Comment—Stabile on George and Clark

Abstract

We are in debt to Professor Stabile for reviewing so clearly Henry George's contribution to marginal productivity theory. As he concludes, neoclassical economics might have achieved better insights . . . if Clark had followed George more closely. However, Clark never intended to follow George except as a U-Boat stalks a troopship, I have documented this elsewhere (1994, 47-59). If Clark followed Ricardo, as Rima (cited by Stabile) alleges, it was for the same end, namely to eliminate and its distinctive rent from the lexicon of economics. Ricardo had to be sunk, too, and Clark his best. Clark should not get credit for originating the marginal productivity theory of distribution. Professor Stabile might have noted that said theory was developed by Henry George's sometime disciple, Philip Wicksteed (1894), well before Clark (1899). title of Wicksteed's masterpiece, Coordination of the Laws of Distribution, is obviously paraphrased from The Correlation and Coordination of These Laws (of Distribution) (George, 1879, Book III, Chapter VII, 218). Wicksteed was formalizing, in more elegant form, an insight from his friend George. Wicksteed, unlike Clark, that while retaining the identity of as a distinctive factor of production. This could help explain why Clark failed to acknowledge Wicksteed. Clark may indeed have been to adopt good ideas whatever their source, as Professor Stabile avers, but he was not always willing to give credit. Clark's main objective was to fuse and confuse with capital, to undercut George's case for taxing while exempting capital. To this end, it was necessary for him to rediscover the theory of marginal productivity in a new framework where was merged with capital. If that involved cribbing, well, his powerful academic friends overlooked it. Wicksteed, after all, consorted not just with Henry George but with unseemly Fabians like G. B. Shaw and Graham Wallas. It is insufficient to say Clark shared George's . . . distaste for citing Clark from 1886. In 1886 George ran for Mayor of New York with full socialist support. Later, Clark regularly uses and agrarian as slurring codewords for Georgism - mischievously, because by then socialism was in bad odor, and George had broken with the Marxist socialists. Clark disliked all the distributive aspects of socialism, whereas George always remained a land socialist. Professor Stabile implies that George's marginalism was inadequate because he belittled marginal utility; and Professor Stabile agrees with Leland Yeager that George did not understand the marginalist revolution in value theory . …