III. The Economic Effect of Changing Price Levels

There was general agreement at the time that changes in price levels resulted in arbitrary and inequitable redistribution of wealth and income. There appeared, however, during this period some new arguments in support of the doctrine that falling prices had adverse effects on the volume of wealth and production which made them particularly undesirable, and that rising prices might bring advantages for production and wealth-accumulation to compensate for their inequitable influence on distribution. The general trend of these arguments was such as to constitute at least a partial defense of the wartime inflation and to strengthen the opposition to resumption at the old par. Whether by implication or expressly, these doctrines gave encouragement to the advocates of a national paper currency free from the limitations to which an international metallic currency was subject. To Ricardo these doctrines were for this as well as for other reasons unpalatable, and later “orthodox” economists, following in his path, tended to ignore or to ridicule them. They were, no doubt, carried to extreme and even absurd lengths. They represent, nevertheless, a substantial contribution to economic analysis which in later years had to be rediscovered.

According to Thomas Attwood, it was the lack of uniformity in a fall in prices which made it injurious:

If prices were to fall suddenly, and generally, and equally, in all things, and if it was well understood, that the amount of debts and obligations were to fall in the same proportion, at the same time, it is possible that such a fall might take place without arresting consumption and production, and in that case it would neither be injurious or beneficial in any great degree, but when a fall of this kind takes place in an obscure and unknown way, first upon one article and then upon another, without any correspondent fall taking place upon debts and obligations, it has the effect of destroying all confidence in property, and all inducements to its production, or to the employment of laborers in any wav.

A contraction of the currency, on the other hand, was injurious because the rigidity of costs prevented it from being followed immediately by a reduction in prices. During the interval consumers, finding themselves possessed of reduced funds, would buy less physical quantities of goods. Workmen would thus lose employment, “until the action of intense misery upon their minds, and of general distress upon all, shall so far have reduced their monied wages and expenses, as to reduce the price [of their product] ... within the reduced monied means of the capitalist.”

Wheatley, abandoning his original views, now argued similarly that falling prices, unless they resulted from increasing per capita output, were a burden on farmers and manufacturers because rent, wages, and taxes would not fall in proportion:

All the distress arises from an inability to make good the contracts, which individuals entered into with each other and the state when prices were high, and nothing can remove the embarrassment, but altering the contracts, lowering rent, wages, and taxes, according to the reduction of prices, or raising prices to their former standard by increasing our currency to its former amount.

These and other writers argued in like manner that an increase in the quantity of money operates to increase employment and prosperity. The argument took two forms. In one of them, the “forced-saving” doctrine now first introduced in England, it is held that the increase in money results in an increase in commodity prices unaccompanied by a corresponding increase in the prices of the factors. There results a forced saving on the part of the recipients of the relatively fixed incomes, not in the monetary sense of an increase in the amount of unspent funds, but in the opposite sense of a decrease in the amount of real consumption while money expenditures are maintained. The increase in money is retained by entrepreneurs, who invest it in additional production. In the other form of the argument, commodity prices do not rise immediately or do not rise in as great proportion as the increase in money, and the money left over is available for additional expenditures and consequently for the employment of additional labor. This form of the doctrine, of course, was not novel, but goes back to Hume, and even earlier to William Potter and John Law, and rests on the assumption that there are idle resources.

The first stages of the development in England of the doctrine of forced saving have been ably traced by Hayek. He finds the first statement in print of the doctrine in the following passage from Henry Thornton:

It must be also admitted that, provided we assume an excessive issue of paper to lift up, as it may for a time, the cost [read prices?] of goods though not the price of labor, some augmentation of stock will be the consequence; for the laborer, according to this supposition, may be forced by his necessity to consume fewer articles, though he may be exercise the same industry. But this saving, as well as any additional one which may arise from a similar defalcation of the revenue of the unproductive members of the society, will be attended with a proportionate hardship and injustice.

Jeremy Bentham had shortly before completed an extended exposition of the same doctrine, but it remained in manuscript form until published in 1843 as his Manual of political economy. According to Bentham, if an increase of money passes in the first instance into hands which employ it “productively,” it results in reduced consumption, because of higher prices, on the part of all who use their income for “unproductive expenditure,” until the new money reaches hands which will use it unproductively. During this interval the reduced consumption of wage earners and recipients of fixed incomes results in corresponding additions to the national stock of capital.

