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The iron law of wages is a proposed law of economics that asserts that real wages always tend, in the long run, toward the minimum wage necessary to sustain the life of the worker. The theory was first named by Ferdinand Lassalle in the mid-nineteenth century. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels attribute the doctrine to Lassalle (notably in Marx's 1875 ''Critique of the Gotha Programme''), the idea to Thomas Malthus's ''An Essay on the Principle of Population,'' and the terminology to Goethe's "great, eternal iron laws" in ''Das Göttliche''.〔''Critique of the Gotha Programme,'' Karl Marx, (Chapter 2 ), (footnote 1 ), (1875)〕 == Lassalle == According to Alexander Gray,〔Gray, Alexander (1946, 1947) ''The Socialist Tradition: Moses to Lenin'', Longmans, Green and Co., p. 336〕 Ferdinand Lassalle "gets the credit of having invented" the phrase the "iron law of wages", as Lassalle wrote about "das eiserne und grausame Gesetz" (the iron and cruel law).〔Lassalle, Ferdinand (1863) ''Offenes Antwortschreiben'', http://www.marxists.org/deutsch/referenz/lassalle/1863/03/antwortschreiben.htm〕 According to Lassalle, wages cannot fall below subsistence wage level because without subsistence, laborers will be unable to work. However, competition among laborers for employment will drive wages down to this minimal level. This follows from Malthus' demographic theory, according to which population increases when wages are above the "subsistence wage" and falls when wages are below subsistence. Assuming the demand for labor to be a given monotonically decreasing function of the real wage rate, the theory then predicted that, in the long-run equilibrium of the system, labor supply (i.e. population) will be equated to the numbers demanded at the subsistence wage. The justification for this was that when wages are higher, the supply of labor will increase relative to demand, creating an excess supply and thus depressing market real wages; when wages are lower, labor supply will fall, increasing market real wages. This would create a dynamic convergence towards a subsistence-wage equilibrium with constant population. As David Ricardo noticed, this prediction would not come true as long as a new investment, technology, or some other factor caused the demand for labor to increase faster than population: in that case, both real wages and population would increase over time. The demographic transition (a transition from high birth and death rates to low birth and death rates as a country industrializes) changed this dynamic in most of the developed world, leading to wages much higher than the subsistence wage. Even in countries which still have rapidly expanding populations, the need for skilled labor causes some wages to rise much faster than others. To solve the question for why wages might tend towards subsistence, Ricardo put forth the law of rent. Ricardo and Malthus debated this in a lengthy personal correspondence.〔David Ricardo, The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, ed. Piero Sraffa with the Collaboration of M.H. Dobb (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), 11 vols. http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/159〕 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「iron law of wages」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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