Henry Rogers Seager (July 21, 1870 – August 23, 1930, in Kiev, Soviet Union) was an American economist, and Professor of Political Economy at Columbia University, who served as president of the American Association for Labor Legislation.
Inspired by the work of the Austrian School, Seager published his main work "Principles of Economics" in 1913. Inline with the institutional economics this textbook was typical "empirical and institutional in applied work, that dealt with real markets."Rutherford, Malcolm. "Institutional Economics: The Term and Its Meanings." (2004). In 1929 he published his most cited work, entitled "Trust and corporation problems."Fligstein, Neil. The transformation of corporate control. Harvard University Press, 1993.
Biography Seager was born to Schuyler Fiske Seager and Alice (Berry) Seager in Lansing, Michigan, where his father worked as a lawyer. He studied at the University of Michigan, where he obtained his P.h.B. in 1890. He continued his studies at Johns Hopkins University under Herbert Baxter Adams and Richard T. Ely for a year, in Europe at Halle, Berlin, and Vienna for two years, obtaining his PhD back in the US from the University of Pennsylvania in 1894 under Simon Patten."Henry Rogers Seager," in: The American Economic Review. Vol. 20, No. 4 (Dec., 1930), pp. 794-797.
In 1894 Seager started his academic career as an instructor in economics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and was promoted to assistant professor in 1896. In 1902 he moved to Columbia University, serving as adjunct professor until 1905 when he was appointed professor of political economy.
Seager was a member of several commissions in New York to investigate labor conditions. He served as president of the American Association for Labor Legislation, which he had co-founded in 1906 with other economists, and served on the board of editors of the Political Science Quarterly.
Death He died in 1930 in Kiev, USSR when he was visiting to study Soviet economic philosophy.
Work Seager's work as economist was influenced by his training in "English classicism, in the German historical method and in the peculiar Austrian approach" of the Austrian School. In 1904 he published "Introduction to Economics" in 1904, which he later developed into his main work "Principles of Economics," published in 1913.
Introduction to Economics, 1904
In the preface to Introduction to Economics, Seager explains, that "the principal feature which distinguishes it from other college text-books is its full treatment of the subject of distribution. This is the part of the study which is of greatest interest and importance; yet it is the part most neglected in current manuals..."Seager (1904, p. iii)
In a review of this work the American economist Herbert J. Davenport (1904) commented:
"In almost all respects this new manual is all that a book of the sort ought to be—— thoroughly modern in doctrine : wide in sympathy; marvelously deft in avoiding offense and in touching lightly on contested points, yet in all cases calling both instructor and pupil to face fairly the point in question; clear, sprightly, and stimulating in style and in manner of presentation. And all the while there is room for the instructor and for his initiative and individuality. No teacher inferior in training or wanting in class-room skill would better attempt this book...His catholic quality of temper and lack of dogmatism render. Professor Seager's doctrinal positions of less controlling importance for text-book purposes. While his work is noticebly Austrian in tone and method, yet it is such in a manner which need not offend even the radically conservative. Merely as indicating a general point of view, it may be noted that the marginal-productivity theory of distribution is adopted, with perhaps some degree of vagueness or vacillation as to the relation between distributive shares and competitive costs...""Introduction to Economics by Henry Roger Seager," Review by: Herbert J. Davenport. Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Mar., 1904), pp. 303-304.
Modern production and distribution Seager (1904) expressed a specific view on the production and distribution in modern community. Modern business can be divided into twelve branches or principal businesses, as he expressed: "Looking at modern business in a concrete way we may distinguish the following main branches into which production is divided : (1) hunting and fishing, (2) stock-raising, (3) farming, (4) forestry (t. e., logging, lumbering, etc.), (5) mining and quarrying, (6) manufacturing, (7) building, (8) transporting, (9) wholesale and retail trading, (10) produce and stock broking, (11) banking, and (12) insurance. Although by no means exhaustive this list includes the principal businesses to be found in a modern community arranged in about the order in which they have attained prominence..."Seager (1904, p. 154)
According to Seager, the best adapted form of business organisation is different. In hunting, stock-raising, farming, building, broking, and trading the dominant form is the single-entrepreneur and partnership systems. In lumbering, mining, and manufacturing single entrepreneurs, partnerships, and corporations exist side by side, and in transportation, banking, and insurance the "corporate form of organisation holds undisputed sway. In general the corporate form of organisation is that preferred in branches of business where large-scale production is found to be most economical, while in businesses for which small-scale production is better adapted single entrepreneurs and partnerships still have the advantage."
