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Surplus product (German: ''Mehrprodukt'') is an economic concept explicitly theorised by Karl Marx in his critique of political economy. Marx first began to work out his idea of surplus product in his 1844 notes on James Mill's ''Elements of political economy''.〔Karl Marx, ''Early writings''. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975, p. 274f. or: ''Marx Engels Collected Works'', Vol. 3 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), p. 225f.〕 Notions of "surplus produce" have been used in economic thought and commerce for a long time (notably by the Physiocrats), but in ''Das Kapital'', ''Theories of Surplus Value'' and the ''Grundrisse'' Marx gave the concept a central place in his interpretation of economic history. Nowadays the concept is mainly used in Marxian economics.〔Ron Stanfield, ''The economic surplus and neo-Marxism''; Howard, M.C. & King, J.E. (2001). "Ronald Meek and the rehabilitation of surplus economics", in S.G. Medema & W.J. Samuels (eds), ''Historians of Economics and Economic Thought'', London: Routledge, 185-213; Mahesh C. Regmi, ''The state and economic surplus : production, trade, and resource-mobilization in early 19th century Nepal''; John B. Davis (ed), ''The economic surplus in advanced economies''. Aldershot: Elgar, 1992; Anders Danielson, ''The economic surplus : theory, measurement, applications''. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1994.〕 political anthropology, cultural anthropology, economic anthropology〔Maurice Godelier, ''Perspectives in Marxist Anthropology''.〕 The translation of the German "Mehr" as "surplus" is in a sense unfortunate, because it might be taken to suggest "unused", "not needed" or "redundant", while literally it means "more" or "added" - thus, "Mehrprodukt" refers really to the ''additional'' or "excess" product produced. In German, the term "Mehrwert" simply and literally means value-added, a measure of net output, (though, in Marx's specialist usage, it means the surplus-value obtained from the use of capital, i.e. it refers to the net addition to the value of capital owned). ==Classical economics== In ''Theories of Surplus Value'', Marx says in classical economics the "surplus" referred to ''an excess of gross income over cost'', which implied that the value of goods sold was greater than the value of the costs involved in producing or supplying them. That was how you could "make money". The surplus represented a net addition to the stock of wealth. A central theoretical question was then to explain the kinds of influences on the size of the surplus, or how the surplus originated, since that had important consequences for the funds available for re-investment, tax levies, the wealth of nations, and (especially) economic growth.〔Ronald L. Meek, ''The concept of surplus in the history of economic thought from Mun to Mill''. Phd Dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1948, p. 2f.; Heinz D. Kurz, "The Surplus Interpretation of the Classical Economists." In: Warren J. Samuels et al., ''A Companion to the History of Economic Thought''. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003, pp. 167-183.〕 This was theoretically a confusing issue, because sometimes it seemed that a surplus arose out of clever trading in already existing assets, while at other times it seemed that the surplus arose because new value was added in production. In other words, a surplus could be formed in different ways, and one could get rich either at the expense of someone else, or by creating more wealth than there was before, or by a mixture of both. This raised the difficult problem of how, then, one could devise a system for grossing and netting incomes & expenditures to estimate only the value of the new additional wealth created by a country. For centuries, there was little agreement about that, because rival economists each had their own theory about the real sources of wealth-creation〔Isaak Illich Rubin, ''A History of Economic Thought''. London: Ink Links, 1979.〕 - even if they might agree that the value of production must equal the sum of the new revenue which it generates for the producers. Political economy was originally considered to be a "moral science", which arose out of the moral and juridical ambiguities of trading processes themselves.〔James E. Alvey, "An introduction to economics as a moral science". Oakland, Calif.: The Independent Institute, Working Paper #15, December 1999.()〕 It was analytically difficult to take the step from the incomes of individuals, the immediate source of which was rather obvious, to a consideration of the incomes of groups, social classes and nations.〔 Frits Bos, "Three centuries of macro-economic statistics". ''Eagle Economic & Statistics Working Paper'', 2011-02. ()〕 Somehow, a "system of transactors" showing aggregate sales and purchases, costs and incomes had to be devised, but just exactly how that system was put together, could differ a great deal, depending on "from whose point of view" the transactions were considered. The Physiocratic school, for example, believed that all wealth originated from the land, and their social accounting system was designed to show this clearly.〔Ronald L. Meek, ''The Economics of Physiocracy: Essays and Translations''. London: Allen & Unwin, 1962 and Ronald L. Meek, ''Quesnay's Tableau Economique'', London: Macmillan, 1972 (with Margaret Kuczynski).〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Surplus product」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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