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Focuses on the development of the theory of money from Adam Smith to David Ricardo. Principles of political economy; Contents of 'Wealth of Nation'; Theories of monetary circulation.

This article presents a discussion on the research paper "What Was the Labor Theory of Value?" by Donald F. Gordon, a professor at the University of Washington, published in the May 1959 issue of the journal "American Economic Review." Recent investigators into the origins and development of the labor theory of value find themselves arriving at rather unique conclusions. Usually contemporary historians of economic doctrine are provided with abundant opportunities to disagree with one another over the interpretation of what any one economist or group of economists really was saying about a given subject. In the case of the labor theory of value, however, recent commentators are surprisingly unanimous. They agree that neither economist Adam Smith nor David Ricardo nor even Karl Marx held a labor theory of value. According to Gordon most post-Ricardian economists did not believe Ricardo claimed that commodities exchange at ratios which are dependent upon the quantities of labor involved in their production, which itself makes the association of Ricardo's name with the labor theory of value, a bit apocryphal.

This paper will discuss some international aspects of the problem of economic development. It will take up only a few points and cannot even attempt to give anything like a balanced picture. The inducement to invest is limited by the size of the market. That is essentially what economy Allyn Young brought out in his reinterpretation of economist Adam Smith's famous thesis. What determines the size of the market? Not simply money demand, nor mere numbers of people, nor physical area. Transport facilities, which Adam Smith singled out for special emphasis, are important, reductions in transport costs do enlarge the market in the economic as well as the geographical sense. But reductions in any cost of production tend to have that effect. So the size of the market is determined by the general level of productivity. Capacity to buy means capacity to produce. In its turn, the level of productivity depends not entirely by any means, but largely on the use of capital in production. But the use of capital is inhibited, to start with, by the small size of the market.

The article analyzes a letter from economist Adam Smith to William Fitzmaurice, Earl of Shelburne. The author mentions that in 1782, Smith expressed opposition to Shelburne's assumption of the premier cabinet post. He comments that in such reactions, Smith seems somewhat naive and unappreciative of the extent to which Shelburne was attempting to give practical effect to principles taught by Smith. But, in conclusion he says that the letter tends to confirm other evidences that Smith and Shelburne, whose views and influences were so alike on so many matters, had personal contacts which were warm though not numerous.

Let us begin with a brief review of the main documents which Scott had before him when he wrote his monumental Adam Smith as Student and Professor,[1] and the main assumptions which he made concerning their dates. First, there were "four documents, amounting to fifteen folio pages" which Scott discovered "amongst letters kept by Adam Smith.''[2] One of these documents, as Scott himself indicated, is very probably not by Smith, but a copy of a paper on prices which he had received from Lord Hailes.[3] A second, on moral philosophy, has recently been edited by Professor Raphael, who has quite properly questioned Scott's judgment as to date of composition, while indicating that it was probably written before the first edition of the Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759.[4] The two remaining documents--the really relevant ones so far as the present article is concerned--deal more or less exclusively with the division of labour, and were thought by [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section presents abstracts of articles on economics and other related topics published in the May 1965 issue of the journal Economica. The article Adam Smith on the Division of Labour: Two Views or One?, by Nathan Rosenberg attempts to demonstrate that Smith's handling of the consequences of a growing division of labor was in fact substantially free of the contradictions which have often been attributed to it. But more important, it attempts to show that there is embedded in Smiths' writing a fairly sophisticated and hitherto unnoticed analysis of the determinants of inventive activity. Inventive activity is itself envisaged by Smith as a specialised activity within the framework of a larger social division of labor. Moreover, the paper titled A Dissenting View of Duopoly and Spatial Competition, by Nicos E. Devletoglou develops an operational mechanism capable of questioning the significance of the celebrated Hotelling thesis on spatial competition under conditions of duopoly. Furthermore, the article Size of Farm and Productivity: A Problem of Indian Peasant Agriculture, by Dipak Mazumdar presents a cross-section analysis of data in the recent farm management surveys in India. The data shows that as the size of the farm decreases the amount of input per acre increases, as does the output per acre. An examination of the data shows that this result is mainly due to the application of more labour per unit of land as the size of the farm becomes smaller. The analysis yields the conclusion that the marginal product of labour in Indian agriculture is positive but less than the going wage-rate. The policy implications of the observation that smaller farms are in some sense more efficient are also interesting.

