ABSTRACT
Smith's doctrine on this matter found very little acceptance. The physiocrats objected to any extension of their idea of the content of productive labour; other people thought his extension did not go far enough. Even the French translator of the Wealth of Nations thought it necessary to append a hostile note of over thirty pages. He notices inter alia Smith's inconsistency in holding some wage-paid labourers unproductive while at the same time declaring the produce of labour to be the natural wages of labour.1 J.-B. Say in 1803 observed that" immaterial products," such as a good stage-play, were just as real as material products such as fireworks. II Lauderdale laughed at Smith for having made a distinction between products which last and products which immediately perish, after having himself made fun of people who thought it better to accumulate pots and pans indefinitely rather than drink good wine.3 McCulloch remarked that Smi th' s " menial servant" who brought coal up from the householder's cellar was raising coal just as much as the miner; 4 and finally Senior cleared the matter up by pointing out that whether we think of a person as producing a thing or as performing an " immaterial" service depends upon trifling circumstances. A bootmaker makes leather and thread into boots: a shoeblack makes dirty boots and blacking into clean boots. We think of the bootmaker as having produced boots because we buy the boots from him:
we think of the shoeblack as having performed a It mere service" because the chief material on which he works belongs to us, so that we do not have to buy it from him.! This ought to have been enough. but the obstinacy of James and John Stuart Mill kept the semi-physiocratic doctrine from complete disappearance till the nineteenth century was far gone. Even in r888 the author of an elementary manual classed schoolmasters. actors, musicians and domestic servants along with the idle rich. the idle poor, and even "thieves," as living "on what the directly productive classes produce." 2 But in general economists regarded the physiocratic and semi-physiocratic doctrines as obsolete, and were content to treat "produce" as including It services" as well as " commodities." 3
This was a simple matter compared with another question which received astonishingly little attention but really was of the greatest importance. Given that the produce included services as well as commodities. did it include all commodities and services. and if not. how should those to be included be distinguished from the others?
