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The iron law of wages is a proposed law of economics that asserts that
real wages Real wages are wages adjusted for inflation, or, equivalently, wages in terms of the amount of goods and services that can be bought. This term is used in contrast to nominal wages or unadjusted wages. Because it has been adjusted to account f ...
always tend, in the long run, toward the minimum wage necessary to sustain the life of the worker. The theory was first named by
Ferdinand Lassalle Ferdinand Lassalle (; 11 April 1825 – 31 August 1864) was a Prussian-German jurist, philosopher, socialist and political activist best remembered as the initiator of the social democratic movement in Germany. "Lassalle was the first man in Ger ...
in the mid-nineteenth century. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels attribute the doctrine to Lassalle (notably in Marx's 1875 '' Critique of the Gotha Program''), the idea to Thomas Malthus's ''
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,'' and the terminology to Goethe's "great, eternal iron laws" in ''
Das Göttliche ''Das Göttliche'' (''The Divine'') is a hymn in the Weimar Classicism style written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832) was a German poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, ...
''. It was coined in reference to the views of
classical economist Classical economics, classical political economy, or Smithian economics is a school of thought in political economy that flourished, primarily in Kingdom of Great Britain, Britain, in the late 18th and early-to-mid 19th century. Its main thinkers ...
s such as David Ricardo's law of rent, and the competing population theory of Thomas Malthus. It held that the market price of labor (which tends toward the minimum required for the subsistence of the laborers) would always, or almost always, reduce as the working population increased and vice versa. Ricardo believed that this happened only under particular conditions.


Lassalle

According to Alexander Gray,
Ferdinand Lassalle Ferdinand Lassalle (; 11 April 1825 – 31 August 1864) was a Prussian-German jurist, philosopher, socialist and political activist best remembered as the initiator of the social democratic movement in Germany. "Lassalle was the first man in Ger ...
"gets the credit of having invented" the phrase the "iron law of wages", as Lassalle wrote about ''"das eiserne und grausame Gesetz"'' (the iron and cruel law). According to Lassalle, wages cannot fall below subsistence wage level because without subsistence, laborers will be unable to work. However, competition among laborers for employment will drive wages down to this minimal level. This follows from Malthus' demographic theory, according to which population rises when wages are above the "subsistence wage" and falls when wages are below subsistence. Assuming the demand for labor to be a given monotonically decreasing function of the real wage rate, the theory then predicted that, in the long-run equilibrium of the system, labor supply (i.e. population) will rise or fall to the number of workers needed at the subsistence wage. The justification for this was that when wages are higher, the supply of labor will increase relative to demand, creating an excess supply and thus depressing market real wages; when wages are lower, labor supply will fall, increasing market real wages. This would create a dynamic convergence towards a subsistence-wage equilibrium with constant population, in accordance with
supply and demand In microeconomics, supply and demand is an economic model of price determination in a Market (economics), market. It postulates that, Ceteris paribus, holding all else equal, in a perfect competition, competitive market, the unit price for a ...
theory. As Ricardo noticed, this prediction would not come true as long as new
investment Investment is the dedication of money to purchase of an asset to attain an increase in value over a period of time. Investment requires a sacrifice of some present asset, such as time, money, or effort. In finance, the purpose of investing i ...
, technology, or some other factor causes the demand for labor to increase faster than population: in that case, both real wages and population would increase over time. The demographic transition (a transition from high birth and death rates to low birth and death rates as a country industrializes) changed this dynamic in most of the developed world, leading to wages much higher than the subsistence wage. Even in countries which still have rapidly expanding populations, the need for skilled labor in certain occupations causes some wages to rise much faster than in others. To answer the question of why wages might fall towards a subsistence level, Ricardo put forth the law of rent. Ricardo and Malthus debated this concept in a lengthy personal correspondence.


Ricardo

The content of the iron law of wages has been attributed to economists writing earlier than Lassalle. For example, Antonella Stirati notes that Joseph Schumpeter claimed that Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot first formulated the concept. Some (e.g., John Kenneth Galbraith) attribute the idea to David Ricardo. According to Terry Peach, economists interpreting Ricardo as having a more flexible view of wages include Haney (1924), J. R. Hicks (1973), Frank Knight (1935), Ramsay (1836), George Stigler (1952), and Paul Samuelson (1979). She sees Ricardo, for example, as being closer to the more flexible views of population characteristic of economists prior to Malthus. The theorist Henry George noticed that Ricardo's Law of Rent did not imply that a reduction of wages to subsistence is an immutable fact, but that it instead points the way towards reforms that could greatly increase real wages, such as a land value tax. Ricardo drew a distinction between a natural price and a market price. For Ricardo, the natural price of labor was the cost of maintaining the laborer. However, Ricardo believed that the market price of labor or the actual wages paid could exceed the natural wage level indefinitely due to countervailing economic tendencies: Ricardo also claimed that the natural wage was not necessarily what was needed to physically sustain the laborer, but could be much higher depending on the "habits and customs" of a nation:


Criticism

Socialist critics of Lassalle and of the alleged iron law of wages, such as Karl Marx, argued that although there was a ''tendency'' for wages to fall to subsistence levels, there were also tendencies which worked in opposing directions. Marx criticized the Malthusian basis for the iron law of wages. According to Malthus, humanity is largely destined to live in poverty because an increase in productive capacity results in an increase in population. Marx criticized Lassalle for misunderstanding David Ricardo. Marx also noted that the foundation of what he called "modern political economy" needs, for the theory of value, only for wages to be a given magnitude. He did so in praising the Physiocrats.Marx, Karl (1963, 1969) '' Theories of Surplus Value'', Part I, Chapter II, Progress Publishers


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Iron law of wages Economics laws Classical economics Labour economics Ferdinand Lassalle