Labor-cost to the laborer would take the form of labor-pain or labor-time. To the employer, it would take the form of outlay in wages. Adam Smith never makes any definite statement of point of view here, and shifts back and forth from one to the other. He recognizes variations in labor-pain, in danger, etc., in different kinds of labor when discussing wages.
Ricardo elaborated the labor theory of value, and tried to think it through. He was too keen a logician to shift view-points with Smith's facility, and he tried to make a completed system.[55] There is some shifting from the theory of labor as a cause of value to labor as a measure of value, as in the following passage: "If the state charges a seigniorage for coinage, the coined piece of money will generally exceed the value of the uncoined piece of metal by the whole seigniorage charged, because it will require a greater quantity of labour, or, which is the same thing, the value of the produce of a greater quantity of labour, to procure it." (Works, McCulloch ed., 213.) In general, however, Ricardo developed a causal theory of value, quantity of labor being the basis of the absolute values of goods, their relative values depending on the relative amounts of labor involved in the production of each. I shall not go into the matter fully, but shall call attention to the rock on which the system split, as Ricardo himself admits. A greater or less proportion of capital works with labor in producing different things, and the value of product, in that case, varies not merely with the labor, but also with the amount of capital, and the length of time the capital is employed. How say, then, that labor alone governs value? How reduce labor-cost and capital-cost to homogeneous terms? James Mill tried to do it for him by making capital merely stored up or petrified labor, which gives up its value again in production. But this doesn't meet the difficulty, because there is a surplus value, over and above that explained by all the labor, including the labor which produced the machine, and the labor which produced the raw materials which entered into the machine, etc. The case of wine is a particularly obstinate case. Wine increases in value merely with the passage of time, at a rate which corresponds to the profit on capital. Ricardo finally, in correspondence with McCulloch, definitely abandons the case, stating that there are many exceptions to the proportionality between exchange value and labor-cost. "I sometimes think that if I were to write the chapter on value again which is in my book, I should acknowledge that the relative value of commodities was regulated by two causes instead of one, namely, by the relative quantity of labor necessary to produce the commodities in question, and by the rate of profit for the time that the capital remained dormant." (Davenport, Value and Distribution, p. 41.) But this is a "dualistic" rather than a "monistic" explanation—one element is a money-expense, or at all events a pecuniary item, while the other is a "real cost" item. The two are incommensurate and incommensurable.
Senior seeks to supply the unifying principle. "Abstinence" and labor have pain as a common element, and so are commensurable. Costs, reduced to labor and abstinence, become homogeneous again. Monism is restored. Cairnes completes the doctrine by adding risk to the real cost elements: a triune cost concept, sacrifice being the generic fact in the three manifestations.
With John Stuart Mill, in general, we have an entrepreneur view-point. Money-expenses of production, entrepreneur outlay, plus wages of management, or including wages of management, are the factors with which Mill reckons. He is no longer concerned with psychological ultimates, or real costs. Cairnes criticised Mill sharply for this. No distinction is more fundamental he holds, than that between costs or sacrifice on the one hand, and rewards on the other. Labor, abstinence and risk are sacrifices; wages, interest, profits are rewards. None the less, in cost doctrine, as in supply and demand doctrine, it is Mill's view which has prevailed. Cost as conceived by Mill is a superficial, pecuniary notion. It tells little as to ultimate causation. But it is virtually only as a pecuniary doctrine, costs from the entrepreneur view-point, that the cost doctrine is met in modern theory.
