Phelps Brown & Weber (1953): Accumulation, Productivity and Distribution in the British Economy, 1870-1938

Overview

"Accumulation, Productivity and Distribution in the British Economy, 1870–1938" is a 1953 article by the London School of Economics labour economist E. H. Phelps Brown and Bernard Weber, published in The Economic Journal (vol. 63, no. 250, pp. 263–288).[1] The paper reconstructs long-run British data on capital accumulation, output, and the division of income between factors of production across nearly seven decades — the kind of national-accounts reconstruction that, a few years later, fed into the growth-accounting tradition associated with Robert Solow's residual.

Within the Georgist literature the paper is best known at second hand: Fred Harrison cites it in The Power in the Land (Ch. 6) as the source for a long-run decline in the rate of return to industrial capital in Britain — one blade of a "scissors" divergence in which falling returns to capital open up against rising returns to land, which Harrison presents as a driver of the 18-year land cycle.[2]

Status of This Page

This wiki has not obtained the original 1953 text, which sits behind a journal paywall; the description above of Harrison's use of the paper is drawn from Harrison's own citation of it, not from independent reading of Phelps Brown & Weber's data or methodology. [CITATION NEEDED: direct access to the 1953 article, or a secondary economic-history source summarizing its specific capital-return findings, to verify Harrison's characterization independently.] This page should be expanded, and the resulting land-vs-capital divergence pattern compared against the wider boom-bust cycle evidence base, once that access is available.

See Also

• Harrison, The Power in the Land — the book that cites this paper (Ch. 6)
• 18-Year Land Cycle — the cycle theory this paper's capital-returns data is cited to support
• Boom-Bust Cycle — the wider evidence assessment for land-and-capital cycle theories

Sources

1. E. H. Phelps Brown and Bernard Weber (1953), "Accumulation, Productivity and Distribution in the British Economy, 1870–1938," The Economic Journal, 63(250), pp. 263–288. Oxford Academic · DOI/JSTOR 10.2307/2227124 — bibliographic details (authors, journal, volume 63, issue 250, page range 263–288, year 1953, LSE affiliation) confirmed this session against the publisher and JSTOR records; the paywalled full text was not obtained, so Harrison's characterization of its capital-return findings (below) remains second-hand.
2. Fred Harrison (1983), The Power in the Land, Universe Books / Shepheard-Walwyn, Ch. 6 — used for the attribution of the declining-capital-returns finding to this paper (the discovery source). wiki summary