It is sometimes bemoaned that economists have to-day so small a direct part in the government of our republic.
They develop classical economists who announce that the only possible way for men and women to get food and shelter is by the existing method.
While the economists of that day believed the conditions of poverty and misery to be inevitable, the pessimists pronounced them unendurable, and advocated a radical social change as the only hope of saving the masses from starvation.
A wider meaning recently given to the word by many economists turns on the supposed relation of some portions of price to cost of production. Thus, frequent use is made of the expressions: consumer's rent, producer's rent, buyer's rent, seller's rent, etc.
This was the panorama of the progress of society as seen by both the conservative economists and the socialists of less than a century ago: continued invention, an increasing population, low wages, scanty food, growing wealth for the few, and growing poverty and misery for the masses.