Presents a series of abstracts on various topics of economics published in the February 1964 issue of the periodical 'Economica.' Opinion of economist Roy Harrod on the growth of British economy; Problems faced by planners in planned economies in making choices regarding foreign trade; Analysis of views of economist Adam Smith on the division of labor; Impact of the increase in a single money price on aggregate expenditure.

Since the days of economist Adam Smith, economic theorists have treated collective goods, goods whose benefits can be enjoyed concurrently by everyone, as if their production were the unavoidable responsibility of the public sector. This treatment of collective goods has permitted increasingly complete theoretical demonstrations of the efficiency of perfect competition in the private sector. It is of both theoretical and practical interest to examine the efficiency of a competitive, free enterprise economy which produces and sells both private goods and collective goods. This paper concentrates on perfect markets. In particular, it assumes throughout the formal analysis that there is perfect knowledge of all market-relevant information and perfect exclusion. Perfect exclusion exists when any possessor of a collective good can demand a fee from each individual on the basis of a freely enforceable threat to exclude that individual from receiving the benefit of, or using, the collective good.

The article focuses on the use of various publications by physiocrats in the eighteenth century to spread their beliefs and doctrines related to economics. In the eighteenth century, the physiocrats faced the problem of finding an appropriate media of expression. The books which the physiocrats wrote had a limited number of readers. Desiring wider public attention, the physiocrats found acceptance among the readers of an already well established periodical, that is, "Le Journal économique." As economist François Quesnay's group of devoted disciples grew in number and strength, the Journal became alarmed by the program of Quesnay's economic school. In 1763, "La Gazette du commerce," a biweekly newspaper, was launched. The physiocrats took advantage of this opportunity to promote their beliefs alongside opposing views and succeeded in making an impression. The year 1776 marked the physiocrats' official exit as a school of economic thought. That year also marked the beginning of the classical school of economic thought with the publication of Adam Smith's book "An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations."

The article reports on the study of consumer demand in the field of marketing. The author focuses on aspects of consumer behavior that affect many aspects of the production, distribution, and other aspects of industrial development. It is suggested that businessmen need information about demand to make decision relating to product quality and production rate. Statistical, economical, and psychological approaches to the study of consumption are discussed in detail. Economist Adam Smith's theory of consumption is also examined.

The article discusses importance of the recovery of the proper use of the word individuality and individualism for the sane study of the political and social theories, because no other substitute for this word can be found. The word is used in the sense if representing the unique aspect or form of personality, and this appears to be its rightful meaning. It is used also as expressing the nature or conduct of those who in society act singularly, even anti-socially. It is used more frequently as if individualism, as a state of being and selfishness are synonymous terms. Individualism is spoken of as the term to express the doctrine first formulated by economist Adam Smith. Individualism is this view as is the laissez-faire one which is with it. The view on social individualism has never been enunciated, even with the incomplete dearness of the functional view, but it obviously relies on a co-operative alliance of the complemental differences of individuality in citizens and in a non-competitive individual initiative rather than on state initiative and control, or on a competitive basis, as in functionalism.

The article comments on social exchange theory. Economist Adam Smith's most direct role in the development of modern exchange theory was, in all probability, through the influence of his work on economists. This article attempts to establish the historical precedence of Smith's exchange theory and to explore its value in theoretical development. This article will also compare modern theory with an in-depth treatment of Smith's ideas and speculate about the current value of his work and reasons why it has been relatively neglected. Smith's work is quoted extensively to permit the reader to judge the validity of the author's interpretations. Like many social-psychological models, exchange theory treats the processes through which social systems socialize their participants, maintain participant involvement in the system to permit stable patterns of social interaction, and carry on transactions with their environment. Focusing on these three processes facilitates a comparison of Smith's work with that of modern scholars. Both Smith and contemporary theorists emphasize the importance of social approval in the socialization process. Modern exchange theorists assume that people value and work for social approval and conversely dislike and attempt to avoid social disapproval.

