Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen: Review of John Bates Clark’s The Distribution of Wealth (1901)

Schullern’s brief scholarly review situates Clark’s theory of income distribution within contemporary theoretical economics. It presents the book’s governing proposition: undisturbed distribution assigns each productive factor the value it produces. The crucial qualification concerns the status of this purported natural law:

Den Terminus Naturgesetz (natural law) versteht Clark im Sinne eines statischen Gesetzes, einer Tendenz.

English translation: Clark understands the term Naturgesetz (natural law) in the sense of a static law, of a tendency.

Schullern thus identifies a theoretical tendency, not an unconditional description of observed incomes. He declines detailed criticism or a comprehensive account within the limits of a short notice, noting that Clark systematizes articles previously published in journals. The review instead maps the conceptual foundations and principal sections of the book.

Marginal productivity supplies the organizing principle of Clark’s treatment of wages and interest. Schullern makes its intellectual affiliation explicit:

Da Clark den Gedanken der Grenzproductivität all seinen Betrachtungen über Lohn und Zins zugrunde legt, rückt er der österreichischen Schule nahe, er muss sich also auch mit ihr auseinandersetzen; zu Böhm-Bawerk scheint er eingehender erst Stellung nehmen zu wollen in einem zweiten Werke, das den dynamischen Theil der Einkommensvertheilung behandeln soll.

English translation: Since Clark places the idea of marginal productivity at the basis of all his considerations on wages and interest, he moves close to the Austrian School, and he must therefore also come to terms with it; he seems to intend to take a more detailed position on Bohm-Bawerk only in a second work, which is to treat the dynamic part of income distribution.

The proximity to the Austrian school entails a need for theoretical engagement; Schullern cautiously locates a fuller response to Böhm-Bawerk in a projected treatment of dynamic distribution. His account also stresses that static laws, including marginal productivity, remain operative in developing societies.

The chapter outline gives this argument its structure. Chapters 4, 5, and 12 establish distribution’s basis in economic laws, its relation to social organization, and marginal productivity’s regulation of wages and interest. Chapters 7–8 address wages; chapters 9–10 distinguish capital from capital goods, assigning interest to the product of capital and rent to the returns of capital goods. Chapter 13 treats rent, while later sections chiefly explain and defend earlier propositions. Value theory and rent theory therefore enter as necessary components of the distribution problem, with the rent principle potentially applicable to wages and interest. The review’s significance lies in this compact positioning of Clark’s conceptual system, rather than in a judgment of whether its promised correspondence between production and income has been demonstrated.