Efficiency Wages and Classical Wage Theory

Michael E. Bradley

Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 2007, vol. 29, issue 2, 167-188

Abstract: In The General Theory, John Maynard Keynes lumped together the marginalist and neoclassical economics of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the more narrowly defined “classical” economics of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, J. R. McCulloch, James and John Stuart Mill and other mainstream economists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth into what he called the “classical theory of employment,” which he reduced to two “fundamental postulates”:(a) The wage is equal to the marginal product of labour…(b) The utility of the wage when a given volume of labour is employed is equal to the marginal disutility ofthat amount of employment…(Keynes 1936, p. 5).

Date: 2007
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:jhisec:v:29:y:2007:i:02:p:167-188_00

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of the History of Economic Thought from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().