The Modern Distributive Process: Studies of Competition and Its Limits, of the Nature and Amount of Profits, and of the Determination of Wages, in the Industrial Society of to-Day (Classic Reprint) - Tapa blanda

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Excerpt from The Modern Distributive Process: Studies of Competition and Its Limits, of the Nature and Amount of Profits, and of the Determination of Wages, in the Industrial Society of to-Day

A systematic restatement of the facts and laws of the Distribution of Wealth is not attempted in these studies. Nothing is said in them, except incidentally, of interest and rent. They are studies of the process by which the income of modern society is divided among its principal claimants. There is presented to the student of to-day a more highly organized industrial system, and a more complicated process of apportioning the social income, than those that were observed by Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill. By the operations of trade the total product of industry is divided and subdivided among certain naturally constituted groups and sub-groups. The income falling to each sub-group is apportioned among its component economic classes, capitalists, laborers, etc., by the bargains that they make with each other. In each of these dividing acts, artificial combinations, - the pools, trusts, labor unions, etc., of recent times, - have come to play a part so prominent that competition would seem, at the first view, to be abolished at important points. The mode of its working has been, in fact, so changed as to demand a new scientific treatment.

It is the aim of these studies to analyze the natural group system of modern industry; to determine where within it competition is possible, and where combination is naturally invited; to ascertain the extent to which this movement checks individual rivalry; and to determine the nature and scope of that residual competition which is the controlling principle of the new regime. They thus undertake to separate that which is transient from that which is permanent in the Ricardian Theory of Distribution.

They analyze into its elements the sum traditionally termed profits, and show that an essential element, the only part of the gross sum to which the term pure profit can be applied, has not been clearly distinguished by the traditional analysis, and that, as a matter of course, the special laws that determine its amount have not been established.

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