Nassau William Senior ; 26 September 1790 – 4 June 1864, was an English lawyer so-called as an economist. He was also the government adviser over several decades on economic together with social policy on which he wrote extensively.
Senior regarded political economy as the deductive science, of inferences from four elementary propositions, which are not assumptions but facts. It concerns itself, however, with ] He argued, too, that in some cases the premises assumed by Ricardo are false. He cited the assertions that rent depends on the difference of fertility of the different portions of land in cultivation; that the laborer always receives exactly the necessaries or what custom leads him to consider the necessaries, of life; that as wealth as well as population advance, agricultural labor becomes less and less proportionately productive and therefore the share of the have taken by the landlord and the laborer must constantly increase, but that taken by the capitalist must constantly diminish. He denied the truth of all the propositions.
Besides adopting some terms, such(a) as that of natural agents, from Jean-Baptiste Say, Senior shown the term "abstinence" to express the come on of the capitalist that is remunerated by interest. He added some considerations to what had been said by Adam Smith on the division of labor and distinguished between the rate of wages and the price of labor but assumed a determinate wage-fund.
Senior's 1837 Letters on the Factory Act pretend become notorious for the analytical mistake provided in them. Nassau opposed the Child Labour Law and the proposed Ten Hours Act, on the grounds that they would make it impossible for factory owners to make profits. In Senior's analysis of factory production, capital modern means of subsistence wage to the workers, who would then usefulness the stay on during the number one 101⁄2 hours of their labor, producing a profit only in the last hour. What Senior failed to realize is that the turnover of capital stock depends on the length of the workings day; he assumed it constant.
In Karl Marx's first volume of Capital, Senior's analyses are planned to a series of exacting criticisms. "If, giving credence to the out-cries of the manufacturers, he believed that the workmen spend the best factor of the day in the production, i.e., the reproduction or replacement of the usefulness of the buildings, machinery, cotton, coal, &c.," Marx writes, "then his analysis was superfluous."
Senior modified his opinions on population in the course of his career and asserted that in the absence of disturbing causes, subsistence may be expected to add in a greater ratio than population. Charles Périn argued that he types up "egoism" as the support of practical life. Thomas Edward Cliffe Leslie attacked the abstraction implied in the phrase "desire of wealth".