John Atkinson Hobson (1858 - 1940) was an English social scientist and economist most famous for his work on imperialism-which notably had an influence on Vladimir Lenin-as well as his theory of underconsumption. His early work also questioned the classical theory of rent and predicted the Neoclassical marginal productivity theory of distribution. First published in 1910, The Industrial System - An Inquiry Into Earned and Unearned Income sets out to analyse the distribution of wealth through the study of the various sorts of acts of distribution, i.e. the payments actually made to owners of labour, ability, land, and capital, in the different processes of industry. Contents include: A Business , Trades and their Place in the Industrial System , Spending and Saving , Costs and Surplus , Wages, Interest, and Rent , Ability , Distribution of the Surplus by Pulls , Prices and the Ration of Exchange , The Mechanism of Markets , The Law of Supply and Demand , etc. Other notable works by this author include: Evolution of Modern Capitalism (1894), Problem of the Unemployed (1896), and John Ruskin: Social Reformer (1898). Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. It is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with an introductory chapter from Hobson’s The Evolution of Modern Capitalism (1906).