The Wealth of Nations, as its title suggests, is essentially a book about economic development and the policies that can either promote or hinder it. In its practical aspects the book is an attack on the protectionist doctrines of the mercantilists and a brief for the merits of free trade. But in the course of attacking “false doctrines of political economy,” Smith essentially analyzed the workings of the private enterprise system as a governor of human activity. He observed that in a “commercial society” each individual is driven by self-interest and can exert only a negligible influence on prices. That is, each person takes prices as they come and is free only to vary the quantities bought and sold at the given prices. The sum of all individuals’ separate actions, however, is what ultimately determines prices. The “invisible hand” of competition, Smith implied, assures a social result that is independent of individual intentions and thus creates the possibility of an objective science of economic behaviour. Smith believed that he had found, in competitive markets, an instrument capable of converting “private vices” (such as selfishness) into “public virtues” (such as maximum production). But this is true only if the competitive system is embedded in an appropriate legal and institutional framework—an insight that Smith developed at length but that was largely overlooked by later generations. Even so, this is not the only value of the Wealth of Nations, and within Smith’s discussion of how nations became rich can be found a simple theory of value, a crude theory of distribution, and primitive theories of international trade and of money. Their imperfections notwithstanding, these theories became the building blocks of classical and modern economics. In fact, the book’s prolific nature strengthened its impact because so much was left for Smith’s followers to clarify.
David Ricardo, portrait by Thomas Phillips, 1821; in the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Courtesy of The National Portrait Gallery, London
One generation after the publication of Smith’s tome, David Ricardo wrote Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817). This book acted, in one sense, as a critical commentary on the Wealth of Nations. Yet in another sense, Ricardo’s work gave an entirely new twist to the developing science of political economy. Ricardo invented the concept of the economic model—a tightly knit logical apparatus consisting of a few strategic variables—that was capable of yielding, after some manipulation and the addition of a few empirically observable extras, results of enormous practical import. At the heart of the Ricardian system is the notion that economic growth must sooner or later be arrested because of the rising cost of cultivating food on a limited land area. An essential ingredient of this argument is the Malthusian principle—enunciated in Thomas Malthus’s Essay on Population (1798): according to Malthus, as the labour force increases, extra food to feed the extra mouths can be produced only by extending cultivation to less fertile soil or by applying capital and labour to land already under cultivation—with dwindling results because of the so-called law of diminishing returns. Although wages are held down, profits do not rise proportionately, because tenant farmers outbid each other for superior land. As land prices were increasing, Malthus concluded, the chief beneficiaries of economic progress were the landowners.
Since the root of the problem, according to Ricardo, was the declining yield (i.e., bushels of wheat) per unit of land, one obvious solution was to import cheap wheat from other countries. Eager to show that Britain would benefit from specializing in manufactured goods and exporting them in return for food, Ricardo hit upon the “law of comparative costs” as proof of his model of free trade. He assumed that within a given country labour and capital are free to move in search of the highest returns but that between countries they are not. Ricardo showed that the benefits of international trade are determined by a comparison of costs within each country rather than by a comparison of costs between countries. International trade will profit a country that specializes in the production of the goods it can produce relatively more efficiently (the same country would import everything else). For example, India might be able to produce everything more efficiently than England, but India might profit most by concentrating its resources on textiles, in which its efficiency is relatively greater than in other areas of Indian production, and by importing British capital goods. The beauty of the argument is that if all countries take full advantage of this territorial division of labour, total world output is certain to be physically larger than it will be if some or all countries try to become self-sufficient. Ricardo’s law, known as the doctrine of comparative advantage, became the fountainhead of 19th-century free trade doctrine.
The influence of Ricardo’s treatise was felt almost as soon as it was published, and for over half a century the Ricardian system dominated economic thinking in Britain. In 1848 John Stuart Mill’s restatement of Ricardo’s thought in his Principles of Political Economy brought it new authority for another generation. After 1870, however, most economists slowly turned away from Ricardo’s concerns and began to reexamine the foundations of the theory of value—that is, to explain why goods exchange at the prices that they do. As a result, many of the late 19th-century economists devoted their efforts to the problem of how resources are allocated under conditions of perfect competition.
Karl Marx, c. 1870.
