tailieunhanh - History of Economic Analysis part 58

History of Economic Analysis part 58. 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 532 analysis a clumsy tool an encumbrance rather than a help. But for the moment we are not concerned with this but with a third point. For reasons quite different from those that motivate the attitude of modern theorists economists of the period under survey were reluctant to accept the triad which accordingly conquered but slowly and incompletely a fact that considering the obviousness of the schema calls for explanation. Moreover examination of these reasons will teach us an interesting lesson about the ways of the human mind in our field. In Chapter 6 of the First Book of the Wealth of Nations decomposed the price of products into three components wages rent and profit. In Chapter 7 these prices are built up again from these same In itself this points strongly enough toward the triad of factors. But the pointer is completely lost in the argument of Chapter 6. There laborers landlords and capitalists are indeed introduced as participants in the process of distribution but their shares are not construed as returns from the productive employment of their factors if not wholly denied and even if occasionally recognized 9 this factor-value aspect of distributive shares is brushed aside in favor of quite another aspect. it will be remembered tries to show how the landlord s and the capitalist s shares are deducted from the total product that naturally is in its entirety the product of labor. And this seems to point toward a different conceptual arrangement which reserves the role of factor of production for labor alone and bars the outlook on the triad of factors in spite of the fact that s language on the first page of Chapter 7 is clearly suggestive of it. s exposition has been restated in the first place because it anticipates instructively the situation that prevailed in this corner of economic theory throughout the period. Whether under s influence or independently some economists