Hayek refers also to reasoning along similar lines by Malthus, Dugald Stewart, Lauderdale, Torrens, and Ricardo, with the caution that he would “not be surprised if a closer study of the literature of the time revealed still more discussions of the problem.” Some important additions can be made to Hayek's citations, including both further discussions of the problem by the writers whom he has cited and discussions by other writers, and most notably by Joplin.

In the other form of the doctrine that an increase in money meant an increase in production, it was argued that an increase in the quantity of money would increase the monetary volume of purchases more rapidly than it would increase prices, with the result that there would be a substantial interval during which the increase of spendable funds would be absorbed by increased employment in the production of consumers' goods rather than by increased prices. In this form of the doctrine, the increase in money results in increased real consumption, whereas in the forced-saving form it results in increased investment, but in both forms it makes possible increased employment.

The contributions of Joplin to the discussion are interesting because of the way in which, in the midst of much confused analysis, there appear concise statements anticipating some of the “innovations” in both terminology and concepts of present-day monetary theory. Hayek credits Wicksell with “a contribution of signal importance” by his rediscovery of Thornton's doctrine of the effect of the rate of interest, through its influence on the volume of bank loans, on the volume of money, and his combination therewith of the doctrine of forced saving resulting from an increase in the quantity of money. But Joplin has claims of priority in this respect. Hayek has himself pointed out that Joplin in 1823 and later had ably analyzed the influence of the rate of interest on the quantity of money. Joplin not only stated clearly the doctrine of forced saving, but on the basis of these two doctrines reached conclusions as to the proper criteria of currency management which in their essentials seem to anticipate Hayek's “neutral-money” doctrine.

Joplin stated the forced-saving doctrine in several of his writings. There follows one such statement:

If a person borrows one thousand pounds of a banker who issues his own notes, the banker has seldom any means of knowing whether he has lent him money that has been previously saved or not. He lends him his notes, and if either he or some other banker should not have previously had a thousand pounds' worth of notes deposited with them, he has at once added a thousand pounds to the capital and a thousand pounds to the currency of the country. To the party who has borrowed the money, he has given the power of going into the market and purchasing a thousand pounds' worth of commodities, but in doing this he raises their price and diminishes the value of the money in previous circulation to the extent of one thousand pounds, so that he acquires the commodities by depriving those of them who held the money by which they were represented and to whom they properly belonged. On the other hand, if a person pays a thousand pounds into the hands of a banker, and the currency is contracted to that extent, both one thousand pounds of capital and one thousand pounds of currency are destroyed. The commodities represented by the money thus saved and cancelled, are thrown on the market, prices are reduced, and the power of consuming them is obtained by the holders of the money left in circulation.

Joplin does not approve of forced saving. It involves a fraud on those who were holders of money prior to the increase in its issue. At first it results in a stimulus to trade such as “in all probability would more than compensate the holders of the money in previous circulation for the loss they incurred,” but if the increase of issue continues, definite injury and injustice results. “Legitimately a banker can never lend money which has not been saved out of income. Money saved represents commodities which might have been consumed by the party who saves it. Interest is paid for the use of the commodities and not for the money.” If banks have the power to issue money, the amount of such issue is determined by the rate of interest which the banks charge on loans. If forced saving is to be avoided, banks should charge “the natural rate of interest,” which he defines as the rate which keeps savings and borrowings equal. Under a purely metallic currency in its most perfect state, the quantity of money (and/or the scale of value) would be “fixed and unchangeable” and banks would be able to lend only what others had saved. But where banks acquired the right to issue paper currency not fully covered by gold, the quantity of money, “which ought, if possible, to be as fixed as the sun-dial, came to depend upon the credit of bankers with the public, and the credit of the public with the bankers, upon the supply of bills, the value of capital, and innumerable contingencies, which ought no more to affect the amount of currency in circulation than the motions of the sun.” To remedy this situation he would confine the circulation of paper money to certificates of deposit of bullion exchangeable for and issued only in exchange for bullion.

Other doctrines were presented during this period which tended similarly to lead to the conclusion that the inflation of the war period had contributed to the augmentation of the national wealth or the national income. Bentham had argued that if taxation fell on funds which otherwise would have been spent on consumption, and if the proceeds of the taxes were not spent unproductively by the government, the “forced frugality” on the part of the taxpayers would operate to increase the national wealth. Lauderdale, to the same effect, argued that the sinking-fund involved a “forced accumulation of capital ... annually raised by taxation,” thus “transferring from the hands of the consumers a portion of their revenues to commissioners, who are bound by law to employ it as capital, whilst, if it had remained in the hands to whom it naturally belonged, it would have been expended in the purchase of consumable commodities.” Like Bentham, Lauderdale disapproved of this “forced accumulation,” but not on the grounds of equity to which Bentham appealed. Lauderdale claimed that when the government's current expenditures fell below its revenues, there resulted a diminution of “effectual demand” and consequently of production. While the war continued, he wanted the government to carry on its increased wartime expenditures by borrowing, and without forcing individuals, through taxation, to decrease their expenditures. After the war had ended, he urged the government to offset the decline in military expenditures by increased civil expenditures on public works, in order to restore the demand for labor.

