Save your cookie preferences

We use cookies to remember your site preferences, record your referrer and improve the performance of our site. For more information, see our cookie policy.

Please select an option below and 'Save' your preferences.

Save

You can update your cookie preferences at any time from the 'Cookies' link in the footer.

We use cookies (including third-party cookies such as Google) to remember your site preferences and to help us understand how visitors use our sites so we can improve them. To learn more, please see our privacy policy and our cookie policy.

To agree to our use of cookies, click 'Accept' or choose 'Options' to set your preferences by cookie type.

Options Accept

  • English
  • Deutsch
  • Español
  • Français
  • Italiano
  • Polski
  • 日本語
  • 简体中文
  • 繁體中文
  • Daily audit
  • Help
  • Contact
  • Deposit
  • Login
  • Open account
  • ABOUT US
    • About BullionVault
    • In the press
    • Reviews
    BUY/SELL BULLION
    • Live order board
    • Daily Price
    • Regular Investing
    INVESTMENT GUIDE
    • Guide to gold
    • -How to buy gold
    • -Gold investment
    • -Gold investment plan
    • -Investment insurance
    • -Compare asset performance
    • Guide to silver
    • -How to buy silver
    • Guide to platinum
    • -How to buy platinum
    GOLD NEWS
    • Gold news front page
    • -Gold price news
    • -Opinion & analysis
    • -Market fundamentals
    • -Gold/Silver Investor Index
    • -Infographics
    CHARTS
    • Gold price
    • Silver price
    • Platinum price
    • Price alerts
  • Login
  • Open account
  • BUY/SELL BULLION
  • Live order board
  • Daily Price
  • Regular Investing
  • INVESTMENT GUIDE
  • Guide to gold
    • ⤷
    • How to buy gold
    • Gold investment
    • Gold investment plan
    • Investment insurance
    • Compare asset performance
  • Guide to silver
    • ⤷
    • How to buy silver
  • Guide to platinum
    • ⤷
    • How to buy platinum
  • GOLD NEWS
  • Gold news front page
    • ⤷
    • Gold price news
    • Opinion & analysis
    • Market fundamentals
    • Gold/Silver Investor Index
    • Infographics
  • CHARTS
  • Gold price
  • Silver price
  • Platinum price
  • Price alerts
  • ABOUT US
  • About BullionVault
  • In the press
  • Reviews
  • Help
  • Contact
  • Daily audit
    • English
    • Deutsch
    • Español
    • Français
    • Italiano
    • Polski
    • 日本語
    • 简体中文
    • 繁體中文

Gold News

Live support

NEED HELP? ASK US NOW

Search form

Gold News front page

Gold Price News

Gold Prices Ex-US Dollar Break Above $1450 as Italy's 'Brexit' Talk Hits Euro

More...

Gold Investing In Depth

Learn about gold bullion bars

Learn about gold bullion coins (and costs)

Gold investment: Why & how?

Gold Investment Analysis

  • Latest Gold Investor Index
  • Diversification: Gold as investment insurance
  • 40-year Asset Performance Comparison Table

Gold Articles

Opinion & Analysis

Gold Price News

Investment News

Gold in History

Gold Books

Gold Investor Index

Gold Infographics

Archive

  • February 2019 (20)
  • January 2019 (33)
  • December 2018 (28)
  • November 2018 (39)
  • October 2018 (38)
More...

List of authors

Adam Smith and the Theory of Wages

Tuesday, 8/28/2012 14:32

Why wages are not always destined to go down...

ONE GETS an almost cruel pleasure in seeing someone deploy irrefutable logic to destroy an opponent's arguments, writes John Phelan for the Cobden Centre.

I felt it this week reading George Reisman's 'Open letter to Warren Buffett' where the well booted doctrines of Karl Marx got another kicking. By now Marx and his followers ought to be used to this sort of punishment at the hands of Austrians. Eugen von Böhm Bawerk produced his devastating destruction of Marx's economics, Karl Marx and the Close of His System, back in 1896.

But Paul Samuelson was right when he said that "Karl Marx can be regarded as a minor post-Ricardian". Marx simply took the aggregative, labour value theory based economics of David Ricardo and took them to their dismal and erroneous conclusions. And when Reisman writes "The doctrine of class warfare is a derivative of the exploitation theory, whose best-known proponent is Karl Marx" we ought to point out that it is found also in Ricardo's predecessor Adam Smith.

Book One, Chapter VIII, of The Wealth of Nations is titled 'Of the wages of labour'. Smith charts the development from a situation of subsistence production where "the whole produce of labour belongs to the labourer" via the emergence of private property (which gives rise to rent) and stock (which gives rise to profit) to one where a payment for a good must be divided between the labourer (wages), the landlord (rent), and the stockholder (profit).

Smith goes on to say that "It seldom happens that the person who tills the ground has wherewithal to maintain himself till he reaps the harvest. His maintenance is generally advanced to him from the stock of a master, the farmer who employs him and who would have no interest to employ him, unless he was to share in the produce of his labour, or unless his stock was to be replaced to him with a profit" Smith says that "The produce of almost all other labour is liable to the like deduction of profit".

Here we have the genesis of the Marxist theory of the workers alienation from the means of production, exploitation, and 'class war'. Workers do not receive the full product of their labor as they did in the "early and rude state of society which precedes...the accumulation of stock and the appropriation of land". Instead, this product goes to the stockholder as profit and the laborer receives wages.

With wages, Smith states, "The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little as possible". We have Marx's "contending classes". Smith goes on

It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily...In all such disputes the masters can hold out much longer. A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, or merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year without employment. In the long-run the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him, but the necessity is not so immediate.

Smith argued that wages would rise when an economy was growing but otherwise he posited a clear general tendency for wages to feel only downward pressures. From this flowed the idea of the 'subsistence wage' with which Malthus earned economics the tag of "the dismal science" and Lasalle's Iron Law of Wages. Wages will stagnate, Smith argues, and profits will rise. Warren Buffett would not disagree.

But looking at the passage from Smith we can see much wrong with it, or at least, much that has no application today.

First, Smith says that stockholders are "fewer in number" than laborers and thus have a kind of oligopoly power. The error here, perhaps less when Smith was writing, is to regard labor as homogeneous. It isn't. Skills, like capital, can be specific to a certain role and, thus non-transferable. 

It follows that workers with different skills are not substitutes for one another; they are not, in other words, in competition. No brain surgeon ever accepted a lower wage from the fear that the hospital might hire a juggler instead.

Of course, where labor is unskilled it is homogeneous and we would expect to see the increased competition for jobs and resultant low wages which we do. At this skill level, also, capital can be substituted for labor providing a further downward pressure. The answer here is not to raise the banner of class warfare but to accumulate skills.

Second, Smith says that stockholders "can combine much more easily". However, in practical experience, such cartels are always plagued with problems as we see with OPEC. If a cartel sets a minimum price there is always the temptation for one member to sell below that price and capture the market. Although here we are considering the case where a cartel is setting a maximum price for its labor inputs, the analysis is unchanged as we shall see.

Thirdly, Smith contends that "In all such disputes the masters can hold out much longer". This might well be true but the question has to be asked; why would they? If, by hiring a worker at $30,000 per year a stockholder would increase his profit by $40,000 per year, why would that stockholder hold out, throwing away $10,000, in an attempt to drive the worker down to $20,000?

It could be said that the stockholder will lose out on $10,000 this year but will gain $20,000 in every subsequent year. But Smith said that stockholders were "fewer in number", not that there was only one, so there are those cartel problems. Thus, if, in the initial period, stockholder A is willing to forgo $10,000 and hold out for a wage of $20,000 stockholder B will step in and offer the worker $30,000. He will make $10,000 profit while stockholder A makes nothing. There is a saying about stepping over a Dollar to pick up a penny, in this case stockholder B picks up both.

