This post plugs a gap in the time-series of Harvard economics exams back in the day when economics was still called political economy and political economy was just another moral science among the philosophy department’s course offerings. Two courses, that was all in 1877-1878.
Texts from John Stuart Mill, Walter Bagehot, John Elliott Cairnes, Henry Charles Carey were assigned readings.
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Political Economy [first course].
Course Enrollment
[Philosophy] 6. Political Economy. — J. S. Mill’s Political Economy. — Bagehot’s Lombard Street. — Financial Legislation of the United States. Three times a week. Prof. [Charles Franklin] Dunbar and Mr. [Silas Marcus] Macvane.
Total 108: 25 Seniors, 72 Juniors, 9 Sophomores, 1 Freshman, 1 Other.
Source: Harvard University. Report of the President of Harvard College, 1877-78, p. 59.
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PHILOSOPHY 6.
Mid-year Examination 1877-78
- How does the meaning of the following terms, when used in scientific discussion, differ from that which they have in popular discourse? — Wealth, Capital, Rent, Value of Money.
- What is the reason that rears of great unproductive expenditure e.g. years of war, are often years of great apparent prosperity? Illustrate by the cases of England and France during the wars of Napoleon.
- What is the objection to the “Allowance System” of poor relief, by which insufficient wages are made good by a contribution from public funds?
- How is the alleged tendency of profits to equivalence in different employments to be reconciled with the notorious difference in the profits of different individuals?
- Explain the reason for the statement that “if it were the fact that there is never any land taken into cultivation for which rent is not paid, it would be true, nevertheless, that there is always some agricultural capital which pays no rent.”
- Explain carefully the reason for the proposition that high wages do not make high prices.
- What causes determine the value of money?
- In the markets of the world gold bullion is worth more than seventeen times as much as silver bullion. What will be the effect on the currency of a country which establishes the double standard, makes each metal a legal tender for any amount, but adjusts the weight of the coins upon the assumption that the values of gold and silver are in the ratio of 16 to 1? What further effect will be produced if, after this has taken place, another country adopts the same measure, but with the assumed ratio of 15½ to 1?
- What will determine the value of an inconvertible currency which is a legal tender?
- What are the arguments against the possibility of general over-production, or “excess of supply”?
- The following are the items [in £ millions] in the Bank of England account for November 11, 1857:—
| Bullion, |
£6.6 |
Private deposits, |
£12.9 |
| Capital, |
14.5 |
Notes, |
21.1 |
| Gov. Debt. & sec. |
14.5 |
Reserve, |
1.4 |
| Gov’t. securities, |
9.4 |
Rest, |
3.4 |
| Public deposits |
5.3 |
Seven-day Bills |
0.8 |
| Other securities, |
26.1 |
|
|
Arrange these items in the proper form, separating the Issue and Banking Departments, and then show the changes required by the following operations:—
| An increase of loans amounting to… |
£4 millions |
| A sale of Government securities amounting to… |
1 million |
| The withdrawal by depositors of… |
3 millions |
the act of 1844 being suspended.
- Why does the suspension of the act of 1844 give relief to the money market?
- How far can the Bank of England control the market rate of interest?
Source: Harvard University Archives. Examination papers, 1873-1915. Box 2, Bound Volume 1878-79 (sic), Papers Set for Mid-Year Examinations in Rhetoric, Logic, Philosophy, Political Economy, History, Music, Fine Arts in Harvard College, February 1878, pp. 11-12.
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PHILOSOPHY 6.
Year-end Examinations 1877-78
[Let the answers given in your book stand in their proper order. Take either 8 or *8. Take care not to omit the last four questions.]
- Why are the wages of skilled labor so much higher than those of unskilled?
- Are improvements in production ever injurious to the laboring classes?
- Why is it that a potential change of the supply of other commodities is enough to make their value conform to any change in their cost of production, but that in the case of gold and silver the change of supply must be actual?
- When it is said that improvements tend to counteract the increasing cost of production from land, what sort of improvements are meant?
- What effect is produced upon rents, profits and wages, respectively, in a country where population is stationary and capital advancing, like France?
- Explain what effect, if any, will be produced on the price of corn by,
- a tax upon rent;
- a tithe;
- a tax of so much per acre, irrespective of value;
- a tax of so much per bushel.
- In the theory of an ultimate stationary state of society, what is implied as to the well-being of the laboring classes when that state is reached?
- State and examine Mr. Wakefield’s theory of a “limited field of employment” for capital as explaining the fall of profits.
*8. “There are two senses in which a country obtains commodities cheaper by foreign trade: in the sense of Value and in the sense of Cost.”
- What effect does an annual payment of interest to foreign creditors have upon the imports and exports of a country? If the interest is payable in gold, will it necessarily cause gold to be sent out of the country? Why, or why not?
- Criticise the following statement made by a well-known member of Congress:—
“Bank of England notes have been interchangeable with money since 1844, with three brief intervals, when the system of promising gold redemption and of issuing notes based on gold deposits in excess of £14,000,000 brought about crises.”
- What was the provision made by the National Bank Act as to reserves for the protection of circulation and deposits, and what reserves are now required by law?
- What was the amount of greenbacks outstanding in the period 1868-73, and what were the changes by which the amount settled to its present figure, $346,000,000?
- State briefly the history of our gold and silver coins as found in the coinage acts of 1792, 1834, 1853, 1873, and 1878.
