Principles Of Political Economy
- Автор: Mill John Stuart
- Год: 2022
- Язык: английский
- Год: Strelbytskyy Multimedia Publishing
- Жанр: Политика
Электронная книга - «Principles Of Political Economy». Краткое содержание книги:
Beside discussing descriptive issues such as which nations tended to benefit more in a system of trade based on comparative advantage (Mill's answer: those with more elastic demands for other countries' goods), the work also discussed normative issues such as ideal systems of political economy, critiquing proposed systems such as communism and socialism.
Along with A System of Logic, Principles of Political Economy established Mill's reputation as a leading public intellectual. Mill's sympathetic attitude in this work and in other essays toward contemporary socialism, particularly Fourierism, earned him esteem from the working class as one of their intellectual champions.
Railways and canals are virtually a diminution of the cost of production of all things sent to market by them; and literally so of all those the appliances and aids for producing which they serve to transmit. By their means land can be cultivated, which would not otherwise have remunerated the cultivators without a rise of price. Improvements in navigation have, with respect to food or materials brought from beyond sea, a corresponding effect.
§ 4. —In Manufactures.
From similar considerations, it appears that many purely mechanical improvements, which have, apparently, at least, no peculiar connection with agriculture, nevertheless enable a given amount of food to be obtained with a smaller expenditure of labor. A great improvement in the process of smelting iron would tend to cheapen agricultural implements, diminish the cost of railroads, of wagons and carts, ships, and perhaps buildings, and many other things to which iron is not at present applied, because it is too costly; and would thence diminish the cost of production of food. The same effect would follow from an improvement in those processes of what may be termed manufacture, to which the material of food is subjected after it is separated from the ground. The first application of wind or water power to grind corn tended to cheapen bread as much as a very important discovery in agriculture would have done; and any great improvement in the construction of corn-mills would have, in proportion, a similar influence.
Those manufacturing improvements which can not be made instrumental to facilitate, in any of its stages, the actual production of food, and therefore do not help to counteract or retard the diminution of the proportional return to labor from the soil, have, however, another effect, which is practically equivalent. What they do not prevent, they yet, in some degree, compensate for.[136]
Chart VII.
Ratio of Miles of Railroad to the Areas of States and Countries—United States and Europe. The relative proportion is 1 Mile Railroad to 4 Square Miles of Area.
No. Name. Rank in Size. Relative. 1 Massachusetts 67 98 2 Belgium 62 96 3 England and Wales 29 88 4 New Jersey 62 81 5 Connecticut 68 80 6 Rhode Island 71 65 7 Ohio 44 60 8 Illinois 32 59 9 Pennsylvania 40 55 10 Delaware 69 53 11 Indiana 50 52 12 New Hampshire 65 45 13 Switzerland 59 44 14 New York 39 41 15 Iowa 33 39 16 German Empire 4 38 17 Scotland 52 37 18 Maryland 63 36136
Cf. Book IV, Chap. I.