ABSTRACT
In the past twenty years, a considerable body of literature has grown up with relevance to any attempt to explain the determinants of the distribution of income in “overpopulated” agrarian economies. The discussants can be sharply divided into those who hold that the marginal productivity theory applies without amendment and those who allege that, because the marginal productivity of labor in such economies is observedly below subsistence and quite probably zero, this theory cannot adequately explain returns to labor which are greater than subsistence. A debate about the validity of the observation that the marginal productivity of labor is zero occupies the greatest proportion of the literature on the subject. A deliberate social choice of inefficient techniques and an “unnecessary” spreading of labor is in fact the intuitive meaning attached by most economists to “disguised unemployment”.