Source: Harvard University Archives. Examination papers, 1873-1915. Box 2, Bound Volume 1878-79, Papers Set for Annual Examinations in Rhetoric, Logic, Philosophy, Political Economy, History, Music, Fine Arts in Harvard College, May 27 to June 20, 1878, pp. 13-14.
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Advanced Political Economy.
Course Enrollment
[Philosophy] 7. Advanced Political Economy. Cairnes’s Leading Principles of Political Economy. — McKean’s Condensation of Carey’s Social Science. — Lectures. Three times a week. Prof. Dunbar.
Total 28: 1 Graduate, 22 Seniors, 5 Juniors.
Source: Harvard University. Report of the President of Harvard College, 1877-78, p. 59.
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PHILOSOPHY 7.
Mid-year Examination, 1877-78
- What reasons make a revision of the usual definition of Cost of Production necessary? How do Mill and Ricardo use the term?
- What effect has the existence of “non-competing groups” on the exchange of commodities, each of which is the product of several classes of labor, as e.g. a steam engine and cotton cloth?
- What is the argument in favor of Mr. Cairnes’s position that the price of corn, in the progress of society, reaches a certain maximum, beyond which it cannot advance?
- When a permanent increase of currency occurs, what will be the difference in the effect on the prices of manufactured goods, vegetable products, and animal products, respectively?
- Criticise the following statement of the wages-fund doctrine:—
“There is supposed to be, at any given instant, a sum of wealth which is unconditionally devoted to the payment of the wages of labor. This sum is not regarded as unalterable, for it is augmented by saving, and increases with the progress of wealth; but it is reasoned upon as at any given moment a predetermined amount. More than that amount it is assumed the wages-receiving class can not possibly divide among them; that amount, and no less, they can not but obtain. So that the sum to be divided being fixed, the wages of each depend solely on the divisor, the number of participants.”
- What is to be inferred from Mr. Cairnes’s reasoning as to a probable fall of prices in the United States, with respect to the recovery of prices after confidence shall have been restored and industry shall have revived?
- What is the reason for rejecting the common notion that high general wages hinder the extension of the foreign trade of a country like this?
- Discuss the bearing of the reasoning involved in the last question, on the theory of protection.
- Discuss the common argument that the national debt ought to be held at home, because if held abroad it compels the payment of a “tribute” to foreigners, and tends so far to check our prosperity.
- Explain the fact that only about one-ninth of the French Indemnity was paid in coin.
- In the progressive development of political economy as a logical system, what are the relations of Malthus, Ricardo, and Mill, respectively?
- Give some account of Colbert, J.-B. Say, Storch.
Source: Harvard University Archives. Examination papers, 1873-1915. Box 2, Bound Volume 1878-79 (sic), Papers Set for Mid-Year Examinations in Rhetoric, Logic, Philosophy, Political Economy, History, Music, Fine Arts in Harvard College, February 1878, p. 13.
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PHILOSOPHY 7.
Year-end Examination, 1877-78
[Let the answers given in your book stand in their proper order.]
- In what way does skill affect the cost of the products of skilled labor?
- Give Cairnes’s statement of the Wages Fund doctrine. “It will perhaps strike the reader that our reasoning has conducted us into a vicious circle.” Is the circle real or apparent? Why?
- Cairnes says that “an alteration in the reciprocal demand of two leading nations will act upon the price, not of any commodity in particular, but of every commodity which enters into the trade.” Is this statement broad enough to cover all the effects of such an alteration?
- How are we to explain the fact that, while cost of production is generally the ultimate condition governing international exchange, it is seldom, if ever, the proximate or immediate cause of exchange?
- It has been remarked that “the object of taxation is to make all property bear its equitable share.” Is this a correct statement of the principle to be followed? Why, or why not?
- Criticise the following passage from a thesis on Reciprocity with Canada:—
“Unless there is a good deal of uniformity in excise it will be difficult to maintain reciprocity between the two countries… Suppose that an income tax should be laid on in the United States, as has been proposed. Such a measure would place all United States industries at a disadvantage as regards Canadian and perhaps as regards foreign.”
- How does a pressure in the money market here, where paper currency is used, tend to bring gold from London to New York?
- What reasoning is there for or against the statement that “the balance of trade must be against the countries which export raw produce, that the precious metals must flow from these countries, and that they must, while continuing in that course of policy, abandon the idea of gold and silver as a standard of value.”
- Discuss this statement:
“Interest is the compensation paid for the use of the instrument called money, and for this alone. In countries in which that is high, the rate of profit is necessarily so, because the charge for the use of his money enters so largely into the trader’s profits.”
- What is Mr. Carey’s theory as to the tendency (1) to decline in the value of commodities, and (2) to rise in the value of land; and how is this reconciled with his principle that the law of value is universal, embracing everything, «”whether land, labor, or their products”?
- What logical necessity drove Mr. Carey to the invention or discovery of a new law of population? In what does his conception of an ultimate stationary state necessarily differ from that of Ricardo and Mill?
- The existence of much vice and misery is ascribed by Malthus to an economic law. How far is it the result of this to “relieve the governing classes of the world from any possible responsibility for the welfare of those below them”?
Source: Harvard University Archives. Examination papers, 1873-1915. Box 2, Bound Volume 1878-79, Papers Set for Annual Examinations in Rhetoric, Logic, Philosophy, Political Economy, History, Music, Fine Arts in Harvard College, May 27 to June 20, 1878, pp. 14-15.
Image Source: “Charles Franklin Dunbar: Second President of the American Economic Association, 1893.” The American Economic Review, vol. 31, no. 3, 1941.
JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1805801.
Colorized by Economics in the Rear-view Mirror.
