Theories of Surplus and Transfer (Routledge Revivals) : Parasites and Producers in Economic Thought

First published in 1990, this is an analysis of the history of western economics from Petty to Supply-Side, through the prism of the controversies over productive labour and its product. It treats the early economists''productive-unproductive'dichotomies as shorthands for many other sets of distinctions relevant for boundaries, value and welfare. Central to the debates is the question of whether the economy is said to generate a ‘surplus'. Economists and politicians with views on these matters include the Physiocrats, Smith and Ricardo, Marx and his Soviet and western admirers, the marginalists, Keynes, Polanyi, Becker, and Reagan. The book maps the shifting emphases that economists and social thinkers have placed on markets and ‘mode'of production generally. This reissue will be useful to students of economic thought, welfare theory and policy, growth economics and economic systems. Cover 1 Half Title 2 Title Page 4 Copyright Page 5 Original Title Page 6 Original Copyright Page 7 Table of Contents 8 Dedication 12 Preface 14 Acknowledgements 18 1 Introduction: Productive labor and its product 20 Part One Rise and Decline of the Classical-Marxian Surplus and Transfer Theory 32 2 Early views of production, surplus-generation, and transfer 34 1 Kuznets's triad 34 2 Producers in Petty and King 34 Figure 2.1 Petty's welfare economics 38 Table 2.2 King's Scheme 40 3 Mandeville's paradox 42 4 Luxury and necessity in Boisguilbert and Cantillon 46 5 Demand and capital in Physiocracy 49 6 Sterility challenged, Forbonnais to Condillac 56 7 The boundary of the economy in 1776 59 3 Division of labor and unproductive labor in a system of natural liberty: Adam Smith's dilemma 61 1 Two sorts of unproductive labor 61 2 What is capital, that it be accumulated? 64 3 Servants in the household: consumers sovereignty, and natural liberty in the Wealth of Nations 66 4 Materiality dominant? 70 5 Servants of the public 73 6 Division of labor with unproductive laborers - a hopeless contradiction? 81 4 Immaterial production from Garnier to Mill 82 1 Physiocracy after 1789 83 2 'French' Classical microeconomics and the Smithian polarities 83 3 Ricardo avoids input-output error 96 4 Malthus's cure for gluts 97 5 Goods and services, McCulloch to Mill 100 6 Classicism, marginalism, and materiality 105 5 Mode and matter in Marx: the factory paradigm and the scope of the base 108 1 The productive-labor theory of value and its corollaries 108 2 Capitalism or materiality? 111 3 The factory paradigm and the production-circulation dichotomy 115 4 Beyond the capitalist mode: the petty producer 124 Figure 5.1 Marx's economy 123 5 Mental labor and the 'living production machine' 128 6 Can immaterial services be constant-capital inputs? 130 7 The 'most efficacious proportion', a positive fraction 131 8 Marx as welfare economist 133 9 Inputs, outputs and epochs 137 Part Two In a New Mode 138 6 Materiality and non-productivity under mixed sodalism in the USSR 140 1 Labor theorists and Austrians 141 2 Golden-Age Marxism from Kautsky to Lenin 143 3 Bukharin's economics of revolution 154 4 Output under incomplete socialism from Prokopovich to the Stalin textbook: the theoretical options 161 5 The materiality of Soviet 'material production' 170 6 Effects on the service share? 182 7 Perestroika and Soviet economics 186 Part Three Revisions and Extensions 206 7 Old Left and New Right on government as parasite 208 1 Post-Keynesian Marxism: capitalism spared by an unproductive war sector 210 2 Post-Keynesian Classicism: capitalism starved by an unproductive state sector 225 3 Public goods, rent-seeking, and the neoclassical economics of mode 238 8 Drawing the boundary: the main variants 246 1 From producers to products 246 2 Intermediate and final in the System of National Accounts and the International Comparison Project 247 3 Matter and mode in the Material Product System 257 4 New measures of final supply: towards an economics of use-values 262 9 Necessity without materiality, materiality without fallacy 277 1 Necessity without materiality: 'basic needs' in development economics 277 2 Materiality without fallacy: Polanyi-Pearson economic anthropology 285 10 Results, not inputs 290 1 On Sombart's torment turnpike 290 2 Review of the parts 291 3 Finality, sovereignty, and the efficacy of policy 293 4 Styles of dictatorship 295 5 Von Neumann systems 299 6 Intermediates, bads, and the 'most efficacious proportion' 301 7 The 'sole end and purpose of all production' 302 Note on notes, terms and translations 306 Bibliography 307 Index 352 First published in 1990, this is an analysis of the history of western economics from Petty to Supply-Side, through the prism of the controversies over productive labour and its product. It treats the early economists' ""productive-unproductive"" dichotomies as shorthands for many other sets of distinctions relevant for boundaries, value and welfare. Central to the debates is the question of whether the economy is said to generate a 'surplus'. Economists and politicians with views on these matters include the Physiocrats, Smith and Ricardo, Marx and his Soviet and western admirers, the marg .. First published in 1990, this is an analysis of the history of western economics from Petty to Supply-Side, through the prism of the controversies over productive labour and its product. It treats the early economists' ""productive-unproductive"" dichotomies as shorthands for many other sets of distinctions relevant for boundaries, value and welfare. Central to the debates is the question of whether the economy is said to generate a 'surplus'. Economists and politicians with views on these matters include the Physiocrats, Smith and Ricardo, Marx and his Soviet and western admirers, the margina An interpretation of the history of western economics from Petty to Supply-Side as an attempt to transcribe the archaic, productive-unproductive shorthand with a more detailed, logically-consistent set of distinctions with clearer implications for boundaries, value and welfare.