On Monopoly Rent
梳理了经济学家对垄断地租概念的不同理解，试图系统化分散的观点，并给出精确的理论表述，但文献研究显示该概念每二三十年被重新发现，缺乏累积进步。
many different authors. Moreover a thorough study of the literature suggests that there is little continuity and therefore little sense of cumulative progress. Every twenty years or so the idea of monopoly rent surfaces and is discussed by one or two authors, but these discussions are unrelated to earlier work of which the authors seem mostly to be unaware. The aims of this paper are therefore twofold. The first is to provide a survey of the different ways in which economists have conceived and treated the idea of monopoly rent, and so to bring together and systematize the scattered opinions to which Samsonoff referred so long ago. The second is to present the kind of accurate and precise statement of the theory of monopoly rent for which Samsonoff asked in 1912, one which would allow monopoly rent to be regarded as a genuine scientific doctrine. It must be admitted, however, that the thorough study of the literature mentioned above leaves one with a pessimistic view of progress in economic science, with respect to monopoly rent at least. Given that the concept seems to be rediscovered every twenty or thirty years, and that the discoverers seem to refer very little, if at all, to previous literature, there seems no reason why the cycle of discovery and oblivion should not go on for another two hundred years. Despite the fact that the literature gives no grounds for any such expectation, it is still the author's faint hope that this paper may still assist the progress of economic thought. Because the theory of monopoly rent has never been properly formalized, the concept remains shadowy and amorphous because different authors appear to have meant different things by it. Analysis of the writings of the various authors suggests three possible ways in which the term is intended to be understood. The first we call Class Monopoly, after the usage by Harvey (1974). Here the class of land owners, by definition, own all the land and the rent of the land is monopoly rent. This usage seems to be frequent in the writings of the classical economists in the nineteenth cen-