Meyer, Das Wesen des Einkommens (1887)

Meyer begins from a conceptual difficulty: income is indispensable in ordinary economic life, taxation, statistics, and political economy, yet becomes obscure when treated as a rigorous scientific category.

doch begegnen wir eigenthümlichen und sehr ernsten Schwierigkeiten, so oft es gilt, den Vorgang, Einkommen genannt, scharf zu bezeichnen

English translation: yet we encounter peculiar and very serious difficulties whenever it is a matter of sharply defining the process called income

His first move is critical. Against the tradition running from Smith through Hermann and Schmoller, Meyer rejects the identification of income with the annual product of exchangeable goods. Annuality, recurrence, market value, and yield do not by themselves define income. A non-recurring receipt may be consumed without irrationality if it answers a non-recurring need, while a recurring receipt may have to be preserved if future provision depends upon it. The decisive issue is therefore not the mere periodic return of receipts but the maintenance of the conditions under which needs can be repeatedly satisfied.

Die Periodicität der Einnahmen bildet also keineswegs das entscheidende Moment für ihre Verwendung.

English translation: The periodicity of receipts therefore by no means constitutes the decisive factor for their use.

This is the treatise’s central conceptual displacement. Recurrence belongs less to the object called income than to the social process of provision. Human wants recur; economic organization develops historically to secure their satisfaction through labor, storage, tools, agriculture, exchange, division of labor, and capital maintenance. Meyer’s concept of income is thus temporal and social rather than merely accounting-based: it concerns the reproduction of the arrangements that make future consumption possible.

On this basis, national income is defined as the recurrently secured supply of first-order enjoyment goods, including services where they directly satisfy wants. Money, capital goods, inventories, and mere appreciations in value are excluded from national income because they do not themselves directly satisfy needs. They may mediate, represent, or condition future enjoyment, but they are not enjoyment goods.

Das Geld ist als zur Bedarfsbefriedigung nicht unmittelbar geeignet¹⁾, kein Einkommensgut, kein Gut erster Ordnung.

English translation: Money, being not directly suited to the satisfaction of needs¹⁾, is not an income good, not a good of the first order.

This also explains Meyer’s resistance to monetary or balance-sheet definitions of capital maintenance. A society may preserve a nominal capital sum while losing the real qualitative structure required for future provision. Conversely, a fall in money value is not identical with the consumption of capital. Crises and unemployment reveal that the essential question is whether the economy has reproduced the concrete means of continued satisfaction, not whether accounts show an unchanged value.

Meyer then distinguishes sharply between national income and individual income. Private income is not simply a physical share of the social product; it is shaped by possession, contract, money, and law. Rent, interest, wages, entrepreneurial gain, speculation, gifts, public revenues, and insurance receipts are socially mediated claims. Entrepreneurial income appears as a residual product-revenue rather than a sum of wages, rent, and interest. Wages, especially among common laborers, often fail the stricter requirement of secured recurrent provision, which gives Meyer’s analysis a social-political edge: the demand for a right to work becomes a demand for income in the full sense, not merely for occasional earnings.

The same distinction governs his treatment of uses, services, saving, insurance, trade, and public income. The annual use of a durable good is not a new good entering income each year; otherwise the good and its effects would be counted twice. Services do not belong to individual income as transferable possessions or saved goods, yet they may belong to national income when they directly satisfy wants. Saving is likewise not automatically capital formation, since only a further productive use of saved resources converts them into capital.

International exchange and state finance confirm the asymmetry between national and individual income. For Meyer, national economies are territorially delimited, and only first-order enjoyment goods imported or exported directly affect national-income calculation. Money flows, trade balances, and private purchasing power cannot by themselves measure income, though the distribution of individual incomes helps determine what enjoyment goods society will produce.

The work’s lasting significance lies in its refusal to reduce income to yield, money revenue, annual product, or subjective satisfaction. Meyer anticipates problems of national accounting, welfare measurement, capital maintenance, and social insurance by treating income as recurrent social provision rather than as a simple return on assets.

Das Einkommen ist keine Ertragskategorie.

English translation: Income is not a category of yield.