The last post began with the exam question below taken from the 1922 Cambridge Economics Tripos.
Meanwhile at the Facebook outpost of Economics in the Rear-view Mirror Ross Emmett asked quite naturally “Who is the quote from?” Charles Robert McCann Jr did a Google books search on the quote and came up with a link to page 234 in Volume 5 of the series Ausgewählte Lesestücke zum Studium der politischen Ökonomie edited by Karl Diehl and Paul Mombert and published in 1912.
I was able to track down a pdf copy of the Diehl and Mombert volume at the University of Mannheim (see link below). The quote actually comes from a Ricardo letter to Malthus quoted by Marshall in his Principles. The examination bastards board must have wanted to double-disguise the quote’s Ricardian/Marshallian origins, presuming the examinees would have been intimately familiar with Marshall’s Principles. Or perhaps this was merely a gratuitous test of German reading skills? Anyhow, mystery solved. You’re welcome!
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Cambridge Economics Tripos
PART I
Monday, May 29, 1922. 9—12.
GENERAL ECONOMICS. I.
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“Ich bestreite nicht den Einfluss der Nachfrage weder auf den Getreidepreis noch auf dem Preis aller andern Dinge; aber das Angebot folgt ihr dicht auf den Fusse, und alsbald erlangt es die Macht, den Preis von sich aus eigenmächtig zu bestimmen, und indem es ihn regelt, ist er durch die Produktionskosten bestimmt.” Comment.
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Where this German translation comes from
Alfred Marshall, “Note on Ricardo’s Theory of Value“: Anmerkung über Ricardos Werttheorie, Handbuch der Volkswirtschaftslehre, pp. 477-486. German translation from the 4th edition [sic] of Marshall’s Principles by Hugo Ephraim and Arthur Salz (Stuttgart and Berlin, 1905). Reprinted in Karl Diehl and Paul Mombert (eds.) Ausgewählte Lesestücke zum Studium der politischen Ökonomie, Band 5 Wert und Preis, II. Abteilung (Karlsruhe: 1912), p. 234.
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Original: Ricardo to Malthus (1820)
“I do not dispute either the influence of demand on the price of corn or on the price of all other things; but supply follows close at its heels and soon takes the power of regulating price in his [sic] own hands, and in regulating it he is determined by cost of production.”
Source: Letter LXXIV (November 24, 1820) of Ricardo to Malthus, in James Bonar (ed.) Letters of David Ricardo to Thomas Robert Malthus, 1810-1823 (Oxford, 1887), p. 179.
Image Source: Thomas Phillips portrait of David Ricardo in 1821. Public domain copy at Wikimedia Commons.