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Starting with its early twentieth century origins, the development of Labor Economics is traced to the present. We describe an intellectual revolution in which an earlier tradition that focused primarily [...]

Professional and academic economists of the 19th century were influenced by the work of their amateur counterparts on the relationship between wages and labor productivity. The work of Lord Thomas Brassey was interpreted by some amateur economists as establishing that higher real wages could promote labor productivity, reducing or eliminating the cost of wage increases. Review of the work of professionals, including Alfred Marshall, John A. Hobson, J.E. Cairnes and F.A. Walker, provides some insight into how these early theories made the transition into marginal economics.

I use Body Mass Index (BMI) to investigate how the relationship between health status and retirement among older men has changed since 1900. Although BMIs for the elderly were much less healthy in 1900 than today, the BMI level that maximizes labor force participation rates has not changed. However, in 1900 the elasticity of nonparticipation with respect to BMI was greater than it is today, suggesting that health is now less important to the retirement decision than in the past. Other factors (especially rising income) are more important than health in explaining the historical changes in retirement rates.

Dr. George W. Taylor, who died in 1972 at the age of 71, left behind a legacy of leadership in the field that he had founded as a young scholar [...]

John Gray, considered by many a 'Ricardian socialist,' advanced a monetary theory based on the concept of 'labour-money' which came under attack by Karl Marx as being utopian. The argument centered around the relationship between labor and value and theories of the function of money. Marx criticized Gray for failing to understand the complexities of the interaction between money, commodities and labor which allowed the latter to ignore contradictions between socialist goals and commodity relations.