Book Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1915 edition. Excerpt: ...in 1878, 1887, 1894, 1904 and 1909, in America in (fiscal years) 1895, 1897 (but cf. note 3, p. 104), 1905, 1909 may be adduced as additional evidence of the automatic recovery of industry. tion of the revivals of particular industries, we may well be on our guard against allowing such reductions of real miscellaneous costs the sole or even the predominant place in determining the revivals of industry as a whole. 3. HARVESTS. THE ELASTICITY OF DEMAND.. We are led on therefore to consider, with reference to industry as a whole, the second possible cause of increased prosperity in any group--a rise in the exchange value of its products. It should hardly be necessary to insist that a simultaneous rise in the exchange value against one another of the products of all trades is a vacant and meaningless phrase. But a rise, due to an increased bounty of nature, in the exchange value of the products of industry as a whole against the products of agriculture is clearly by no means open to the same objection.1 There is, however, a widespread reluctance among modern writers 2 to admit its importance as a cause of general revival. This reluctance seems to be founded partly upon certain irrational habits of mind, and partly upon more coherent, if not conclusive, argument. Under the former head we may class, first, a tendency to infer that if the particular theory of periodicity connected with the name of Professor W. S. Jevons is proved invalid, the whole theory of crop influences breaks down together with it: 8 secondly, the assumption that a lack of positive correlation between agricultural and other prices disproves the existence of any causal connection: 4 and 1 This phenomenon might indeed be classified as a reduction in real costs in one...