Hans Mayer, Verteilung (1928)

Hans Mayer’s encyclopedia entry examines distribution through a history of its changing theoretical object. Its central claim is that modern economics must explain how individual incomes arise, rather than imagine a pre-existing national product subsequently apportioned among social classes. Moving from household and feudal organization through physiocracy and classical economics to marginal productivity and Austrian imputation theory, Mayer argues that an inherited vocabulary has obscured a fundamental conceptual transformation:

Wie in der Wissenschaftsgeschichte öfter, so hat auch hier die Entwicklung dazu geführt, daß unter Beibehaltung des alten Namens des Problems eine tiefgehende Veränderung des Probleminhaltes sich vollzogen hat.

English translation: As often happens in the history of science, development here too has brought about a profound change in the content of the problem while retaining its old name.

“Distribution” once described a concrete institutional operation. On great estates, obligations determined the division of output between lords and dependent producers; under feudal arrangements, dues and urban regulations governed the incomes of estates and occupations. Physiocracy generalized these conditions into a systematic theory. Its conception of the economy as an organism, whose constituent classes jointly produce and then receive shares of national income, was rooted in a society organized through status and authoritative regulation:

Aus diesen Verhältnissen heraus: dem Bestehen von Ständen, welche sich im großen und ganzen überdeckten mit den Klassen der Grundbesitzer, der Landwirte und der Gewerbetreibenden, und aus der Tatsache der autoritären Regelung der Wirtschaftsvorgänge innerhalb der Gesellschaft entstand das erste geschlossene System volkswirtschaftlicher Theorie und damit die erste „Verteilungslehre“ in dem Lehrgebäude der Physiokraten.

English translation: From these circumstances—the existence of estates which broadly coincided with the classes of landowners, farmers, and those engaged in trades, and the fact that economic processes within society were regulated authoritatively—there arose the first integrated system of economic theory and, with it, the first “theory of distribution” in the theoretical system of the Physiocrats.

For the Physiocrats, agriculture alone generated a net surplus. Landowners controlled its allocation, retaining a portion and leaving farmers enough to maintain themselves and production; artisans received their subsistence through expenditure by the other classes. Mayer’s point is not merely that this production theory was mistaken. Given its premises of class dependence and concentrated control over the surplus, distribution as the assignment of class shares was an intelligible problem.

His criticism concerns its survival under different conditions. In an exchange economy, the national economy is a network of individual economic relations, not a single agent disposing of a common yield. Individual incomes arise first; national income is their conceptual aggregate. To derive those incomes from the distribution of that aggregate reverses the explanatory order. Likewise, classes do not themselves receive incomes: class totals are constructed retrospectively from individual receipts. Mayer reinforces the objection by observing that income differences within a class can exceed those between members of different classes. His target is thus the treatment of statistical aggregates as if they were independently acting economic subjects.

The history of theory nevertheless shows research escaping its inherited formulation. Adam Smith still asked how society’s product was divided among classes, but actually investigated the determinants of incomes from labour, land, capital, and entrepreneurial activity. For Mayer, Smith’s decisive achievement was to recognize income formation as a problem of factor pricing, despite an inadequate underlying value theory. Ricardo continued this inquiry while assigning especially strong determining roles to population growth and diminishing agricultural returns.

Thünen marks the next turning point: the productive effect of the last unit of labour or capital helps determine the value and, under free competition, the price of equivalent units. Mayer presents modern marginal-productivity theory and the Austrian theory of imputation, together with value and price theory, as the foundations of contemporary income analysis. The historical sequence therefore advances a substantive position: explanation must connect productive contributions, valuation, and market prices, rather than begin with an undifferentiated social product.

A separate discussion addresses the persistent conjunction of explanation and justice. Questions about why incomes differ have repeatedly become questions about what each recipient deserves. Mayer traces this tendency through medieval just-price doctrine, Locke, Thünen, and socialist claims to the full product of labour. He presents Rodbertus and Marx as developing the premise that labour is the sole productive factor into exploitation theory. His objection distinguishes physical-technical causation from the economic dependence of output on productive conditions; the fuller argument is referred to another encyclopedia entry.

The conclusion separates causal explanation from moral or social-policy justification without excluding institutions or power from economic analysis. Natural-technical and economic regularities must be distinguished from the effects of legal arrangements, economic organization, and social power. Their operation nevertheless belongs within an account of income formation through prices:

Sie erkennt, daß die gesamte Einkommensbildung im Wege der Preisbildung vor sich geht, der Preisbildung für die Produkte sowohl, wie insbesondere für die Produktionsmittel.

English translation: It recognizes that all income formation takes place through price formation, price formation for products as well as, in particular, for the means of production.

The entry’s relevance lies in this double insistence: aggregates must not replace an explanation of individual incomes, and explanation must not be confused with justification. Its closing cross-references make clear that it supplies a conceptual orientation and historical argument; the detailed theory is delegated chiefly to the entries on imputation and price.