This article focuses on the labor theory of value. By the modern meaning of the phrase "theory of value," the labor theory of value is presumably the proposition that commodities exchange at ratios that are reciprocals of the quantities of labor involved in their production, including, of course, that involved in the creation of capital. Economist Adam Smith presents provided a classical account of how, in a competitive market, the prices of commodities, through shifts in the allocation of factors, approach equality with their money costs of production, where the latter are estimated by the quantities of the three traditional factors remunerated at their natural or usual rates. However, another economist David Ricardo, did not subscribe to this proposition. Like Smith, he accepted the theorem on the long-run equality of price and cost. For all nonagricultural commodities, in which land is presumed not to enter, long-run average and marginal costs are presumed to be constant, but among these the proportions of capital to labor vary considerably. Thus fluctuations in the rates of wages and profits will cause fluctuations in the relative prices of these commodities, unconnected with any changes in their relative labor contents.

This article considers the institutional factors in economic thinking. To Thorstein Veblen, what economists believed and had to say about the operation of economic forces in a price system was essentially a logical formulation of the preconceptions and observations of those whose daily lives were subjected to the impact of the system. The problems economists think about and the way they think about them are determined by the institutional matrix in which they find themselves. Around this idea, economist Wesley Clair Mitchell built his course in the development of economic thought from Adam Smith to John R. Commons. Smith formulated principles governing the determination of prices, the economic allocation of resources, the distribution of income, the geographic division of labor, and economic progress, and in doing so he laid the basis for late-nineteenth-century neoclassicism. Smith, in defending economic individualism as a means of promoting the national welfare, conceived of the national income as the aggregate of individual incomes .But economic individualism, the philosophical product of individualistic capitalism, had no sooner conquered men's minds than the great transformation was ushering in the next sequence in the inexorable flow of institutions and ideas.

Most modern authors define profit as the income of the firm as such or as the price paid for performing the function of enterprise. This has not always been the case, however, Adam Smith, the founder of the classical school, so little a classicist himself shows profit as the income of the capitalist entrepreneur, that is, as the income of the individual owner of a capital sum who uses this capital to hire workers, buy machines and manufacture products which he sells on a market. But after Smith have come a whole series of authors, who have in one way or another, with all the resources of excessively atomistic analysis, dismembered Smith's basic idea. In profit, as Smith defined it, they treat as separate elements the interest which remunerates the capital provided by the entrepreneur himself and the wage which pays for his labor of direction and coordination of the factors of production. In the income of the entrepreneur, designated as gross profit, they isolate, after eliminating the interest on the entrepreneur's own capital and a wage for his labor of direction, a net profit which seems to them to be pure profit and which they then proceed to try to explain.

In the development of political economy, alike as an academic discipline and as an art of government, there has been evinced from time to time a disposition to treat the range of problems concerned with what may be broadly termed raw material supply as distinctive. Indeed, from the middle of the eighteenth up to the middle of the nineteenth century, it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that problems of raw material supply were generally regarded by economists as not only peculiar but crucial. Thus, physiocrats accounted raw-materials producing industries the unique source of the social net product. While economist Adam Smith disputed the contention that agriculture and mining were the sole source of the Wealth of Nations, even he was willing to allow that "the labor of is certainly more productive than that of merchants, artificers, and manufacturers." And he added that "of all ways in which capital can be employed, it is by far the most advantageous to the society." After the middle of the nineteenth century, however, economics no less than economic statesmanship became increasingly concerned with the role of capital in the productive process and with the relations of capital and labor in industrial organization.