Indeed, if the worker adds $40,000 to profits it makes sense for the stockholder to employ them at any wage up to that (tax wedges notwithstanding). We have arrived, as economists did after 1870, at the Marginal Productivity Theory of Distribution. This simply states that a factor (labor or capital) will be paid to the value of its marginal product.

So, if hiring a first barman generates $100 a week extra profit for a bar owner, that barman will be paid up to $100. If, however, hiring a second barman adds only $80 a week the marginal product of bar staff has fallen to $80 a week and so will the wage even of the first. If hiring a third barman adds just $50 a week and no one will take the job at that wage no one else will be hired and $80 a week will be the wage.

Of course, if there are two barmen earning $80 a week one could go on a cocktail course. His mojito's might prove a draw, his marginal product will rise and so will his wage. By doing the course, 'upskilling', the first barman is differentiating his labor from that of barman two. Their labor is heterogeneous.

Smith himself saw a situation where in a growing economy, one in which the profits of stockholders were increasing, demand for labor would also increase. In this case "The scarcity of hands occasions a competition among masters, who bid against one another, in order to get workmen, and thus voluntarily break through the natural combination of masters not to raise wages".

However, as we've seen, because of heterogeneity on both the labor (due to non-transferable skills) and stockholder (due to cartel issues) sides of the wage bargain it is this which is the general case and not the previously enunciated tendency for wages to fall and profits to rise. Because some 'hands' are skilled at some things and other 'hands' at other things there is at any given time a "scarcity of hands" in any profession requiring a modicum of skill. And because we have a number of potential "masters" we have at any given time "competition among" them.

Both profits and wages can rise together and the zero sum thinking of Marx and Buffett can be discounted. But Adam Smith's role in this thinking should not be forgotten either.

Buying Gold? Make it safer, cheaper and easier with BullionVault...

  • Reddit logo
  • Facebook logo
  • Twitter logo
  • Google logo
  • Yahoo logo
  • LinkedIn logo
  • Digg logo
  • StumbleUpon logo
  • Technorati logo
  • del.icio.us logo

Built on anti-Corn Law radical Richard Cobden's vision that "Peace will come to earth when the people have more to do with each other and governments less," the Cobden Centre promotes sound scholarship on honest money and free trade. Chaired by Toby Baxendale, founder of the Hayek Visiting Teaching Fellowship Program at the London School of Economics, the Cobden Centre brings together economists, businesspeople and finance professionals to better help these ideas influence policy.

Cobden Centre articles

Please Note: All articles published here are to inform your thinking, not lead it. Only you can decide the best place for your money, and any decision you make will put your money at risk. Information or data included here may have already been overtaken by events – and must be verified elsewhere – should you choose to act on it. Please review our Terms & Conditions for accessing Gold News, RSS links are shown there.

Follow Us

Facebook Youtube Twitter LinkedIn

 

Mobile apps

 - live trading 24/7

 - buy & sell instantly

 - up-to-the-second charts

 

 

 

Daily news email
Go to 'communications settings' 

Get the latest daily gold price news free by email

Latest gold news by email

 

 

 

Gold Investor Index
5 February 2019

Gold Investor Index

Gold up, investing up!

 

 

 

CNBC TV-18
3 January 2019

CNBC TV-18

Gold jumps into New Year

 

 

 

Portfolio Adviser
19 October 2018

Vaulted large bar gold. Source: BullionVault

Beyond gold 'chatter'

 

 

 

Money Observer
6 August 2018

Bitcoin ain't gold

No, Bitcoin isn't "new" gold

 

 

 

  •  Email us

Market Fundamentals

  • Gold 'Set to Drive' Silver Price Gains in 2019
  • LBMA Gold Price Forecasts See Tight Range in 2019
  • Gold Mining M&A Now 'Easier' Than New Exploration
More...
  • Cost calculator
  • Cookies
  • Terms & conditions

©BullionVault Ltd 2005-

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Google Plus
  • LinkedIn
  • YouTube