ABSTRACT

This chapter deals with the comparative effects of certain causes upon the size of the national dividend and upon its distribution among rich and poor persons. No machinery exists by which effects upon distribution in this sense can be directly investigated. But economists have carried through, and have made common property, a very full analysis of the influences that affect distribution in another sense, namely, distribution among the various “factors of production". Labour embraces the work both of wholly unskilled workpeople and of numerous sorts of skilled artisans. The factors other than labour embrace, along with the work of Nature, the work of many kinds of mental ability and of various sorts of capital instruments. Capital, or to put the same thing in concrete terms, capital instruments, are the embodiment of labour itself, waiting for the fruits of labour and uncertainty-bearing.