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A tough nut to crack Wicksell\'s (1890) Norwegian article on “Empty stomachs – and full warehouses” was written in June that year in Paris. His visit to France closed the long next of economic studies abroad he had started in 1885–1886, which included as well stays in London, Strasbourg, Vienna and Berlin. In the spring term of 1889 Wicksell gave four popular lectures on the new theory of value (mainly Jevons and Walras) and capital (mainly Böhm-Bawerk) at the Stockholm Workers’ Association. Those lectures later developed into his first book (Wicksell, 1954 [1893]), whose introductory chapter is a reproduction of the first of the 1889 lectures, about pre-marginalist value theory. By 1889 he had also drafted a manuscript on interest and prices, which contained the basic elements of his cumulative process of price level changes fully elaborated in book form nine years later (Gårdlund, 1958, pp. 121–28; Boianovsky and Trautwein, 2001, pp. 488–90). Wicksell\'s economic research agenda was already broadly outlined around 1890. Despite Wicksell\'s familiarity with the “new theory” of value and capital, there are no traces of neoclassical concepts in his 1890 piece. Leon Walras is the only neoclassical author mentioned, but in connection with his criticism of J.S. Mill\'s proposition that “demand for commodities is not demand for labour” (Wicksell, 1890, p. 257, n. 1). The absence of neoclassical economics is explained not just by the fact that the issue tackled by Wicksell in that article – overproduction, unemployment and overpopulation – was largely foreign to its domain, but also because marginal productivity had not yet been incorporated into its theoretical framework. Wicksell (1890) discussed how low consumption (“empty stomachs”) on one side and overproduction (“full warehouses”) on the other could coexist. His main target was the Marxian underconsumptionist approach, based on the notion of the “industrial reserve army”, and its implications for wage determination and income distribution, which was particularly influential in Germany at the time. According to Wicksell\'s reading, the Marxian view of “modern industrial world” stated that Unlike several contemporary authors (particularly in the United States; see Woirol, 1996, p. 20), Wicksell (p. 254) did not join the argument “most often directed against Marx”, namely that workers’ economic welfare had improved since the widespread introduction of machinery at the beginning of the 19th century. Compared to the rate of economic growth, any improvement in the workers’ position was perceived as very “modest”, if any at all. However, Wicksell claimed that such unfavourable turn of events took place not as a result thereof but despite technical progress. The notion that the “actual cause of the evil” consisted in discoveries, labour-saving industrial methods and other technical changes was a “paradox” ascribed by Wicksell (p. 255) to an “incomplete analysis of economic phenomena”. A full treatment of the question should bring into the picture the “most extreme ramifications” represented by compensation mechanisms that prevent the potential negative effects of the introduction of machinery on demand for labour and wages. Marx (1938 [1867], chapter 15, Section 6) left out of his critical discussion of what he called the “theory of compensation” the essential element in McCulloch\'s (1825, part II, Section IV) argument against Ricardo\'s machinery chapter. Costs reductions caused by labour-saving technical changes must, under perfect competition, result in lower prices followed by the expansion of demand and output (see e.g. Blaug, 1985, chapter 6, Section 6). As put by Wicksell (1890, p. 255), producers “either stuff the entire profit” from cost reductions or, more likely, “they are forced to share it with consumers through the sale of their goods at cheaper prices”. The increase in real income will be used by consumers and entrepreneurs for consumption or investment, with similar results in “completely absorbing the unemployed” workers made superfluous by the introduction of machinery and increasing wages. Wicksell (p. 256) considered also the possibility of a negative income effect on effort supply, which would cause a reallocation of workers but not unemployment.