ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. Theories of Surplus and Transfer aims to be the most comprehensive analysis in economic literature since Schumpeter of the historical debates over the nature of the economy and of the limits of economic behavior. Economists' understanding of the relations between inputs, outputs, and welfare, Sir William Petty to the present, West, East, and South, are studied using a conceptual framework that incorporates recent developments in public and comparative economics. The factory of Classical and Marxian microeconomics is a multi-person firm whose owners hire unskilled labor and physical capital to produce reproducible, externality-poor, private, material goods under favorable returns to scale; market sale of these goods returns the going rate of profit. Self-styled 'neoclassical political economy' revives the value-laden productive/unproductive vocabulary of Classical surplus-generation and transfer models as a distinction, theoretically promising but very hard to draw in practice, between 'rent-seeking' and 'profit-seeking'.
