The Labor Theory of Value

Malthus argued that wages largely determined men's decisions regarding when to marry. While he conceded that increases in the work effort of women and children could perhaps postpone the impact of lower male wages, he never explored the implications of changes in the relative eco­nomic contributions of family members.¹⁹ David Ricardo also overlooked these factors as he sought to explain relative prices in terms of the relative amounts of labor devoted to production.

Ricardo followed the precedent set by Locke, treating labor as the most important factor of production, but one which was not itself produced (see discussion in Chapter 2). Quantification made this crystal clear: neither the hours devoted to rearing children nor those required to maintain adults entered into the equation. The value of a factory worker was determined only by the cost of the commodities that he purchased on the market, primarily the food that he needed to survive. This food requirement was often described, rather starkly, in terms of‘‘corn’’—the generic English term for grain. As with the rioting French women and the Speenhamland system of poor relief, wage determination came down to bread.

Ricardo believed that population growth would always drive wages to the subsistence level. He defined this level as one consistent with a stationary population, which would ‘‘enable the labourers, one with another, to subsist and to perpetuate their race, without either increase or diminution.”²⁰ Like Malthus, he was nervous about the prospect of an actual decline in popula­tion, recognizing that it would put upward pressure on wages.

Neither economist speculated on how many children a subsistence wage would, ideally, support. The answer depended partly on the probability that a child would reach adulthood, a function of nutrition and living standards as well as health. Parish relief could have helped lower child mortality and therefore increased the efficiency of childrearing. Smith had referred in passing to such issues; Malthus and Ricardo never considered them.²¹ The assumption that children were simply the fruit of sexual desire, rather than the product of parental time and effort, discouraged such considerations. Subsistence wage theory also sidestepped consideration of the productivity of families, ignoring the ways that higher wages and child labor regulation might contribute to improvements in the future quality of the labor force.

Children’s contributions to the family income affected the net cost of rearing them. As a result, the effect of wages on population growth was mediated by the age at which children could begin to contribute to family income, helping support not only themselves but also their siblings. Families, not individuals, were the basic units of production in most agrarian settings; husbands and fathers wielded legal control over the earnings of their wives and minor children. Occupations were enumerated for all male children over the age of ten in the British Census of 1831, suggesting that those between the ages of eleven and eighteen were likely to contribute to family income.

Malthus and Ricardo, however, focused on adult male workers. When they claimed that a single man could subsist on less than a married man, they ignored both the market and non-market work of wives and children. A married man pooling income with a wife who provided him with household services that he would otherwise pay for was better off than a single man with a nominally higher market income.

Children’s contributions to family income posed a problem not only for the theory of subsistence wages, but also for the theory of population. It was not rising wages or poor relief that fostered high fertility in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England, but rather increased economic opportunities for young adults. The traditional controls that parents had exercised over the age of marriage were weakened. The first stages of proto­industrialization, based on a putting-out system in which capitalists pro­vided semi-rural families with raw materials and purchased their final products, made it easier for men and women to marry at a younger age and utilize their own young children’s labor.²² The expansion of opportun­ities for factory employment reinforced this trend. As the British population census of 1821 noted, ‘‘In many Manufactures, Children are able to maintain themselves at an early age, and so to entail little expense of their Parents, to the obvious encouragement of marriage.’’²³ British industrialization initially increased the incentives to high fertility. Passion and reason worked in concert.