Real and Money Wages

Alfred Marshall, in his testimony before the Gold and Silver Commission of 1887 [Official Papers, p. 19], argued that "a powerful friction tends to prevent money wages in most trades from falling as fast as prices.11 Marshall repeated the proposition in his testimony for the Indian Currency Commission of 1899 [Official Papers 284-8], but on the latter occasion, he relied on statistical work by Bowley [EJ, 1898] to support the argument. - Neither in his testimony, nor in his classic text, is there an analytic explanation of the cyclical fluctuation in real wages.