Why is this? Well, first, the real-cost doctrine simply does not square with the facts. The hardest labor does not produce the most valuable goods. Value in fact does not vary either with labor-pain or labor-time. In fact, whatever the explanation, it would seem to be truer that the relation is an inverse relation. Nor does the abstinence that pinches hardest produce the largest amount of capital. And while there is some correlation between risks and profits, the correlation is at best low and is not a correlation between psychological sacrifice and profits. Even "marginal abstinence" for a Rothschild or a Rockefeller causes no pain. It is absurd to seek to find a common element in the "abstinence" of a rich man and the pain of a poor and aged laborer. I pass over the supposed difficulty that abstinence is, in general, suffered by one set of minds, and labor-pain by a different set of minds, and hence, since men cannot compare their own emotions with the emotions of other men, there is no comparability. This subjectivistic psychology would, of course, make it equally impossible to fund labor-pains of different laborers, or to get any common denominator at all.[56] It is enough to point out that differences between rich and poor, between successful and unsuccessful, between efficient and inefficient, (apart from acquired differences which may be smoothed out by the "stored up labor-of-training" principle) make labor-pain, and marginal labor-pain, vary greatly from value, and make labor-pain, abstinence and risk quite incommensurable, and quite without fixed relation to value. Cairnes saw this in part, and developed his doctrine of non-competing groups to deal with it. Labor-pain and value vary together only when we are comparing goods produced by laborers within a competing group. Laborers in one group do not compete with laborers in another group. There is perfect competition in the capital market, however, and so capital costs ("abstinence") are perfectly correlated with value, to the extent that capital enters. Cairnes seems to think that the whole difficulty with his real cost doctrine comes from the failure of competition. In fact, however, it comes also from the inequalities in wealth. And even in his highly competitive capital market it is equally true that abstinence, or even marginal abstinence (a term which Cairnes does not use) has no constant relation to amount of capital accumulated, value produced, or interest received. The cost theory breaks down at every point when it runs in labor-abstinence-risk terms. So generally has this been recognized, that the cost theory has generally given way to the utility theory, and cost doctrine when it appears in modern economics is either the very superficial money-outlay notion of Mill, or else the Austrian cost doctrine, later to be discussed, which is still a pecuniary concept. I have elsewhere undertaken to show (Social Value, chs. 3-7, and the ch. on "Marginal Utility," infra) that these defects of the "real-cost" theory, are just as much in evidence in the utility theory. The failure of the real cost theory of value is by no means a vindication of the utility theory. Both have the same vice—the effort to combine into a homogeneous sum a lot of individual psychological magnitudes measured in money, when the money-measure has a different psychological significance for each individual, and so comparison and addition are impossible. But in any case, the real cost doctrine of the Classical School has failed, and so cannot serve as the basis of the theory of the value of money.
Obviously the money-outlay cost theory of Mill cannot explain the value of money itself. The marginal cost of producing twenty-three and twenty-two hundredths grains of gold will always be a dollar, however the dollar may vary in value. Indeed, in general, the assumption of a constant value of the money-unit is implied in the monetary cost concept. Cost curves are supply-curves and the reasoning already given as to the need for assuming constant value for money in the supply and demand concept will apply here. Costs function in value-determination only by checking supply. Rising costs tend to mean a lessened supply. But if the cost-curve is rising because of a fall in the value of money, then the demand-curve will be rising also, and production will not be checked. The general law as to the relation of cost to demand and supply assumes a fixed value of the unit of cost, the dollar.
To the Austrian economists we owe a rational theory of costs which gives the money-outlay concept more than a merely empirical basis. First, they see in costs not causes, but results. Value causation comes ultimately, not from the side of supply, but from the side of demand. I shall not now undertake a criticism of their explanation of demand. I have elsewhere criticised their confusion of demand-curves and utility-curves, and pointed out that marginal utility gives no explanation of demand. I shall recur to the utility theory of value at a later point. For the present, it is enough to point out that the Austrian theory of costs is independent of their utility vagaries, and rests best on the notion of supply and demand, as expressed in the modern curves, with the assumption of a fixed value of the money-unit. Costs consists of entrepreneur money outlay of various kinds, chiefly wages, interest, and rent. Rent is, for the Austrians, as much a cost as any other item of entrepreneur outlay. But these items of cost are not ultimate data. They are rather reflections of the positive values of the products. Value runs from finished product to agents of production, labor, and instrumental goods, and land. Avoiding needless complications from a discussion of interest as a factor in cost—a doctrine on which the Austrians, say Wieser and Böhm-Bawerk, are not agreed,—it is enough to point out that high wages or high rents, which limit production in any given industry or establishment, are high because the land and labor in question have alternative uses, because other industries, or other competitors in the same industry, bid for them. Cost-curves, then, are reflections of demand-curves. The cost-curve of wheat, e. g., is what it is because of the demand-curve for corn, for cattle, and for every other commodity that could be produced with the same labor and land. Cost doctrine thus becomes part of the general doctrine of supply and demand, and runs in pecuniary terms, assuming money, and a fixed value of money, and hence is incapable of serving as a theory of the value of money itself.
That some vaguer form of cost doctrine, where the unit of cost is, not money, but some composite commodity of things used in the production of the standard money metal, or a unit of abstract value, might be worked out, is doubtless true. Gold production, like other industry, is part of the general economic scheme, and there is some sort of equilibrium reached which draws labor and capital now away from, and now back to, the gold mine. To bring this equilibrium into the general scheme of the modern theory of costs, however, in terms precise enough to make a satisfactory theory of the value of money, is a thing which has not so far been done, and I do not have high hopes of its early accomplishment. In any case, such a theory must rest upon a positive theory of value. Cost doctrine is negative, and can never be fundamental.[57]