(Walker) Capital was still believed to come only from savings in prior years, and no additional amount of money could be added to the production process to support more workers.
(Walker) Unlike the Physiocrats' tableau, the money to maintain the subsistence of employees during production did not have to come from previous year's savings.
John Stuart Mill's Principles of Political Economy, published in 1848, provides the definitive treatment of Wage-Fund Doctrine.
In 1869, Mill qualifies his support of the Wage-Fund Doctrine due to recognition that capital is not necessarily fixed in that it can be supplemented through "income of the employer which might otherwise go into savings or be spent on consumption" (Spiegel, pg.
"[2] Walker also states in "The Wages Question" that the limits on capital and the growth in population "were accidental, not essential" to the formation of the doctrine.
Given the improvements in technology and productivity that followed 1848, the original reasons that gave rise to the doctrine were seen to be unusual and not the basis for a universal law.
In a preface to the first edition of his 1871 publication The Theory of Political Economy, a seminal work in the Marginal Revolution in economic theory, William Stanley Jevons criticises Wage-Fund Doctrine as useless, calling it "purely delusional" and stating:"This theory pretends to give a solution of the main problem of the science [economics]—to determine the wages of labour; yet, on close examination, its conclusion is found to be a mere truism, namely, that the average rate of wages is found by dividing the whole amount appropriated to the payment of wages by the number of those between whom it is divided.
"[3] In Chapter III of his 1879 treatise on the causes behind poverty in progressive economies, Progress and Poverty, the self-taught economist Henry George argues against the wage-fund doctrine, writing:"The proposition I shall endeavour to prove is: That wages, instead of being drawn from capital, are in reality drawn from the product of the labour for which they are paid...