According to Seager, production and distribution in the modern community can be analysed, and graphically pictured, by distinguishing three more basic branches of production: the extractive industries, which supply materials, the manufacturing industries, which combine and fashion materials into the forms desired by consumers, and transportation and trade, which bring manufactured goods to those who are to use them.
About the basic interaction, Seager further explained:
"As represented in the above figure the three great branches of production are being carried on simultaneously and the goods produced are flowing in a vast stream from the extractive industries, where they originate as materials, to traders who dispose of them in finished forms either to consumers or to producers who use them as capital goods or aids to further production. Although working contemporaneously, successive groups of producers are, of course, engaged on materials previously produced by those employed at the preceding stages. Manufacturers are manufacturing materials turned out somewhat earlier by the extractive industries and transporters and traders are handling goods previously manufactured. The iron ore and the coal that are being mined to-day will come together in blast furnaces and steel mills some weeks or months hence; the resulting steel will be fashioned into axes, ploughs, building frames, etc., some weeks or months after it has been reduced to ingots or rolled into bars; these steel products will contribute to the satisfaction of the wants of consumers at a still later period. The average time taken, as production is now organised in the United States, to convert raw material into consumable commodities cannot be accurately measured, but it is certain that it runs into months and probable that it exceeds a year. The vast majority who are at work on any given day help to produce materials or unfinished commodities."Seager (1904, p. 155)
Value, Price, and Distribution In the chapter about "Value, Price, and Distribution" Seager explains, that his model of the modern production and distribution can be used to "restate the laws determining rent, wages, and interest."Seager (1904, p. 267-9) He stated:
"It will be necessary to advert for the last time the relations that would prevail in an industrial society brought Production to the state of normal equilibrium. In such a society the relation between production, distribution, and consumption would be extremely simple. Production would still be carried on as a serial process, but it could be readily analysed, since all prices would correspond exactly to the expenses of production and these would never vary. The whole matter may be represented graphically by the accompanying figure. In the figure production is represented as subdivided into three great stages, A, B, and C. The extractive industries: (A) turn out raw materials. Manufacturing (B) takes these and transforms them into manufactured products. Transportation and trade (C) deliver the latter as finished products to purchasers, who may be either consumers converting their money incomes into real incomes, or entrepreneurs converting the free replacement fund into capital goods to restore the wastes incidental to production. The figure represents movement without change."
And furthermore: "Goods are flowing continuously from stage A to B and from stage B to C. At C the stream is divided, an unvarying volume of capital goods flowing one way and an unvarying stream of consumers' goods flowing the other. The capital goods exactly replace the goods destroyed in the course of production and the consumers' goods exactly remunerate the owners of land, workmen, and owners of capital goods for the productive services which they or their possessions have rendered. Finally the prices of goods are invariable and everywhere just equal to their unvarying expenses of production."
Later in the 20th century the model of the circular flow of income has been developed, which comprehends similar concepts.
Principles of economics In his 1913 Principles of economics Seager further extended his theory of production and distribution. Seager explained:
"Since the relations we are trying to picture are between flows of goods rather than fixed funds of goods, certain of their aspects may be more easily presented in graphic than in arithmetical form. The [accompanying] figure... represents capitalistic production in a self-contained industrial society brought to a state of normal equilibrium. In it are represented in successive and connected compartments the three great branches of production: the extractive industries, manufacturing, and transportation and trade..."Seager (1904, p. 192-4)
About the flows in the model, he explains: "...Raw materials, the products of the extractive industries, flow through from left to right, being enriched as they pass along by the addition of form, place, time and possession utilities. On leaving the hands of dealers, they are separated into two great streams, one, the replacement fund, which flows back to repair and renew capital goods worn or destroyed in the process of production, the other, consumption goods, which begin immediately to gratify wants. The consumption goods stream is again subdivided, one branch conveying the second and subordinate replacement fund needed to repair and renew the durable consumption goods whose presence is indicated at the top of the diagram and which give off a continuous stream of utilities to mingle with those afforded by transient consumption goods, the other and larger branch into which the main consumption goods stream is divided."
And furthermore: