Abstract
Young commented on many of his contemporaries and earlier economists. Young reviewed Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Edgeworth’s Papers Relating to Political Economy, Pigou’s Wealth and Welfare, Fisher’s Making of Index Numbers and Jevons’s Theory of Political Economy. He also corrected many of the notions of neoclassicals such as Marshall, Pigou and Fisher. He was highly critical of the abstract general equilibrium systems of Walras and Pareto which had little bearing on the practical problems of economic life. Marshall’s approach, on the other hand, was more practical. He appreciated Counot’s treatment of imperfect competition and Ricardo’s theory of rent.
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Notes
- 1.
Young to Keynes dated 11 February 1920. In his reply, dated 28 February 1920, Keynes stated: “In spite of everything I say about him, and all my disappointments, I still believe that the President played a nobler part in Paris than any of his colleagues.”
- 2.
Young’s Harvard students, Lauchlin Currie, Paul Theodore Ellsworth and Harry Dexter White called for the cancellation of those debts as part of a lengthy, urgent memorandum on anti-depression policies (Laidler and Sandilands 2002).
- 3.
“It cannot be assumed…that an increase in the aggregate supply of labour will normally have the effect of reducing wages. Nor can it be assumed that a general reduction of real wages would lead to the increased employment of labour…in the way that a reduction of the price of a particular commodity would generally lead to larger sales. Little or nothing is to be gained by the general formula of supply and demand for an explanation of the determination of wages” (Young 1929b, 1990, p. 138). Young believed that wages were determined by the agreement between the employer and the employee. The relative bargaining power of a worker was weak as he could not hold out indefinitely for higher wages because of the need to feed himself and his family. See also Chap. 5.
- 4.
Frank Ramsey (1903–1930) became famous for his two widely cited articles on optimal taxation and optimal saving.
- 5.
Later writers (except Joseph Stiglitz) left the inelasticity of supply out of the picture, and at some point even gave up inelasticity of demand, coming back to ‘uniformity’ as the key to tax neutrality. Sandilands in his letter to Fred Harrison (Cc Mason Gaffney) dated 25 October 2017, suggests that Young was only considering produced goods.
- 6.
In his article on ‘The trend of prices’, which also had a discussion on business cycles, Young (1923a) disagreed with Mitchell that increasing costs of business would bring the expansion phase of the business cycle to an end. It had to be remembered that expenses of production were also money incomes of the consumers. The crisis occurred not due to difference in aggregate demand and aggregate supply but due to the fact that composition of demand was maladjusted with the structure of supply.
- 7.
“Now it is a capital error to hold (with Thorstein Veblen and some of his followers) that the explanation of things in terms of their historical antecedents is in some special sense a scientific mode of explanation; that, as Veblen puts it, modern sciences are characteristically ‘evolutionary sciences,’ and concern themselves primarily with ‘unfolding sequences’ and ‘cumulative causation’. The truth is, of course, that the goal towards which the natural sciences are always pressing—even though it may be an unattainable goal—is the explanation of this world of changing and evolving forms and types of organization in terms of some simple and stable mechanism ” Young (1927b; Mehrling and Sandilands 1999, pp. 6–7).
- 8.
Veblen had discarded the classical and the neoclassical theory. He had also discarded the contractual view of society in favour of a historical view. Young, on the other hand, could see the finer points of both and regarded them valid approaches to seeking economic truth.
- 9.
Even before reviewing this book Young, in an undated letter probably of 1913, wrote to Fisher: “[T]he prices which would be most surely and promptly affected by a decrease in the mint price of gold would be the prices of those commodities which largely enter into foreign commerce. I, for one, should expect that these sudden fluctuations in these particular prices would arouse the opposition of exporters and importers, as well as of large consumers or large producers of imported or exported goods.”
- 10.
“Earlier investigations regarded trade cycles merely as manias, forming the basis for the later ‘psychological theory’ of waves of optimas and pessimas… But why should these waves coincide? This periodic movement is explicable only as a result of contagion due to some external cause and then, admittedly, mental states may accentuate ‘real’ fluctuations” (Young 1990, p. 76).
- 11.
This was the first chapter of volume 2 of Cournot (1861).
- 12.
Earl J. Hamilton to Charles P. Blitch dated 14 February 1973. See Blitch (1995, pp. 118–9).
- 13.
These articles later appeared in his The High Price of Bullion, A Proof of the Depreciation of Bank Notes (Ricardo 1810).
- 14.
Apart from James Mill, his circle of friends included such names as T.R. Malthus and Jeremy Bentham.
- 15.
According to Young the growth of American cities and settlement of western states involved a lot of sacrifice and effort, which may not have been forthcoming had the expected rise in land values not been counted as earned reward (see Ely et al. 1916, p. 424).
- 16.
Young (1928a) stated that Jevons’s contribution to statistical inquiries may count for more in revolutionising economic theory than his Theory of Political Economy.
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Chandra, R. (2020). Young’s Estimate of His Contemporaries and Earlier Economists. In: Allyn Abbott Young. Great Thinkers in Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31981-6_9
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