15  See Lars Calmfors and John Driffill, ‘Bargaining structure, corporatism and macroeconomic performance’, Economic Policy, No. 88, 1988. 16  Bargaining council agreements typically disallow exemptions for “economic reasons”. This presumably includes low productivity or unaffordability.
This was an attitude that became standard in the course of the following centuries but which must have been revolutionary at that time, a time characterised by a strong spirit of innovation. And what was certainly new and extremely modern was the approach we know today as “quantitative” in matters such as trade, which had until then remained far removed from any scientific concept.