Note 149 — Chapter VIII · SENIOR

Ibid., pp. 129-30. Some of the extraordinary earning power or ability of the laborer may be the result of education and training for which sacrifices have been made. Such abilities are “immaterial capital,” and the part of the whole wages due to them is really profit on this capital (p. 130). Then wages of skilled or professional labor may contain rent for inborn talents, profit for abilities acquired through the sacrifice called abstinence, and wages for the real disutility of labor incurred. “Forty pounds a year would probably pay all the labour that [a lawyer] undergoes in order to make, we will say, £4,000 a year. Of the remaining £3,960 probably £3,000 may be considered rent” (p. 134). “The intellectual and moral capital of Great Britain far exceeds all her material capital, not only in importance, but even in productiveness.” Ibid.