WAGES AND PRICES
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9485.1958.tb00364.x |
| Date | 01 June 1958 |
| Published date | 01 June 1958 |
| Author | A. D. CAMPBELL |
WAGES
AND
PRICES
ROBERTSON and Flanders think that we need to modify
our
wage-
determining machinery in order to avoid an appreciable inflationary
trend in prices, and Johnston’s tour shows
us
various alternative possi-
bilities in addition to those suggested by the first two writers.
Parkinson, in very good company, puts the major part of the blame
for rising wages, costs and prices
on
the high level of demand. The
three writers taking
a
positive line-Parkinson, Robertson and Flanders
largely content themselves with discussions of method rather than
of ends. Robertson and Flanders,
in
particular, spend most of their
papers discussing
how
to fix wages and do not give
us
much guidance
about the principles
on
which wages should be fixed or the ends that
we should try to achieve when fixing wages.
To
know what wages have to be fixed, we have to know about
many other things. We should know what is intended for prices,
production and employment, and for the distribution of income. It
is easy enough to agree about goals
for
production and employment
-at least in aggregate-but policies for prices and income distribution
are much more difficult. Has the primary distribution of income to
be left to the impersonal forces of market Competition,
then
to
be
modified by taxation and public expenditure to produce
a
satisfactory
secondary distribution?
Or
has there to be intervention from the start?
We do not obtain very much guidance about income distribution
from the authors
;
it
is
probably far too difficult a subject for mere
economists.
The question of the policy for prices is much more congenial. In
recent years we have been
so
concerned with the problem of halting
inflation that there has been little discussion of how we would like
prices to behave. Here again
we
do not obtain very much help from
the authors: they appear to have felt little need to go beyond the
immediate task
of
stopping inflation. Parkinson does mention the
problem briefly but he goes
no
farther than to say that it cannot be
too readily accepted that the natural course of prices is inevitably
upwards. Robertson does not refer explicitly to the relative merits
of
rising
or
falling prices but
he
appears to be seeking a goal of price
stabilisation. Flanders goes beyond price stabilisation
;
he appears to
favour rising prices. provided that we avoid
‘
too much inflation
’.
We
have therefore what could be held to be three slightly different views.
How should we like the value of money to behave?
165
To continue reading
Request your trial