Search

The article discusses the concept of normal price in value and distribution. It attempts to examine, clarify and make precise the meaning of normal price, with particular reference to differences in the way in which it is to be defined in the two leading classes of price problem with which economic theory deals. In what may be called the primary valuation, or the valuation of consumption goods, normal price must be defined in a way which has no valid application to the case of secondary valuation or distribution, the valuation of productive services.

The article presents information on various books about general works, theory and its history published in 1925. Some of the books included are, "Papers Relating to Political Economy," by F. Y. Edgeworth. The authors scattered papers, rescued from the files of the "Economic Journal," and the periodicals and brought together in these three volumes, make an impressive showing. Even one who, like the present reviewer, counts himself fairly familiar with the author, cannot turn to the pages of these books without a new appreciation of variety and the sustained level of the achievement they represent. "Origins of Sociology," by Albion W. Small. The author tells what sociology is by telling how it came to be, by tracing its differentiation out of the general field of social science. Being a sociologist, he naturally sees the sociological movement as an advance, a passing beyond previous social science. In the preface the movement is described as "a drive from relatively irresponsible discursiveness."

The article focuses on the book "Plain Talks on Economics," by Fabian Franklin. The title is a fair and excellent description of this endeavor to put over the fundamentals of economics to the general reader. It is the work of an old man, competent and successful in varied affairs of life, very sane, very wise. One can hardly deny that most of what the author says is true, and important; and one closes the book with a realization, tinged, possibly, with bitterness, of the justice of Carlyle's epithet, the dismal science. Of the two parts of the book, the first, on "Leading Principles," is only a little over half the length of the second, on "Issues of Today," and the first is much the less satisfactory of the two. It is explicitly unsystematic as well as brief, and its orthodoxy is in fact rather that of a generation ago than that of today. The whole idea of differentials is being more generally recognized as essentially meaningless, and discarded, even in the case of land rent. It does not explain rent to say that the value of a given piece of land is the difference between its value and that of a piece that has no value at all.