ABSTRACT
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The topic of “wages” is vast. Among the classical economists one of the key objects of analysis was where the economic surplus so evident in society came from, and a prime suspect was always that workers were paid less in wages than the value they actually added in production. Indeed, one of the driving forces behind the development of neoclassical economics was to do away with such discussion, by formalizing the hypothesis that all “factors”, including labour, were paid precisely their marginal product. Wages remain central to economic analysis and discussion today, primarily over questions of unemployment and inflation.
