Wage-rates and Industrial Depressions: A Study in the Business Cycle ... |
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accumulation amount better distribution boom business cycle capital capital accumulation cause chasing power Commerce Yearbook concerns Conference on Unemployment consumers consumption costs of production crease Cycles and Unemployment decline decrease depres distribution of income duction earnings Economics of Unemployment economy of high effective demand efficiency employers enterprises establishments excess profits factors of production fluctuations G. D. H. Cole George Soule high wage-rates high wages Ibid important increased wages indus industrial depression industrial system investment J. A. Hobson labor large profits large purchasing power larger last depression less masses ment mitigating necessary needs nomic output over-expansion over-production over-supply peak period of prosperity perity ployment population present pression prevailing problem quarter of 1920 R. H. Tawney result rise sion social stabilization of high standard of living sumers supply surplus tion Trade Board unem wage reduction wage-lag wants Waste in Industry writes
Popular passages
Page 90 - The statute declares the carrier to be only a trustee for the excess over a fair return received by it. Though in its possession, the excess never becomes its property and it accepts custody of the product of all the rates with this understanding. It is clear, therefore, that the carrier never has such a title to the excess as to render the recapture of it by the Government a taking without due process.
Page 41 - The proportion which the usual market rate of interest ought to bear to the ordinary rate of clear profit, necessarily varies as profit rises or falls. Double interest is in Great Britain reckoned what the merchants call a good, moderate, reasonable profit; terms which I apprehend mean no more than a common and usual profit.
Page 7 - The real economic function of saving must be clearly kept in mind. It does not consist in not spending, ie in putting money income in a bank, or even making an investment. It consists in paying producers to make more non-consumable goods for use as capital, instead of paying them to make more consumable goods and consuming them.
Page 5 - The broad result is that the worst years run something like 15 to 20 per cent behind the best, and something like 8 to 12 per cent behind the moderately good years.
Page 39 - Nor must it be overlooked that in some instances the enforcement of higher rates of wages has acted as a stimulus to improvement in working methods; and our attention has been drawn to cases in which improvements in machinery and organisation so brought about have increased production and thus have enabled the earnings of piece-workers to reach the statutory basis without any increase in the actual piece-rates paid.
Page 75 - ... stoppage of industry which he rightly diagnoses as under-production. Now a trade depression manifestly is a state of under-production, but this state is the product of an excessive activity preceding it. Over-production, congestion, stoppage, is the visible order of events. Theoretically, no doubt, it ought not to be possible. Every increase of output ought to find its outlet in consumption without reducing prices below the level at which it pays to produce. But since it does not work this way,...
Page 57 - In the great majority of enterprises larger profits result from these divergent fluctuations, coupled with the greater physical volume of sales. For while the prices of raw materials and of bank loans often rise faster than selling prices, the prices of labor lag behind, and the prices making up supplementary costs are mainly stereotyped by old agreements.
Page 90 - US 184), it was held that under section 418 the commission in making division of joint rates between groups of carriers might in the public interest consult the financial needs of a weaker group in order to maintain it in effective operation as part of an adequate transportation system, and give it a greater share of such rates if the share of the other group was adequate to avoid a confiscatory result.
Page 9 - The abuse or uneconomical use of the surplus product is the source of every sort of trouble or malady of the industrial system, and the whole problem of industrial reform may be conceived in terms of a truly economical disposal of this surplus.