Abstract
In Ricardo’s day ‘… English labourers’ weekly wages were often less than the price of half a bushel of good wheat’.1 By the time that Ricardo published his classic work (1817), the weekly wage of unskilled workers in the United States was equal to the price of two bushels of good wheat.2 In 1890, when Marshall’s Principles appeared, US unskilled workers could buy close to nine bushels of wheat with their weekly wage. In as much as my story pertains largely to changes since then, let me continue for the moment with wages and wheat in the United States. By 1970 the weekly compensation of manufacturing production workers was sufficient to buy 96 bushels of high-quality wheat.3,4 The economics of the decline by half between 1900 and 1970 in the deflated price of wheat is well known. But the economics of the rise in real wages for time spent at work by labour, which is vastly more important, is still in large part unsettled.
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Notes
Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics (Macmillan and Company, 1920) in the Preface to the 8th edition, p. xv.
N. Potter and F. T. Christy, Jr., Trends in Natural Resource Commodities (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, for Resources for the Future, 1962).
Marc Nerlove, ‘Toward a New Theory of Population and Economic Growth’, pp. 527–45, in Economics of the Family: Marriage, Children and Human Capital, edited by Theodore W. Schultz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975).
See Harry G. Johnson, ‘Toward a Generalized Capital Accumulation Approach to Economic Development’, The Residual Factor and Economic Growth (Paris: OECD, 1964) pp. 219–27.
Simon Kuznets, Modern Economic Growth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966). Chapter 4, pp. 181–3, bears directly on this analytical issue. This part of the analysis is restricted to the US and to the period from 1909–14 to 1955–57.
US Bureau of Economic Analysis, Long Term Economic Growth, 1860–1970 (Washington, DC, 1973) p. 22, per cent distribution of national income by type.
See especially the seminal contributions of Gary S. Becker, which include among others his Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis with Special Reference to Education (New York: NBER, 1964);
Gary S. Becker, ‘A Theory of the Allocation of Time’, Economic Journal, 75 (September 1965) pp. 493–517;
Gary S. Becker, ‘A Theory of Marriage’ in the Economics of the Family, edited by Theodore W. Schultz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975) pp. 299–344;
Gary S. Becker, The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).
See also Jacob Mincer, Schooling, Experience and Earnings (New York: NBER and Columbia University Press, 1974).
Simon Kuznets, Modern Economic Growth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966) p. 228.
Frank Knight. ‘Diminishing Returns from Investment’, Journal of Political Economy, 52 (March 1944) pp. 26–47.
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© 1980 International Economic Association
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Schultz, T.W. (1980). On the Economics of the Increases in the Value of Human Time over Time. In: Matthews, R.C.O. (eds) Economic Growth and Resources. International Economic Association Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-04063-6_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-04063-6_6
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