The Origins and Development of Labor Economics_intro.pdfVIP

INTRODUCTION John R. Commons once remarked that it was surprising how many and how varied were the theoretical economic systems erected on the single concept of labor : From John Locke to Adam Smith , to Ricardo , Proudhon and Karl Marx , it is possible to build a whole system of political economy on the one foundation of labor . . . . The word Labor has as many meanings as you wish to read into it . 1This book is a study of how labor has figured in the history of economic thought , not from the standpoint of the various meanings that have attached to the word but rather from that of how the study of labor within economics has shifted over time . Like society, the subject of their analyses, the social sciencesare always in the process of becoming ; both are continually evolving and developing . For example , the approach economists take to a problem such as the impact of the labor union , the questions they raise in connection with it , and the ways in which their interest in the subject is distinguished from that of other professionals are all initially conditioned by the received body of economic analysis available to them or , to use Robinsons phrase, by the box of tools assembledby their predecessorsin the analysesof similar problems .2 But in the process of analysis, some of these tools may be found to be inadequate and may have to be discarded , and others may be newly forged . Thus the persistence of large-scale labor organizations in nineteenth -century England ultimately forced economists to go beyond the confining limits of pure or perfect competition and mathematically determinate economic models to the analysisof bilateral monopoly and indeterminate bargaining situati