Essentials of Economic Theory: As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public PolicyClark, John Bates
General
Essentials of Economic Theory: As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy
Clark, John Bates
Economics
_Differences between Static Forms of Society at Different Dates._--A
highly dynamic condition, then, is one in which the economic organism
changes rapidly and yet, at any time in the course of its changes, is
relatively near to a certain static model. It is clear, therefore,
that it cannot, at different periods, conform even approximately to
one single model. If the forces of change which in 1800 were impelling
the industrial society of America to a forward movement had been
suppressed, and if competition had been ideally free and active, that
society would before long have settled into the shape then required by
the forces which, in the preceding chapters, we have described. Some
labor would have moved from certain occupations to others and gained
by the change; and this movement of labor would have ended by making
the productive power and the pay of a unit of this agent uniform in
all the different subgroups of the system. Capital would have so
apportioned itself as to level out inequalities in its earning power.
The profits of _entrepreneurs_ would have been equalized by becoming
in all cases _nil_, and the best available methods of production would
everywhere be found surviving and bestowing their entire fruits on
laborers and capitalists. All this is involved in saying that the
static model, the form of which was determined by the conditions of
1800, would have been realized. This would have been brought about by
suppressing at that date the forces which cause organic change and by
giving to competition a perfectly unobstructed field. If we had done
this in 1900, instead of at the earlier date, economic society would,
in a like way, have conformed to the shape required by the conditions
of 1900; and this would have been very different from the shape which
the static forces would have given to society a century earlier. There
is an ideal static shape for every period, and no two of these static
shapes are alike.
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