The Principles of Economics Part 59

3. Is the work of any kind fixed in quant.i.ty? What would cause it to change?

4. What kinds of laborers were thrown out of employment by the invention of the type-writer? What kinds of labor found employment as a result of its invention? Was the net result a gain or a loss of employment?

5. Answer the same questions with regard to the invention of railroads, mowing-, binding-, and threshing-machines; or the new roller-process of flour milling.

6. Can you describe from your own experience any example of readjustment of labor due to introduction of new machinery?

CHAPTER 27. TRADE-UNIONS

1. Does it make any difference in the permanence of an increase of wages brought about by a strike, whether the employer is one of the more successful or one of the less successful in that business?

2. Is there any similarity between the methods of trade-unions and the etiquette of the medical and the legal professions?

3. If you were an officer of a trade-union, would you begin a strike when trade was good or when it was poor?

4. If you can do more work in two hours than in one, can you do more continuously in sixteen consecutive hours than in eight?

5. What determines the maximum study-time for the earnest student?

6. If as much is produced in a general eight-hour day, who benefits?

7. If production is reduced one fourth by shorter hours, is "work made"

to that degree for the unemployed?

8. If all day-laborers should agree to work with one hand tied behind them, would their wages go up or down? Would it be good or bad for the whole cla.s.s of laborers?

CHAPTER 28. PRODUCTION AND THE COMBINATION OF THE FACTORS

1. What is production? Does the economic idea of production conflict with the physical principle that matter cannot be created?

2. Is it production to buy fifty cents' worth of yarn and knit a pair of socks worth twenty-five cents if you enjoy doing it? If you do not enjoy it?

3. Give examples of factors of production.

4. What factors of production must be combined by a savage to produce a canoe?

5. Outline the combination of factors that has produced New York bread made from Minnesota wheat.

6. What is the largest manufacturing establishment in your home town?

Would a number of smaller establishments of the same sort and with the same aggregate capacity succeed as well? Why?

7. Have you observed the growth of any local industry from a small beginning to large proportions? If so, how do you account for it?

8. Would you prefer to begin your business career with a large company or with a small merchant? Why?

9. Through what historic stages has production pa.s.sed?

10. Give examples of the industrial advantages of America as compared with Europe.

CHAPTER 29. BUSINESS ORGANIZATION AND THE ENTERPRISER'S FUNCTION

1. What is the relative importance of organization in sawing wood, building houses, running a small store, or a large factory?

2. Which wins the battle: the general, the soldiers, or the armament?

3. What determines whether a crop is poor or good: the ground, the weather, or the farmer?

4. Why do some businesses give increasing returns as they grow?

5. One has said: "The natural differences in powers and apt.i.tudes are certainly not greater than are natural differences in stature." Is this sound in an economic sense?

6. Who runs the business in a large store owned by a large family? Who has the risk?

7. Who is the enterpriser in a stock company where there is a superintendent elected by a board of directors, themselves elected by shareholders with one vote per share?

8. Who is the employer in a cooperative cooper-shop whose superintendent is elected by the workmen?

9. Has "a good chance in life" much to do with success?

10. What are the chief elements of business success?

11. Is modern business compet.i.tion a compet.i.tion of men only?

CHAPTER 30. COST OF PRODUCTION

1. What is the cost of a good you have made entirely with your own labor?

2. What is the difference to the employer between rent, interest, and wages as items of cost?

3. Is there anything in common between "cost, the onerous exertion necessary to get goods," and cost as the money expenses of production?

4. Why does a merchant engage in one business rather than in another?

5. When prices fall, what determines which factories shall close, and which workmen shall be discharged?

6. Does the value of a product conform to the capital that has been put into it.

NOTE.--For a fuller treatment of the more recent view of the subject, see Smart, pp. 64-83; Wieser, _Natural Value_, pp. 171-214; Bohm-Bawerk, _Positive Theory of Capital_, pp.

179-189, 223-234. The defects of such revisions as that attempted by Alfred Marshall are pointed out in _Quarterly Journal of Economics_, Vol. XV, pp. 432-452, article "The Pa.s.sing of the Old Rent Concept."

CHAPTER 31. THE LAW OF PROFITS

1. Business being poor, one employer is making good profits; how different will be the wages he pays from those paid by the unsuccessful employer?