ABSTRACT
Joseph Spengler (1983: 5) has summarized the implications of Wicksell’s insistence on diminishing returns:
One may say in conclusion that Wicksell’s emphasis upon the role of diminishing returns and the resulting limitations to the augmentability of the total output in a given country made evident the costs of population growth beyond certain limits. This discovery in turn drew attention to the fact that population growth beyond a certain point made for a decline in the realizable level of average output, that is, at a point that marked a country’s optimum size of population, excess of which prevented maximization of average output in such countries. This conception, a derivative of Malthusian concern, won even wider support in the late nineteenth and the twentieth century, due in some part to Wicksell’s contributions.