This articles describes the professional life of economist Adam Smith as the Commissioner of His Majesty's Customs in Great Britain. Adam Smith entered upon his duties as Commissioner of His Majesty's Customs at Edinburgh early in 1778. He was then close to fifty-five years of age, and at the height of his powers and reputation. With an assured income of £900 a year-two-thirds from his government appointments, the other third his pension from the House of Buccleugh-he was a rich man in the Edinburgh of his day and fully in position to enjoy what he loved most: "his mother, his friends, his books." Yet his acceptance of the appointment greatly disturbed his friends who were fearful that the duties of the office would prove "sufficient to waste his spirit and dissipate his attention." During the first years of his residence in this city his studies seemed to be entirely suspended and his passion for letters served only to amuse his leisure and animate his conversation.

This article attempts to trace the growth of the commercial conception of the economics from the time of Adam Smith to its apogee in J. S. Mill and to describe the contemporary opposition to it. Smith more easily could distinguish between monetary prices and national wealth because of his use of the word "price" in a broader sense than that which became prevalent among his followers and from the first he contrasted "the price of commodities" in labor and in money. David Ricardo's main work appeared in 1817 and it is no mere chance that the beginning of the great increase of popular interest in economics have been dated the following year. It was chiefly Ricardo who gave to the liberal economic doctrine, handed down from Adam Smith, both its appearance of theoretical completeness and its pronounced commercial character. Ricardian economics was in full vigor from 1818 until 1860. The ethical protest against price economics was led by Thomas Carlyle, who voiced his opinions with characteristic vigor in three successive groups of essays. Carlyle's fulminations on economic evils gave offense in some quarters but, uttered, as they were, when he was at the very height of his literary reputation, had doubtless a notable effect and many have had no small part in hastening various measures of parliamentary reform.

The article discusses the development of the labor or cost-of-production tradition of Aristotle, which indicates that labor cost was connected with the process of value determination. It informs that an eighteenth century thinker who was directly familiar with the works of Aristotle, and who was at least indirectly influenced by scholastic writers, might take a labor-oriented approach. Such an orientation can be shown to persist in early value theory along with the utility element, as a secondary, but nevertheless influential, factor. Further, there are a number of passages in Aristotle's writings, which can be interpreted as indicating that he also thought that labor cost was connected with the process of value determination. It has adequately demonstrated how the Austrian value theorists of the nineteenth century were anticipated in part, by writers in a tradition, which stemmed from Aristotle. However, there is also a labor or cost-of-production tradition which may be less obvious, but which links Adam Smith, the scholastics and Aristotle.

The article discusses the reasons for the establishment and the operations of the International Material Conference during the Korean emergency and discusses the appropriateness of economist Adam Smith's dictum, that restrictions on international trade are justified when some particular industry is necessary for the defense of the country, as guide to economic policy. When the Korean emergency began, the domestic economy was approaching full employment. It was likely that additional large demands for raw materials arising primarily from the emergency might have to be met by creating or discovering additional productive units rather than from existing facilities. Temporarily, certain "nonessential" or "less essential" demands might have to be administratively curtailed unless prices were to be allowed to serve as a rationing device. In the 1950s the United States had adopted and was implementing a political policy of collective defense under the Mutual Defense Assistance Program and had adopted and was implementing a long-term policy of freer international trade, which also applied to raw materials.

This article examines economists' intellectual heritage in the matter of budget balancing. It is commonly held that the classicists assumed that the economic role of the state must necessarily be limited and they then adduced certain rationalizations regarding the nature of governmental fiscal operations to support this assumption. It seems more likely that such economists as Adam Smith looked first at the objective requirements of the economic order and then proceeded to theorize about the proper role of the state therein. Adam Smith's views on balanced budgets were conditioned vary largely by his views on national debt. And his views on the latter are a clear and direct product of his antimercantilism. It is difficult to dissociate Smith, the antimereantile-polemicist, from Smith the economist. His often quoted passages defining, in restrictive terms, the proper and legitimate functions of the state should probably be viewed not so much as an evidence of his pro-laissez-faire position as an evidence of his antimercantilism. Smith was an antimercantilist because he saw that the state apparatus as it then existed was an inefficient organization from the standpoint of wealth and income creation.

