Cantillon on Real Wages and Employment: a rational reconstruction of the significance of land utilization

Abstract

It is quite a fundamental proposition of Richard Cantillon's Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en General (1755) that employment and population bear a negative relation to the level of real subsistence wages - a form of wages (or subsistence) fund doctrine. This paper presents a 'rational reconstruction' of Cantillon's system and the relation between real wages and employment within it. It seeks thereby to clarify the difficulties in the way of this doctrine operating in a market economy constructed along Cantillonian lines - as opposed to a Cantillonian command economy. These results are contrasted with a model of Cantillon by Hans Brems.