From "Karl Marx's Oekonomische Lehren", by Karl Kautsky, 1887
Before proceeding, it is important to discuss the last of the classical economists, Karl Marx. The first volume of his work Das Kapital appeared in 1867; after his death the second and third volumes were published in 1885 and 1894, respectively. If Marx may be called “the last of the classical economists,” it is because to a large extent he founded his economics not in the real world but on the teachings of Smith and Ricardo. They had espoused a “labour theory of value,” which holds that products exchange roughly in proportion to the labour costs incurred in producing them. Marx worked out all the logical implications of this theory and added to it “the theory of surplus value,” which rests on the axiom that human labour alone creates all value and hence constitutes the sole source of profits.
To say that one is a Marxian economist is, in effect, to share the value judgment that it is socially undesirable for some people in the community to derive their income merely from the ownership of property. Since few professional economists in the 19th century accepted this ethical postulate and most were indeed inclined to find some social justification for the existence of private property and the income derived from it, Marxian economics failed to win resounding acceptance among professional economists. The Marxian approach, moreover, culminated in three generalizations about capitalism: the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the growing impoverishment of the working class, and the increasing severity of business cycles, with the first being the linchpin of all the others. However, Marx’s exposition of the “law of the declining rate of profit” is invalid—both practically and logically (even avid Marxists admit its logical flaws)—and with it all of Marx’s other predictions collapse. In addition, Marxian economics had little to say on the practical problems that are the bread and butter of economists in any society, such as the effect of taxes on specific commodities or that of a rise in the rate of interest on the level of total investment. Although Marx’s ideas launched social change around the world, the fact remains that Marx had relatively little effect on the development of economics as a social science.
The next major development in economic theory, the marginal revolution, stemmed essentially from the work of three men: English logician and economist Stanley Jevons, Austrian economist Carl Menger, and French-born economist Léon Walras. Their contribution to economic theory was the replacement of the labour theory of value with the “marginal utility theory of value.” The marginalists based their explanation of prices on the behaviour of consumers in choosing among increments of goods and services; that is, they examined the benefit (utility) that a consumer derives from buying an additional unit of something (a commodity or service) that he already possesses in some quantity. (See utility and value.) The idea of emphasizing the “marginal” (or last) unit proved in the long run to be more significant than the concept of utility alone, because utility measures only the amount of satisfaction derived from a particular economic activity, such as consumption. Indeed, it was the consistent application of marginalism that marked the true dividing line between classical theory and modern economics. The classical economists identified the major economic problem as predicting the effects of changes in the quantity of capital and labour on the rate of growth of national output. The marginal approach, however, focused on the conditions under which these factors tend to be allocated with optimal results among competing uses—optimal in the sense of maximizing consumers’ satisfaction.
Through the last three decades of the 19th century, economists of the Austrian, English, and French schools formulated their own interpretations of the marginal revolution. The Austrian school dwelt on the importance of utility as the determinant of value and dismissed classical economics as completely outmoded. Austrian economist Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk applied the new ideas to the determination of the rate of interest, an important development in capital theory.
The English school, led by Alfred Marshall, sought to reconcile their work with the doctrines of the classical writers. Marshall based his argument on the observation that the classical economists concentrated their efforts on the supply side in the market while the marginal utility theorists were concerned with the demand side. In suggesting that prices are determined by both supply and demand, Marshall famously used the paradigm of a pair of scissors, which cuts with both blades. Seeking to be practical, he applied his “partial equilibrium analysis” to particular markets and industries.
It was Léon Walras, though, living in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, who carried the marginalist approach furthest by describing the economic system in general mathematical terms. For each product, he said, there is a “demand function” that expresses the quantities of the product that consumers demand as dependent on its price, the prices of other related goods, the consumers’ incomes, and their tastes. For each product there is also a “supply function” that expresses the quantities producers will supply dependent on their costs of production, the prices of productive services, and the level of technical knowledge. In the market, for each product there is a point of “equilibrium”—analogous to the equilibrium of forces in classical mechanics—at which a single price will satisfy both consumers and producers. It is not difficult to analyze the conditions under which equilibrium is possible for a single product. But equilibrium in one market depends on what happens in other markets (a “market” in this sense being not a place or location but a complex array of transactions involving a single good). This is true of every market. And because there are literally millions of markets in a modern economy, “general equilibrium” involves the simultaneous determination of partial equilibria in all markets.
Walras’s efforts to describe the economy in this way led the Austrian American Joseph Schumpeter, a historian of economic thought, to call Walras’s work “the Magna Carta of economics.” While undeniably abstract, Walrasian economics still provides an analytical framework for incorporating all the elements of a complete theory of the economic system. It is not too much to say that nearly the whole of modern economics is Walrasian economics, and modern theories of money, employment, international trade, and economic growth can be seen as Walrasian general equilibrium theories in a highly simplified form.
