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Appendix 3 - Relative Movements of Real Wages and Output (1939)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 November 2012

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Summary

An article by Mr J. G. Dunlop in this Journal (September 1938, Vol. XLVIII, p. 413) on The Movement of Real and Money Wage Rates, and the note by Mr L. Tarshis printed below [in the Economic Journal, March 1939] (p. 150), clearly indicate that a common belief to which I acceded in my General Theory of Employment needs to be reconsidered. I there said:

It would be interesting to see the results of a statistical enquiry into the actual relationship between changes in money wages and changes in real wages. In the case of a change peculiar to a particular industry one would expect the change in real wages to be in the same direction as the change in money wages. But in the case of changes in the general level of wages, it will be found, I think, that the change in real wages associated with a change in money wages, so far from being usually in the same direction, is almost always in the opposite direction … This is because, in the short period, falling money wages and rising real wages are each, for independent reasons, likely to accompany decreasing employment; labour being readier to accept wage-cuts when employment is falling off, yet real wages inevitably rising in the same circumstances on account of the increasing marginal return to a given capital equipment when output is diminished.

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Publisher: Royal Economic Society
Print publication year: 1978

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