Knowledge that Transforms

The three agencies that regulated prices, 205. — Differences in their methods, 206. — The Price-Fixing Committee, 209. — Commodities regulated by the committee, 209. — Ground for their selection; heavy government needs, 210. — Prices were fixed as maxima only, 214. — Gradual elaboration and extension, 214. — Cost of production as the basis, 216. — Marginal, or “bulk-line,” cost, and charts illustrating it, 218. — This basis of price-fixing justified by economic theory, 222. — Distinction between differences in cost based on physical causes and those based on human qualities, 222. — The real ground for stress on marginal cost was necessity of maintaining output, 228. — Special phases of some articles, lumber, cement, iron and steel, 229. — Proposals for an average or pooled price, 232. — Objections to this method, 233. — Conclusion, 238.

Labor-purchase theory of wages, 256. — A Crusoe or collective analysis, 257; inapplicable for competitive purposes, 258; but invoking the selective working of the iron law, 261. — Property as affecting iron law, 262. — Predation and survival, 263. — Minima of living and death rate, standard of living and birth rate, as bearing on wages, 264. — Both the minimum and the standard doctrine are cost doctrines for the supply of men who have no costs of production, 265. — Bearing of numbers on per capita product, 268. — Flexibility of standards of living, 270. — Population limited by increasing product, 271. — The causal nexus, 272. — Wage-fund theory, 274. — Labor-pain theory, 278. — Productivity theories, 280; in ethical implications, 280; in distributive precision, 282. — Surplus-value theory, 286. — Reconstruction, 288. — Production in competitive meaning, 288. — No outlook for higher wages at expense of employers, 288. — Possible lines of amelioration, 289. — Institutional conditions and competitive processes as affecting (1) the distribuend, (2) the distribution rations, 291. — Conclusion, 297.

Burdens of war are objective and subjective, 242. — Costs resulting from destruction, and cost of maintaining the fighting forces, 243. — Choice between rival ways of financing a war, 245. — Different effects of the levy plan and the loan plan, 247. — The assumed burden of a loan to the lender, 249. — Subjective burdens of levy and loan methods, 252. — Conclusion, 254.