Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Zusatzbemerkung (1894)

Böhm-Bawerk’s supplementary article clarifies his agreement and disagreement with Auspitz over costs, utility, and the disutility of labor. It begins by identifying shared theoretical premises, proceeds through corrections keyed to three sections of Auspitz’s preceding article, and concludes by challenging the equal explanatory standing of utility and disutility. Its central thesis is that the empirical classical cost law cannot be identified with the elementary “law of disutility”: monetary production costs and subjective labor hardship are distinct magnitudes, even when both influence prices.

Böhm-Bawerk wants to prevent Auspitz’s criticism of him from being mistaken for a defense of conventional cost theory. On his reading, both authors recognize that monetary costs require further explanation. Even where labor hardship affects wages, its influence depends on the worker’s subjective valuation of the money received. Supply therefore cannot be assigned exclusively to disutility while demand is assigned to utility. Utility enters both sides of the explanation. Böhm-Bawerk locates their substantive disagreement in the practical scope of the disutility mechanism:

Unsere einzige wesentliche Differenz bezieht sich darauf, dass nach meiner Meinung die disutility durch Hindernisse thatsächlicher Natur an der Ausübung jenes Einflusses sehr häufig gehindert wird, während Herr Auspitz glaubt, dass derselbe trotz jener Hindernisse imstande sei, sich zu universeller Geltung zu bringen.

English translation: Our only essential difference relates to this, that in my opinion the disutility is very frequently prevented by obstacles of an actual nature from exercising that influence, whereas Mr. Auspitz believes that it is able, in spite of those obstacles, to bring itself to universal validity.

The ensuing corrections distinguish simplifying assumptions from claims of economic rigidity. “Aggregate demand for labor products” means that demand pressures pass between interconnected labor markets, not that individual demands or their sum remain fixed. Similarly, Böhm-Bawerk’s argument requires neither invariant working hours nor fixed productivity or workforce size. He accepts variation in effort, skill, equipment, remuneration, and labor-market participation. What matters is that available labor remains limited, and that working time is not generally adjustable with the freedom required to bring wages and hardship into equilibrium. His numerical examples illustrate relationships without purporting to reproduce every differentiation of actual labor.

The third section clarifies the purpose of his earlier example. Differences within ordinary labor were omitted for intelligibility, not denied. More importantly, the example was intended to establish a distinction between two laws, not to disprove the existence of disutility effects:

Mein concretes Beweisthema war jedoch, wie von mir wiederholt hervorgehoben wurde (S. 201, 205, 206, 207, 209 und öfter), lediglich die Nichtidentität des (existierenden) law of disutility mit dem empirischen classischen Kostengesetze.

English translation: My concrete thesis to be proved was, however, as I repeatedly emphasized (pp. 201, 205, 206, 207, 209 and elsewhere), solely the non-identity of the (existing) law of disutility with the empirical classical law of costs.

A new illustration makes that distinction concrete. A skilled artisan earns four florins for a day’s comparatively agreeable work; an ordinary laborer earns two florins for work assumed to involve twice the hardship. The empirical cost law makes their products’ prices tend toward their respective monetary wage costs. Identifying those costs with absolute disutility would imply the opposite price ranking. Böhm-Bawerk therefore separates price adjustment toward money costs from any further relationship between wages and subjective sacrifice:

Dass dies zweifellos nicht der Fall ist, ist der Beweis für mein Thema, dass das Kostengesetz und die in demselben angerufenen Kosten nicht einfach identisch sein können mit der disutility und der ihr zugeschriebenen Beeinflussung der Preise.

English translation: That this is indubitably not the case is the proof of my thesis that the law of costs, and the costs invoked therein, cannot be simply identical with the disutility and with the influence upon prices ascribed to it.

Both relationships may nevertheless hold simultaneously. If labor supply is sufficiently adjustable, each worker can extend working time until the marginal utility of wages balances the hardship incurred. Because money has different subjective significance for the two workers, four florins might compensate the artisan for less hardship than two florins compensate the ordinary laborer. Such an equilibrium would reconcile the two laws without making them identical. But prices can also gravitate toward money costs when wages do not constitute that balancing equivalent. Böhm-Bawerk regards these divergences as common; he declines to repeat the empirical evidence already presented in his earlier discussion.

The concluding question draws out the theoretical stakes. Even granting Auspitz’s equal division of price determination between demand and supply, utility governs demand and also participates in translating labor hardship into monetary supply costs. On that accounting, disutility receives only half of a half. The article’s relevance lies in this separation of observable cost-price regularities from their subjective explanatory foundations: recognizing labor sacrifice does not establish its universal operation, nor make it an independent measure of value equal in practical importance to utility.