Salários e Capital

"Great care must be taken in dealing with the productivity concept.

In particular, there is danger in using a term such as “productivity of labor.” Suppose, for example, we state that “the productivity of labor has advanced in the last century.”

The im­plication is that the cause of this increase came from within labor itself, i.e., because current labor is more energetic or personally skillful than previous labor. This, however, is not the case.

An advancing capital structure increases the marginal productivity of labor, because the labor supply has increased less than the supply of capital goods. This increase in the marginal productivity of labor, however, is not due to some special improvement in the labor energy expended. It is due to the increased supply of capital goods.

The causal agents of increased wage rates in an expanding economy, then, are not primarily the workers themselves, but the capitalist-entrepreneurs who have invested in capital goods.

The workers are provided with more and better tools, and so their labor becomes relatively scarcer as compared to the other factors.[19]" "Man, Economy and the State", Chapter 9—Production: Particular Factor Pricesand Productive Incomes