DICKINSON (Henry Douglas).
Institutional Revenue. A Study of the Influence of Social Institutions on the Distribution of Wealth.
The British economist Henry Douglas Dickinson’s (1899-1969) first published book, the content of which was largely developed during his time as a research assistant at the London School of Economics from 1922 to 1924 under the direction of Edwin Cannan. In his preface, Dickinson also credits the influence of Hugh Dalton and particularly Maurice Dobb: ‘In the course of numerous discussions he and I worked out in common many fundamental notions, although we have developed them along individual lines - he in his Capitalist Enterprise and Social Progress and I in the present work. Thus many of the ideas to be found in the following pages owe much to his influence’ (p. 7).
Dickinson’s Institutional Revenue is ‘of interest for generalising the concept of institutional rents’ (New Palgrave) and also ‘showed how a theory of surplus value could be restated in modern marginalist terms. Dickinson had also argued that, since incomes under capitalism were largely a matter of capturing ‘rents’, the distribution of income was an institutional matter, that is, factor prices played a less decisive role in resource allocation than had been thought’ (ODNB).