The years between the publication of Marshall’s Principles of Economics (1890) and the stock market crash of 1929 may be described as years of reconciliation, consolidation, and refinement for the marginalists. The three schools of marginalist doctrines gradually coalesced into a single mainstream that became known as neoclassical economics. The theory of utility was reduced to an axiomatic system that could be applied to the analysis of consumer behaviour under almost any circumstance. The concept of marginalism in consumption led eventually to the idea of marginal productivity in production, and with it came a new theory of distribution in which wages, profits, interest, and rent were all shown to depend on the “marginal value product” of a factor. Marshall’s concept of “external economies and diseconomies” (any external effects, either positive or negative, that a firm or entity might have on people, places, or other markets) was developed by his leading pupil at the University of Cambridge, Arthur Pigou, into a far-reaching distinction between private costs and social costs, thus establishing the basis of welfare theory as a separate branch of economic inquiry. This era also saw a gradual development of monetary theory (which explains how the level of all prices is determined as distinct from the determination of individual prices), notably by Swedish economist Knut Wicksell. In the 1930s the growing harmony and unity of economics was rudely shattered, first by the simultaneous publication of American economist Edward Chamberlin’s Theory of Monopolistic Competition and British economist Joan Robinson’s Economics of Imperfect Competition in 1933, then by the appearance of British economist John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in 1936.
Before going on, it is necessary to take note of the rise and fall of the German historical school and the American institutionalist school, which leveled a steady barrage of critical attacks on the orthodox mainstream. The German historical economists, who had many different views, basically rejected the idea of an abstract economics with its supposedly universal laws: they urged the necessity of studying concrete facts in national contexts. While they gave impetus to the study of economic history, they failed to persuade their colleagues that their method was invariably superior.
The institutionalists are more difficult to categorize. Institutional economics, as the term is narrowly understood, refers to a movement in American economic thought associated with such names as Thorstein Veblen, Wesley C. Mitchell, and John R. Commons. These thinkers had little in common aside from their dissatisfaction with orthodox economics, its tendency to cut itself off from the other social sciences, its preoccupation with the automatic market mechanism, and its abstract theorizing. Moreover, they failed to develop a unified theoretical apparatus that would replace or supplement the orthodox theory. This may explain why the phrase institutional economics has become little more than a synonym for descriptive economics. Particularly in the United States, institutional economics was the dominant style of economic thought during the period between World Wars I and II. At the time there was an expectation that institutional economics would furnish a new interdisciplinary social science. Although there is no longer an institutionalist movement in economics, the spirit of the old institutionalism persists in such best-selling works as Canadian-born economist John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society (1969) and The New Industrial State (1967). In addition, there is the “new institutionalism” that links economic behaviour with societal concerns. This school is represented by such scholars as Oliver Williamson and Douglass North, who view institutions as conventions and norms that develop within a market economy to minimize the “transaction costs” of market activity.
It was through the innovations of the 1930s that the theory of monopolist, or imperfect, competition was integrated into neoclassical economics. Nineteenth-century economists had devoted their attention to two extreme types of market structure, either that of “pure monopoly” (in which a single seller controls the entire market for one product) or that of “pure competition” (meaning markets with many sellers, highly informed buyers, and a single, standard product). The theory of monopolistic competition recognized the range of market structures that lie between these extremes, including (1) markets having many sellers with “differentiated products,” employing brand names, guarantees, and special packaging that cause consumers to regard the product of each seller as unique, (2) “oligopoly” markets, dominated by a few large firms, and (3) “monopsony” markets, with many sellers but a single monopolistic buyer. The theory produced the powerful conclusion that competitive industries, in which each seller has a partial monopoly because of product differentiation, will tend to have an excessive number of firms, all charging a higher price than they would if the industry were perfectly competitive. Since product differentiation—and the associated phenomenon of advertising—seems to be characteristic of most industries in developed capitalist economies, the new theory was immediately hailed as injecting a healthy dose of realism into orthodox price theory. Unfortunately, its scope was limited, and it failed to provide a satisfactory explanation of price determination under conditions of oligopoly. This was a significant omission, because in advanced economies most manufacturing and even most service industries are dominated by a few large firms. The resulting gap at the centre of modern price theory shows that economists cannot fully explain the conditions under which multinational firms conduct their affairs.