William Blake similarly argued that increased government expenditures financed by borrowing operated to increase prices, profits, and production, by bringing into activity capital which if left in private hands would have remained “dormant,” by which he meant apparently that it would have been kept either as idle cash or as idle stocks of goods. He explained the post-war difficulties as due to “the transition from an immense, unremitting, protracted, effectual demand, for almost every article of consumption, to a comparative cessation of that demand.”

John Rooke believed that spending on consumption contributed to prosperity whereas savings, apparently even if invested, did not. He therefore held that the cessation of military expenditures, unless offset by deliberate currency inflation, would operate to cause deflation and depression, especially if these military expenditures had been financed by borrowing:

As the funds which had supported them [i.e., soldiers] in a military capacity, particularly in England, were partly derived from borrowed money, the savers who had supplied this money did not become spenders in the place of government; nor would the war-taxes which were remitted immediately pass into circulation through the medium of consumption, the basis of all income.

In one of his earliest essays, John Stuart Mill denied Blake's argument that it was the cessation of the government's war expenditures which brought about the depression:

... every argument is [fallacious] which proceeds upon the supposition that a fund becomes a source of demand by being spent, while it would not have become so by being saved. A loan is a mere transfer of a portion of capital from the lender to the government: had it remained with the lender it would have been a constant and perennial source of demand: when taken and spent by the government, it is a transitory and fugitive one.

Mill is here tacitly assuming that the government borrowed funds which the lenders would otherwise have themselves invested. But Blake had argued that if left in private hands these funds would have remained “dormant,” i.e., would have been kept either as idle hoards of cash or as idle stocks of commodities. He could even more effectively have argued that the funds borrowed by the government were in large part created by the banks for the purpose of being lent to the government and therefore might not have existed at all in the absence of the government borrowings. Mill also objected that Blake's contention that there could be oversaving rested on the reasoning that although the savers were the only persons who could purchase the (net?) products of their investment, men saved because they did not wish to consume. Mill replied, that on the contrary, men saved because they wished to consume more than they saved. Mill is here once more clearly identifying saving with investment. He overlooks the possibility that men may save without investing because for the time being they wish neither to consume nor to invest, but merely to preserve their capital resources without risk of loss through unprofitable investment, and that this is especially likely to be the case when prices are falling rapidly and no investment seems profitable or secure.

It is not surprising that Ricardo, with his loyalty to the metallic standard and his temperamental reluctance to explore the shortrun and intermediate phases of economic process, also did not take kindly to these doctrines. His references to them are few, and tend to be obscurantist in nature. As in other cases, he alternated between outright denial of their validity, on the one hand, and qualified admission of their correctness for the short run but with minimization of their importance, on the other hand.

To Malthus's argument, that an increase in the quantity of money would operate to transfer purchasing power from those with fixed money incomes, an “idle and unproductive class,” to farmers, manufacturers, and merchants, and would thus result in an increase of capital, Ricardo replied that an increase of prices resulting from such increase of money, by reducing real fixed incomes, might reduce the savings of those receiving such incomes to an equal degree instead of reducing their consumption.

In answer to questions put to him by the Lords Committee in 1819, Ricardo dealt further with the question of forced saving. He denied that bank credit created capital:

Credit, I think, is the means which is alternately transferred from one to another, to make use of capital actually existing; it does not create capital; it determines only by whom that capital should be employed ... Capital can only be acquired by saving.

Asked what in his opinion was the difference between “a stimulus ... by fictitious capital arising from an overabundance of paper in circulation, and that which results from the regular operation of real capital employed in production,” he merely replied:

I believe that on this subject I differ from most other people. I do not think that any stimulus is given to production by the use of fictitious capital, as it is called.

