§ 14. Wages and the general economic situation. Our statement of the theory of wages has now been brought 12 In fact, of all those over 10 years old engaged in agriculture, forestry, and animal husbandry (in 1910, a total of about 12,700,000 persons) about one half were operating owners, one fourth were labor ers on the home farm, and only one fourth were farm laborers "work ing out," that is, for wages outside the family. In mercantile trade, manufacturing, transportation, and mining, the proportion of wage workers is much larger, as will be shown in the study of enterprise later.
to a provisional stopping point. But the reader should be aware of the limitations of our treatment. We have outlined a theory of wages assuming a certain economic situation; we have passed in review the various motives and characteristics of men which help to explain the ratio in which the various kinds of services are valued in terms of each other. While we have recognized the presence and effect of material resources and of manifold instrumental goods as being indispensable to the use of labor, we have said little of the effects that changes in their amount would have on the whole economic situation. We have, in other words, outlined only a static (or
equilibrium) theory of labor-incomes, and not a dynamic theory.
But the level of the general scale of wages is a part of a gen eral economic situation and is dependent on the relation of population to all material resources, artificial and natural, on the progress of education, of science, and of the industrial arts, and on many other factors. The foregoing theory of wages therefore is only provisional, not that it must be es sentially changed, but that it must later be materially en larged and completed. The study of the value of labor is not a thing apart from that of the value of other agents. Each succeeding chapter from this point on will supplement the foregoing treatment of labor and wages. Especially in the last part of this volume (Chapters 32-39) will be discussed the great underlying conditions on which depends the general eco nomic situation in which and by which the level of labor-in comes is determined.