The Value of MoneyAnderson, Benjamin M. (Benjamin McAlester)
General
The Value of Money
Anderson, Benjamin M. (Benjamin McAlester)
Money
exists in the dollar in each case, but the response is very
different in the two cases.
Later formulations of the utility theory and the labor cost
theory, as represented by the theory of Schumpeter, which we
shall discuss in the chapter on "Marginal Utility," give us, in
a scheme of purely static equilibrium, a picture of the
adjustment of the individual values to the social values. As we
shall see, they give us no account whatever of the social
values. They do not explain causation at all. But they do show
that there is a tendency for the individual marginal utilities
of consumption to become proportional to the social values of
the goods consumed by each individual; and for the individual
marginal disutilities in production to become proportional to
the social values of the rewards that come to producers. The
scheme is highly unrealistic. It has been emphatically
repudiated by Boehm-Bawerk, so far as the disutility equilibrium
is concerned. ("Ultimate Standard of Value," _Annals of the
American Academy_, Vol. V, pp. 149-209.) But it is worth
something, not as explaining social values or market prices,
but rather, as showing how individuals _conform_ to social
values and market prices. _Cf. Social Value_, pp. 43-44, n. 2,
and 148.
The theory that individual marginal utilities and disutilities
are proportional to market values is unrealistic enough, in the
light of the analysis of individual utilities which we have
given, even for the utilities. It is quite impossible to make
anything of importance of it from the side of individual
disutilities. The length of the working day is not fixed for
each worker by a comparison of his own labor pain with the
satisfactions he expects from his wages. It is fixed by
conditions largely external to him, and the whole group works
the same number of hours, with the machine. The law may limit
the working day. Trades-union effort may do it. Opportunities
for alternative employment may do it, for the labor force of a
factory as a whole. But the theory, which really must rest in
the notion that each individual has many options, and that the
working period is flexible, cannot mean much. The prosperity of
the laborer does more to limit the working day than does his
suffering!
The reactions of individuals as consumers or producers on the
social values modify the social values. But, as we have shown,
the primary explanation of the social values is not to be found
in the individual utilities and disutilities of those who react
to them. Utilities and labor pains are parts, but minor parts,
in the explanation of social values.
CHAPTER II
SUPPLY AND DEMAND, AND THE VALUE OF MONEY
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