as well as to economics. | History of economic analysis 442 we must touch on another point not because it is worth our while in itself but because it has attracted attention beyond its deserts Thunen s famous formula for the natural wage. He must have thought a lot of it because he had it engraved upon his tombstone. For simplicity consider a one-year productive process the only expense of production being wages. Call the dollar value of the national net product p the total pay roll w so that total profits which Thunen like others identified with interest are p-w and the rate of profits interest is p-w Suppose that the wage receivers spend a fixed amount a per P - TV year investing the rest w-a at the current rate of interest W On - w - d p - w this investment they will evidently earn W 4z If this expression is to be a maximum we must have4 p and a being treated as constants diP-w- a div 1 tv2 from which follows Thunen s formula w2 ap or v - tip-This wage would maximize workers income from investment. The idea is not without interesting suggestions and might be used among other things in certain schemes of profit sharing. But of course this wage is not natural in the sense that the free-market mechanism tends to produce it. The formula does not embody Thunen s theory of wages. Nor is it an essential part of it. The wildly unrealistic assumptions should not however prompt us to declare the argument wrong. Under its assumptions it is quite right. John Rae 1796-1872 not to be confused with the other John Rae mentioned in this book the biographer of A. Smith a Scotsman whose intellectual refinement he had emerged from the Universities of Aberdeen and Edinburgh as a good classical scholar and mathematician 4 In order to have a maximum and not a minimum it is further necessary that the second derivative be negative. But this is all right since it equals a p and w being essentially positive. Review of the troops 443 and as a biologist and physician who was at least half trained and nervous .