NOTES AND COMMENTS The wage basket in Ricardo's Essay on Profits

theory of profit in Ricardo's early writings is a difficult one to unravel, particularly where it concerns the interpretation of Ricardo's Essay on Profits (written in 1815; the page references here are to Ricardo, 1951-73). An unresolved issue in the debate involves the fundamental question of whether Ricardo does or does not assume in the Essay that the wage basket consists entirely of corn. Hollander's position on this question would appear to be a contradictory one. In discussing the numerical table of the Essay, he tells us that the role of corn is only that of numeraire, whereby 'capital is "estimated in quarters of wheat", but does not consist entirely of wheat... ' (Hollander, 1979, p. 137). Nine pages later Hollander writes that 'there can be no doubt that Ricardo clouded the issue for his readers by his assumption in the Essay that corn alone enters the wage basket ' (Hollander, 1979, p. 146). There are similar problems of inconsistency in the various statements which Garegnani makes on the composition of the wage basket in the Essay. At one point in his article he states that 'in the Essay, the basis of Ricardo's argument lay in the physical corn quantities of agriculture and therefore, implicitly, on the simplification of wages consisting entirel