The article presents information on the development and acceptance of the marginal utility theory. Much earlier than is generally assumed the theorists of subjective value had discovered the principles of marginal utility. At the time of economist Adam Smith, Italian and French economists already considered it self-evident that the interplay of utility and scarcity explains the value of consumer goods, money and the level of wages. The French, Italian and Swiss writers had solved all problems of marginal utility except one, no one saw the connection between marginal utility and the individual value of equal units. Economist William F. Lloyd discovered the correct relation in 1834. Fourteen years later economist John Stuart Mill, in his Principles expounded a somewhat weak mixture of objective and subjective elements in his theory of value. Mill, like other economists either by-passed the utility approach or paid scant attention to it. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was not ignorance which accounted for the dividing line between the two opposing points of view, but rather the antagonism between the Aristotelian-Thomistic and the Protestant social schools of thought.

The article examines the usage of the term, favorable balance of trade, by American economists in light of the origin and development of the expressions favorable and unfavorable balance of trade. It asserts that the impression of mercantilists about the term, such that it implies the advantage of excess commodity exports over commodity exports, is merely conventional and is not a true index of the economic well-being of a country. Several works dealing with the commercial or mercantile system and the balance of trade were analyzed like "The Wealth of Nations," by economist Adam Smith, and the Bullion Report, which identified the balance of trade with the movement of exchange rates.

This article discusses the role of the natural laws in the economic philosophies of French economist Francois Quesnay and his disciples and of economist Adam Smith. According to the author, the economic and social philosophies of the Physiocrats and Smith, though very different in character, thus came to very similar results. Under a natural law, a natural economic process would ensure the working out of appropriate adjustments in the economic system and the maximization of national wealth. The Physiocrats said that the natural legal system was the one indicated by the Nature, through certain simple and obvious facts of social life, to the reason of the reformer, as the system intended and calculated to promote the general welfare. Whereas Smith said it was the system which harmonizes with the moral sentiments that the Nature engenders in men's minds through the workings of sympathy. The natural economic process was not an uncontrolled process but the process intended by the Nature, and capable of complete realization as the actual economic process only if the state should do its part by establishing the laws and policies prescribed by the Nature.

A representative collection of people who profess to study labor problems today would consist of members of almost every social science faculty. There would be economists, historians, philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, lawyers, political theorists, psychiatrists, psychologists and others. Each would be looking at labor behavior from his specialist point of view; convinced, justifiably, that his view was important, but rarely if ever taking account of the views of others. This state of affairs has evolved because the factors which aroused the interest of academics in labor problems have been many and varied. Early political economists were interested in the wages of labor and in the quantity of labour used in production. Sociologist Adam Smith examined wages as a price but his approach had width as well as depth as befitted a moral philosopher. Political economists who followed paid less attention to wages and more to the quantity of labour in production.

Comments on Adam Smith's theory of value specifically labor, wages and rent. Criticisms on Smith's theory; Role of labor in Smith's theory; Information on Smith's cost-of-production theory.

From 1783 TO 1834 William Godwin published a succession of ingeniously varied works that were widely and vehemently discussed and criticized. During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, with the complete defeat of these Englishmen who were spokesmen for reform, Godwin fell out of "extreme notoriety," as William Hazlitt put it in his "The Spirit of the Age." During much of the time that the Western world was arguing the merits of his strikingly individualistic-even anarchistic ideas, Japan was almost entirely isolated intellectually. What has been the impact upon Japanese thinking of a writer so varied and so original as this man? Godwin's ideas first reached Japanese minds with the growth of the study of political economy. Japan had to develop her economy rapidly after being opened to outside trade in 1854. It was not only Adam Smith with whom students of economics became acquainted. Among Japanese theorists on population, discussions of Malthus have always included Godwin's contribution, although the attitudes of these scholars have varied.

Focuses on the residual claimant theory of distribution. Factors governing the theory; Deductions related to share of laborers and capital included in the theory; Comparison of the theory with that of Adam Smith's theory of distribution.

This article presents information on the commercial legislation of England and its effect on the U.S. It also discusses economist Adam Smith's interpretation of economic activity. One cannot be surprised that the first generation of American historians writing, as they did, before the passions provoked by the great struggle had time to subside. It compelled them to pay more than their "fair value" for the commodities they imported, and to accept less than their "fair value" for the commodities they sold. But a like opinion is not confined to American historians, it has come to be very generally accepted by English writers and upon its side it has the authority of the most painstaking and the most widely read of the historians of the eighteenth century. It is, undoubtedly true that the commercial policy of England had established a real opposition of interest between the mother country and her colonies. The laws of England, affecting the trade and industry of the American colonies, fall, with one notable exception to be dealt with by and by, into three groups and it is essential to bear in mind the differences between them. There were, in the first place, the Navigation Laws proper in the second place, what one may conveniently christen the Enumeration Laws and lastly and of far less significance, the Law concerning Manufacture.

The article examines the preconceptions of economic science. It discusses the view that the economics handed down by the writers of a past generation is substantially a taxonomic science. The author argues that while economic science in the remoter past of its history has been mainly of a taxonomic character, later writers of all schools show a divergence from the taxonomic line and an inclination to make the science a genetic account of the economic life process. The article considers Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations," and his views on economics.

The article discusses the ideas of Alexander Hamilton and Adam Smith in the field of political economy. It has often been asserted that Hamilton was familiar with Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations." Having previously perused the earlier writers, he now entered upon a deliberate examination of the political economy of Adam Smith. This passage is the common source of the statement that is inferred from the fact that, with the three exceptions following, no indication has been offered of the nature of the evidence upon which it is based. Well-known economist Dunbar, in his sketch of "Economic Science in America, 1776-1876," says that Hamilton, in some parts of his Report on Manufactures, was influenced by his familiarity with Adam Smith, and significantly adds that Hamilton pointed out errors in Smith's concessions to the Physiocrats. Hamilton nowhere in the report mentions Adam Smith's name. Hamilton's remarks on premiums cover the same general points as Smith's, but there is less similarity of language.

The article focuses on problems related to economic education. The divergence to which the attention both of economists and the thinking public is now invited runs on lines essentially different from those just marked out. The disagreement in question is not between different classes of economic students or different schools of thought, but between well-established economic conclusions on the one hand and the ideas of the public on the other. These ideas do not spring from a study of the contrast between the present state of industry and that of a century ago, but are as old as the commercial system. One of the most marked points of antagonism between the ideas of the economists since Adam Smith and those which governed the commercial policy of nations before his time is found in the case of foreign trade. Before such a thing as economic science was known arose the theory of the balance of trade. The fundamental doctrine of this theory was that trade was advantageous or disadvantageous to a nation according as the value of its exports exceeded or fell short of the value of its imports.

The article discusses the interpretation of writings of economist David Ricardo. Ever since the death of Ricardo there has been an increasing interest in him and his writings. For all deductive economists his theories have had a charm which those of no later writer possess. There are many whose reasoning is more perfect, many whose ideas are more clearly expressed; but few have attained the commanding position of Ricardo in economic theory. In the early part of the year 1815 a remarkable essay by Thomas Robert Malthus appeared, which opened up the discussion of the theory of rent; and a few months later came a still more remarkable essay by Ricardo, in which the position of the modern economist was clearly represented. There is a marked difference between the essay of Malthus and that of Ricardo. The character of the change which Ricardo brought about in economics becomes more manifest when one compares the position of Malthus with that taken by Ricardo in his Political Economy, published two years later. Ricardo's thinking on economic subjects begins with a study of the conditions which determine the rate of profits, and about this all of his system is constructed. Adam Smith had said that the rate of profits was lowered by the competition of producers.

Presents an historical assessment of historian Adam Smith's lectures on rhetoric. Topics emphasized by Smith in his lectures; Comments of three contemporaries on Smith's lectures; Educational background of Smith.