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A Companion to the History of Economic Thought - Chapter 11

C H A P T E R E L E V E N The Surplus Interpretation of the Classical Economists The economy that the classical economists from William Petty to David Ricardo experienced typically generated an annual social surplus, which was distributed amongst the propertied classes in the form of rents or profits | CHAPTER ELEVEN The Surplus Interpretation of the Classical Economists Heinz D. Kurz 11.1 Introduction The economy that the classical economists from William Petty to David Ricardo experienced typically generated an annual social surplus which was distributed amongst the propertied classes in the form of rents or profits and was used for the purposes of consumption and capital accumulation. The surplus refers to those quantities of the different commodities that were left over after the necessary means of production used up and the means of subsistence in the support of workers had been deducted from the gross outputs produced during a year. In this conceptualization the necessary real wages of labor were considered no less indispensable as inputs and thus agents of production than raw materials tools or machines. What became known as the surplus interpretation of the classical economists focuses attention on the mature classical economists approach to how the surplus is distributed and which system of exchange values of the different commodities can be expected to emerge as the result of the gravitation of market or actual prices to their natural or ordinary levels or prices of production. In conditions of free competition - that is in the absence of significant barriers to entry and exit from markets - prices can be taken to oscillate around levels characterized by a uniform rate of profits on the value of the capital advanced at the beginning of the uniform production period and a uniform rate of rent for each of the different qualities of land. The determination of the general rate of profits the rents of land and the corresponding system of relative prices constitutes the analytic centerpiece of 168 H. D. Kurz classical political economy. It was designed to lay the foundation of all other economic analysis including the investigation of capital accumulation and technical progress of development and growth of social transformation and structural change and of .