BOWLEY (Arthur Lyon).
Wages and Income in the United Kingdom since 1860.
‘Bowley became the first to clearly assert the constancy of the wage share in his 1937 book Wages and Income in the United Kingdom Since 1860. This volume synthesised and brought up to date much of Bowley’s earlier work; in a review, Pollak remarked ‘even today, when considerable attention has been directed to studies of wages, standards of living, national income and its distribution, Professor Bowley’s work stands out as pre-eminent in the sphere he has so peculiarly made his own’. On the basis of this work, Samuelson honoured Bowley by coining the expression Bowley’s Law in 1964 (in the sixth American edition of his famous textbook Economics) to describe the stylised fact of a constant wage share, a finding which was wholly at odds with the view of the classical economists who perceived the factor shares of land, capital and labour to be inherently flexible’ (The Palgrave Companion to LSE Economics, p. 223).
