Audiobook · read by volunteers
Principles of Economics, Book 4: The Agents of Production
Alfred Marshall (1842–1924)
Read by Carl Manchester, Sibella Denton, icyjumbo (1964-2010), Mark Nelson, timallenpro2000, Claude Banta · 13 chapters · 7 h 39
About the book
What makes the land fertile, and what makes a worker productive? In Book 4 of Principles of Economics, Alfred Marshall studies the agents of production: land, labour, capital and the organisation that binds them. He starts with the fertility of land and the law of diminishing returns, and goes on to the growth of population, the health and strength of workers, the training of skills and the accumulation of capital. Marshall draws on examples from farming, industry and everyday life, and he keeps an eye on the human side of economics. Thirteen parts, read by six LibriVox volunteers, make up nearly eight hours. This is a substantial section of a landmark text, suitable for students and for anyone who wants to see how the foundations of the subject were laid.
Introduction
Alfred Marshall, who lived from 1842 to 1924, was an English economist at Cambridge whose Principles of Economics became the standard English textbook of its time. First published in 1890, it grew out of work begun in 1881, and its plan gradually widened into a large treatise. The edition recorded here is dated 1920.
Book 4, The Agents of Production, is one of the central sections. It considers the factors that go into the making of wealth, and it begins with the fertility of land, a subject to which two of the chapters are devoted. From there the book moves on to consider labour, population and the training of workers, and to the role of capital and organisation. Marshall treats these as parts of one connected account of how a society produces what it consumes.
As in the rest of the work, the style is measured and the argument is built carefully. Marshall tends to qualify his statements and to point to exceptions, which makes the text demanding but also trustworthy. Readers should remember that this is a textbook of its period, and that economic thought has moved on in many directions since.
The recording has thirteen parts, shared among six LibriVox volunteers, and lasts about seven hours and forty minutes. It is worth hearing today for the history of economic ideas, for the clarity with which Marshall sets out his topics, and for a sense of how earlier economists thought about land, work and growth.
Public domain
Alfred Marshall died in 1924: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text