The Deed and the Wage · Episode 6 of 10 · 22 min
The Case Against the Land Theory of Capital and Labor
The series puts its own thesis in the dock, arguing the strongest case against it and then auditing it. Five counter-arguments say the employment contract produces tension without land, wage labor predates enclosure, revisionists found demography behind the proletariat, modern capital owns no soil, and Marx dismissed Henry George. The episode concedes what it must and keeps a narrower claim.
Who's who
- Ronald Coase+3 more episodesEconomist whose 1937 essay defined employment as an authority relation
- Alan ManningLSE economist who argued employer wage-setting power is general
- David CardEconomist whose 1994 minimum-wage study cracked the competitive labor model
- Alan Krueger+1 more episodeCo-author of the 1994 New Jersey minimum-wage study
- J. D. Chambers+1 more episodeHistorian who argued enclosure often increased rural employment
- Robert C. AllenHistorian whose Enclosure and the Yeoman revised the enclosure story
- Karl Marx+5 more episodesLocated exploitation at the point of production and dismissed Henry George
- Henry George+2 more episodesLand-tax crusader whom Marx dismissed in an 1881 letter
Timeline
- 1351Statute of Labourers caps wages, showing wage labor predated enclosure
- 1881Marx writes to Sorge dismissing George's land-first diagnosis
- 1937Coase publishes The Nature of the Firm
- 1953Chambers argues enclosure raised rural labor demand
- 1992Allen publishes Enclosure and the Yeoman
- 2014-2020Karabarbounis and Neiman, and Autor and co-authors, analyze the falling labor share without land
Still debated
Whether enclosure created the proletariat has no settled aggregate answer, and the size of medieval wage-labor markets is uncertain. The causes of the post-1980 labor-share decline, and whether Marx's dismissal of George was analysis or turf war, are also contested.
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