[Letter] July 14,1890,Minneapolis[on Smith College letterhead] [to F.H. Giddings]

July 14, 1890, Minneapolis [on Smith College letterhead]

Dear Friend,
        The bad cyclone
didn't strike this city,
though it came very
near to it, and was
seen and even photographed.
There are uncertainties
about life in the Miss
Valley.
 I am "getting onto"
a theory of "more product
vs. more value" in
Wittelschöfer's book on
capital. As W. states
it it looks like a
truism. It stands
thus. Value is measured
by labor. Whatever
enables a day's labor to
produce 10 X instead of X
of any our commodity will
give to 10 X the value
formerly held by X. The
cases cited thus for an
usually improvements in
method, but they would
include "concentration of
labor" by the use of capital.
The theory of W. does not,
as I understand it, deny
the productivity of capital. It could be
stated in Böhm's formulas without denying
that productivity, though, of course, I do not
know whether that would make it identical with
B's theory. W's theory put into B's forms
of thought would seem to stand thus. Present
labor measures present value. Make labor
indirect (by making an axe instead of breaking
limbs of trees by hand for fuel) and you increase
the amount of wood cutting down by each day
of labor spent in axe making + wood cutting.
Valuing the results of each day's effort as it
stands in the mind of the worker on the day on
which it is performed, it will be as
great and no greater, in value, than it
was before the improvement in method
was effected. Valuing the result as it is
when, in the case, the wood is ready to burn,
it will then be greater in value, because of
the 'refining', or because of the essential
productivity of capital. W's theory has enabled
me to hit on a mode of stating the same
thing in my own formulas whereby I can apply
the principle alternately to capital and to labor.
What these Austrians say about the ( )
use of capital seems to me to be true of the additional ones created
by an increment of labor. The parallelism between the two
agents seems to be completed here as elsewhere.

              Yours Very Truly,
                   J. B. Clark