As used in economics the term "distribution" means apportioning - that is, the division of the entire social income among those who produce it. Ordinarily, we are likely to think of distribution in the sense of transportation, of buying and selling, of marketing. Distribution, however, is static, not dynamic. It concerns itself with the shares that go to the different persons and groups that produce, and not with the methods or means by which these shares are handed over.

Strangely enough, distribution, the last of the four great economic notions to develop, has become the most important. A century ago, and even less, the chief economic concern of the world was to increase the output of production. Men who built factories and employed women and children to work long hours for little pay, were hailed as benefactors of mankind. Improvements in the industrial arts have changed the social viewpoint. No longer is it feared that the supply of goods is likely to be inadequate to normal demands; or that improvements and developments in productive processes will lag behind any increase in population. Rather is the fear expressed by seriously thinking people that many groups of those who assist to produce are being inadequately rewarded - that is, that they are not receiving a just share of the goods they produce. Consequently, the most important problem in economics, the one to which economists now give the greatest consideration, is concerned with the distribution of the social income.

Under the subject of distribution we shall have occasion to examine the principles governing wages, rent, interest, and profits; the cause and purposes of socialism; the place of social insurance in industry; and the share of the product that goes to the government in the form of taxation. Some of these subjects, notably socialism, might well be studied under production, for, as we shall see, the chief demand in the socialistic program is the government ownership of the instruments of production. Yet the whole problem of social unrest, as manifested by the socialists, arises from the feeling that distribution, as it now exists, is wrong. Also, in some books on elementary economics taxation is treated as a fifth division of the subject. It may come, however, under distribution, for usually taxes, like rent, wages, and interest, are paid directly or indirectly from current income.