ABSTRACT
Rural French worker Marie-Catherine Gardez, born in 1891 in the Nord region, worked hard for all of her long life. Capitalist firms—the farm, the cloth merchant, and the brick factory—exerted the largest single influence, but their power was tempered by worker organization, by state intervention, and by workers’ alternative sources of subsistence. Macroeconomists note that worker and firm expectations of future inflation depend on past experience with inflation, with the result that once a level of inflation has arrived it tends to persist. The neoclassical firm—the key economic unit other than individual consumers or workers—acts single-mindedly to maximize the owner’s or stockholders’ profits. In explaining why wages are “sticky” argued that workers strenuously resist any attempts to reduce their wages relative to those of other workers. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
