Samuelson on Subsistence Wages

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"And, by the age of Mill and Marx indeed, even in Ricardo's time and Malthus's later editions -- the level of the subsistence wage rate was freed from physiological dimensions and became a dummy variable shot through with conventional standards of life hankered after by (some) workers. At this stage a meaningful false theory had been replaced by a meaningless nontheory that could never be vindicated or rejected by any pattern of historical facts." -- Paul Samuelson, "Modes of Thought in Economics and Biology," American Economics Review

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