Three Lectures on the Rate of Wages

Nassau William Senior (1790 - 1864), was an English lawyer known as an economist. He was also a government adviser over several decades in the areas of economic and social policy, on which he wrote extensively. Senior was a contributor to the Quarterly Review, Edinburgh Review, London Review and North British Review. In their pages he dealt with literary as well as with economic and political subjects. Senior regarded political economy as a deductive science, of inferences from four elementary propositions; which are not assumptions, but facts. It concerns itself, however, with wealth only, and can therefore give no political advice. He pointed out inconsistencies of terminology in David Ricardo's works: for example, his use of value in the sense of cost of production; high and low wages in the sense of a certain proportion of the product as distinguished from an absolute amount; and his employment of the epithets fixed and circulating as applied to capital. He argued, too, that in some cases the premises assumed by Ricardo are false. He cited the assertions that rent depends on the difference of fertility of the different portions of land in cultivation; that the laborer always receives precisely the necessaries, or what custom leads him to consider the necessaries, of life; that, as wealth and population advance, agricultural labor becomes less and less proportionately productive; and that therefore the share of the produce taken by the landlord and the laborer must constantly increase, whilst that taken by the capitalist must constantly diminish; and he denied the truth of all these propositions.