History of Economic Analysis part 68. At the time of his death in 1950, Joseph Schumpeter-one of the major figures in economics during the first half of the 20th century-was working on his monumental History of Economic Analysis. A complete history of humankind's theoretical efforts to understand economic phenomena from ancient Greece to the present, this book is an important contribution to the history of ideas as well as to economics. | History of economic analysis 632 of wages laborers produce the whole produce the wage problem is to show why they do not get the whole produce but have to submit to certain deductions hence the wage problem is automatically solved as soon as these deductions have found their explanations. But even for himself and also for James Mill Sismondi and Marx who went further in the direction of Smith s lead than did any other leading economist analysis of the upper and lower limits of what can or must go to labor is so much more important for their treatment of wage problems than is their general philosophy that it is more instructive to deal with them without further reference to the latter. This agrees with what I believe to be the common opinion of a majority of historians. But I cannot agree with the classification of wage theories which many of them have adopted into minimum-of-existence theories supply and demand theories and productivity theories. For these are not distinct let alone incompatible explanations of wage incomes. The first is no theory of wages at all but simply a theorem on the long-run equilibrium level of The supply and demand apparatus is necessary for any wage theory whatsoever and does not identify any particular Ricardians including Marx failed indeed to recognize this in the case of wages as in all other cases for the determination of long-run normals but even they allowed wages like other prices to be determined by supply and demand in a short run. But with wages this meant something very different from what it meant with other prices. For if the long-run normal be made dependent upon adjustments of the population the short run extends over at least fifteen For short runs of this and even greater length indeed for spells of indefinite length the Ricardians relied on the particular form that the supply and demand apparatus takes in the wage-fund doctrine. But in a different the normal form the supply and demand .
