support this hypothesis too, as the constancy of pay differences to the end would otherwise be improbable. I made it the Darwinian axiom: maintenance is exhausted
in satisfying our taste for survival.
Ben-Porath’s life cycle was adjusted to express these features. Factor risk theory argued that human capital is the riskier and higher-return factor because capital of any kind takes on the risk characteristics of its owners and human capital is owned
disproportionately by the risk-tolerant young.
The Y rule contradicts the Y = 1 + C equation, while the pay rule contradicts the dogma that output equals pay plus work. National accounts are founded on both. That means | can expect tough resistance. | have tried to prepare for it by adding a
little more to each argument with each chapter.
Throughout this chapter, and throughout this book, I have bent over backwards to distinguish logical certitudes from falsifiable hypothesis. Economics needs both. But it needs to know which is which. The pay and Y rules, for example, are each certitude in part. The certain part is the heretical one. The present value and maximand rules follow from definitions, and compel expected recovery of human depreciation in pay. | then relied on the convergence axioms to infer actual recovery as a norm, not a invariable outcome, and on the new axiom of the biological imperative, as well as evidence from age-wage profiles, to infer that maintenance
consumption is exhausted rather than recovered in pay as well.
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