4. Recent theories of value assign to labor a more hopeful position. A most optimistic theory of wages is "the residual claimant theory," presented by Francis A. Walker. His view was that the various shares of production, such as land-rent, the income from machinery, etc., and the enterpriser's profits, were fixed by forces independent of wages, and any increase in the product must therefore fall to the laborer as the residual claimant. This conclusion has the one merit of explaining somehow the rise in wages in the past century, but the fallacy of its method is too evident to call for exposure. Not to enter into the details of the method, it is enough to note that it involves the circular reasoning that land-rent is a surplus over cost of production, and is fixed regardless of wages, whereas the cost of production itself is made up of money wages.
Clark's wage theory
Another American economist, John B. Clark, is led by his theory of profits to a most hopeful conclusion as to the future of wages. Profits he considers to be essentially the reward for improvements in productive processes, which gradually accrue to the general benefit. As profits thus disappear, the average wage-earner is correspondingly uplifted, a conclusion quite as hopeful as that of Walker. In discussing profits above, dissent from the narrow conception of their source has been expressed.
Some facts lend support to every one of these theories of social progress, but other facts refuse to be harmonized. The temptation to get a simple, dogmatic explanation of value should be resisted. When the interrelation of the factors is recognized there is little likelihood of concluding that some one of them will absorb all the benefits of progress. One is not driven to the extreme either of optimism or of pessimism. While the theory of value is not in itself a theory of society, it greatly influences social conclusions. Clear economic analysis is a condition to sound thinking on practical questions.
§ III. INTERRELATION OF ECONOMIC AGENTS
Organic nature of the productive process
1. The industrial process is a unity and the different agents bear an organic relation to each other. The problem of value is not one of physical division; it is one of logical analysis, and this is not possible in isolation or without the competition of men. Production as now carried on is a social process; the determination of market price is a social process. The different agents are complementary goods, each necessary to the best use of the various other agents. The value of seed is not to be found apart from the use of the ground; or the value of the leather apart from the shoemaker or the thread he uses. When these things are brought together in society their value is found by the comparison and measurement of marginal utilities. Economic forces, like other classes of forces, act and react upon each other. Two bodies attract each other in space; two chemicals uniting are both transformed into a substance differing from either. The economic result of materials and men coöperating is something differing from either factor, yet dependent on both.
The conventional divisions of economics
2. The divisions of the older political economy are aspects of the general problem of value. The divisions conventional in the text-books on political economy, namely, "production, exchange, distribution, and consumption," have not been observed in the plan of this work. It has not seemed possible to accept the view that each of these phases of the vital economic process could be discussed completely apart from the others. Consumption must be studied at the beginning, as the basis of exchange value, and again at the end, when the circle of thought has returned to the use man makes of wealth; and it pervades the whole subject of value, for back of every price is the potential utility of the good. Exchange is coextensive with the whole process of associated industry; for wherever there is a price, there is exchange. Subjective value outside a market forms a small, though not negligible, part of the problem for the student of to-day. Production is implied in every exchange, as exchange is in all social production. They are, indeed, but different phases of the larger phenomenon, the economic process. Nor is distribution, considered in its impersonal or economic form, any other than the logical valuing of the shares of the factors in economic production. Impersonal distribution is coextensive with economic production. Whatever a good, logically considered, contributes to value in production, that is its share of the product. Personal distribution, it is true, brings in other great influences which have been partly considered, but which will be treated more fully in the division to follow, on the influence of the state in the distribution of income.