Industrial System An Inquiry I

Author : J. A. Hobson
Publisher : Forgotten Books
ISBN 13 : 9781330033432
Total Pages : 350 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (334 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Industrial System written by J. A. Hobson and published by Forgotten Books. This book was released on 2015-06-05 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from The Industrial System: An Inquiry Into Earned and Unearned Income It my fairly be claimed of anyone who puts forth a volume with so comprehensive a title, that he shall present in his Preface a prima facie case for his claim that it shall be read. Perhaps the best way of doing this is to explain how and why it came to be written. As a student of those economic writings which professed to set forth the general principles of modern industry, I failed to find any consistent and convincing exposition of the methods by which wealth, the product of industry, was distributed among the owners of the several factors of production. After one or two unsatisfactory attempts to formulate an independent theory of distribution by correlating the accepted laws of rent, wages, and interest, I came to the conclusion that the proper way to understand how wealth was distributed was to study the various sorts of acts of distribution, i.e. the payments actually made to owners of labour, ability, land, and capital, in the different processes of industry. This involves as a preliminary the construction of an image of the actual concrete system of industry. With this object in view, in the opening chapters of this book I have endeavoured to describe, first, the structure of the various types of business; then their grouping in a trade; next, the relations of a trade to the trades which precede it or succeed it in a stream of industrial and commercial processes converting raw materials into final commodities; and finally, the contacts which these several streams of industry have with one another by drawing upon common sources of material and power and by supplying wants related by sympathy or opposition in standards of consumption. In other words, I have sought to give a true outline picture of the industrial system of the present day as a single organic whole, continuously engaged in converting raw materials into commodities, and apportioning them by a continuous series of payments as incomes to the owners of the factors of production in the different processes. This continuous distribution of the products is achieved by a number of detailed money prices paid to workers, capitalists, landowners, entrepreneurs, for productive services rendered, and each payment evokes a fresh application of productive power. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.