He conceded that an increase in paper money circulation, by changing the proportions in which the national income is divided in favor of the saving classes, “may facilitate the accumulation of capital in the hands of the capitalist; he having increased profits, while the laborer has diminished wages.” This is not an acceptance of the forced-saving doctrine, for the increase of investment is held to result indirectly and voluntarily from the redistribution of real income from a non-saving to a saving group, rather than directly and involuntarily from the rise in the consumer's cost of living. Ricardo, moreover, added that “This may sometimes happen, but I think seldom does.”

Although Ricardo conceded that a sharp fall in prices was a serious evil, the only undesirable consequence of such a fall which he emphasized was the arbitrary redistribution of wealth which resulted therefrom. He admitted also that economic depression was likely to follow the end of war, but he attributed it to a relative shift in the demands for particular commodities, to which the capital equipment of the country had not yet had time to adjust itself. Ricardo's position on these questions was closely related to his acceptance of the James Mill-J. B. Say doctrine that production, if properly directed, created the demand for its product, and that a general insufficiency of demand to absorb all of the possible output of industry was impossible. This doctrine leads naturally to a denial that a fall in prices would operate to restrict production or a rise in prices to increase it. It rests on concepts of “supply” and “demand” too physical and an implicit assumption of price and money-cost flexbility too unrealistic to serve adequately the purposes of analysis of short-run disturbances in a monetary economy. If “supply” and “demand” are interpreted, as they should be, not as simply quantities of commodities but, in the modern manner, as schedules of quantities which would be produced or purchased, respectively, at specified schedules of prices, it becomes easy to see that if money costs are inflexible the schedules of demand prices may fall more rapidly than the schedules of supply prices, with a consequent reduction, not only in prices, but also in volume of sales, in output, in employment, in willingness of capitalists to invest, and in willingness of bankers to lend even if there were would-be borrowers.

Malthus was convinced that there was something wrong in the James Mill doctrine, including its Ricardian version. He failed, however, ever satisfactorily to expose the fallacy which underlay it, because he was himself insufficiently emancipated from the purely physical interpretation of “supply” and “demand.” In the following passage, confused though it is, it appears to me that he comes nearest to exposing this fallacy successfully:

The fallacy of Mr. Mill's argument depends entirely upon the effect of quantity on price and value. Mr. Mill says that the supply and demand of every individual are of necessity equal. But as supply is always estimated by quantity, and demand only by price and value; and as increase of quantity often diminishes price and value, it follows, according to all just theory, that so far from being always equal, they must of necessity be often very unequal, as we find by experience. If it be said that reckoning both the demand and supply of commodities by value, they will then be equal; this may be allowed; but it is obvious that they may then both greatly fall in value compared with money and labor; and the will and power of capitalists to set industry in motion, which is the most general and important of all kinds of demand, may be decidedly diminished at the very time that the quantity of produce, however well proportioned each part may be to the other, is decidedly increased.

It was not Malthus but the two Attwoods, and especially Thomas Attwood, who first explained in reasonably satisfactory fashion the dependence of the “demand and supply” of price theory on the state of the currency:

... while it is certain that a reduction of the quantity of money in circulation necessarily occasions a reduction in the monied prices of all commodities; it is of equal necessity, that the price of no commodity whatever can decline, without some alternation in its relative proportion of supply and demand. The manner, therefore, in which a lessened quantity of money reduces monied prices, is by operating on those ulterior principles by which supply and demand are themselves governed. A scarcity of money makes an abundance of goods. Increase the quantity of money, and goods become scarce. The relative proportion between money and commodities can never alter without producing these appearances. Mr. Tooke, and Mr. Ricardo, will find in this obvious principle an exposition of many of the difficulties and inconsistencies in which they have involved the subject.

Money is as necessary to constitute price, as commodities: increase the supply of money, and you increase the demand for commodities; diminish the supply of money, and you diminish the demand for commodities. The supply of commodities is the demand for money, and the supply of money is the demand for commodities. The prices of commodities, therefore, depend quite as much upon the “proportion” between the supply of, and demand for, money, as they do upon the “proportion” between the supply of, and demand for, commodities. This is a truth which Sir Henry Parnell has altogether overlooked, and his neglect in this respect has led him into a labyrinth of errors. He has considered the supply of, and demand for, commodities as acted upon by some obscure, uncontrollable, and capricious principles, having no reference to the state of the currency, and none to the legislative enactments, which, at one period, have introduced cheap money and high prices, and, when enormous monied obligations have been contracted in such cheap money, have then, at another period, introduced dear money and low prices, and have thus strangled the industry of the country by compelling it to discharge monied obligations which its monied prices will not redeem.