Re: Re: Engels' (non)reply to Wicksteed

[Michael Perelman <michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.qut.edu.au/arts/human/ethics/conf/flat.htm

A relatively large number of references to distributional issues can be found
in Wicksteed?s
?non-economic? works in this later period. It is of some interest to record,
for example, Wicksteed?s
views of the distribution of income at about the time of the publication of An
essay on the co-ordination
of the laws of distribution in 1894. In the following year, Wicksteed in his
short paper ?The advent of the
people? provides support for a more equal distribution of wealth. In so doing
he presents the classic
(marginal) utilitarian defence of greater equality:

      "a more even distribution of wealth would obviously relieve misery so
intense that it would be
      more than a compensation for the loss of enjoyment at the other end by
which it would have to
      be purchased By a well-known law that lies at the basis of all sound
consideration of social
      phenomena, each successive application of wealth to the supply of the
wants of the same
      individual becomes less and less effective as a producer of
satisfaction." (Wicksteed 1895)

Wicksteed?s paper also presents an interesting account of a standard for a just
distribution of wealth. The
point of interest is that the account of justice presented combines Wicksteed?s
interest in medieval studies
and his adherence to the marginalist method. Wicksteed indicates that the
medieval conception of justice
consists in the ?presentation by man of that balance established by God and
nature between capacities and
opportunities?. He goes on to add that ?if we look at society as it now is we
see capacities starved of
opportunity alike by excess and by defect of wealth, and our cry for justice is
not a cry for a dead level,
but a cry for the opening up of opportunities?.



Tom Walker wrote:

> Michael Perelman wrote,
>
> > As I recall this devastating critique of Marx, Wicksteed concentrated on
> > Marx's lack of the theory of rent.  I suspect that he never saw volume 3.
>
> Volume III was published in 1894, Vol. II in 1885. Therefore, Wicksteed
> could only have seen Volume I. (Unless Engels showed him the unpublished
> manuscripts ;-)) So I take it from the discrepency between the
> superlative adjective and the narrow focus that you weren't impressed?
> In his introduction to the collected works, Steedman writes that "some
> writers have regarded Bohm Bawerk?s later attack on the labour theory of
> value, of 1896, as inferior to that of Wicksteed."

--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929

Tel. 530-898-5321
E-Mail michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx