Why Wages Rise

By: F.A. Harper

Narrated by: Steven Menasche

Wages are of prime importance in any advanced economy, such as ours. They affect us all far more than seems evidenced in our concern about them.

Basic principles always have a way of seeming simple, yet they can no more be oversimplified than can the law of gravity or the listing of chemical elements be oversimplified. What is needed in our complex society of millions of products sold by millions of business units to over 100 million traders through billions of transactions each year is to get back to simple economic principles. These are working tools for solving problems that seem more complex than they really are.

©1957 F. A. Harper (P)2016 Gildan Media LLC

Thought-provoking but ultimately false

An fair articulation of the Austrian school’s view of the labor market in the mid-20th century and increasingly in the early 21st century. It relies on both essential truths (e.g. wages are a factor of productivity) and blatant falsehoods (e.g. slaves produced little surplus to their owners) to make arguments for the need to reduce oversight and regulation in labor markets despite contradicting with historical facts (e.g. we know the American political economy of slavery was robust, profitable and led to immense albeit concentrated wealth among its adherents). Contrary to the title, the book seems to arbitrarily contort to make an argument for why wages should rarely if ever rise.

Terribly simplistic and dull!

I could only tolerate 20 minutes 2 1/2 chapters. Reads like "How to win friends and influence people" but way, way more meandering in order to pad out a book that clearly doesn't have enough things to say. This pulp does not represent an earnest attempt to work at the state of the art of Economics in the 1950s.