CHAPTER I
THE HUMAN STANDARD OF VALUE
§ 1. In an age when human problems of a distinctively economic character, relating to wages, hours of labour, housing, employment, taxation, insurance and kindred subjects, are pressing for separate consideration and solution, it is particularly important to enforce the need of a general survey of our economic system from the standpoint of human values. Social students, of course, are justified by considerations of intellectual economy in isolating these several problems for certain purposes of detailed enquiry. But the broader human setting, demanded for the judgment or the policy of a statesman or reformer, can never be obtained by this separatist treatment. For the interactions which relate these issues to one another are numerous and intimate. Taking as the most familiar example the groups of questions relating to the working-classes, we recognise at once how the wages, hours, regularity of employment and other considerations of labour, overlap and intertwine, while, again, the questions relating to conditions of living, such as housing, food, drink, education, recreation, facilities of transit, have similar interrelations as factors in a standard of comfort. Nor is it less evident that conditions of labour and conditions of living, taken severally and in the aggregate, interact in ways that affect the efficiency and well-being of the people.
The special and separate studies of these various problems must then, in order to be socially serviceable, be subject to the guidance and direction of some general conception which shall have regard to all sorts of economic factors and operations, assessing them by reference to some single standard of the humanly desirable. This general survey and the application of this single standard of valuation are necessary alike to a scientific interpretation of the economic or industrial world and to a conscious art of social-economic progress. They must exert a control over the division of intellectual labour on the one hand, and over the utilisation of such labour for social policy upon the other. The notion that, by setting groups of students to work at gathering, testing, measuring and tabulating crude facts, relating, say, to infant mortality, expenditure on drink, or wages in women’s industries, valuable truths of wide application will somehow be spontaneously generated, and that by a purely inductive process there will come to light general laws authoritative for social policy, is entirely destitute of foundation. The humblest grubber among ‘facts’ must approach them with some equipment of questions, hypotheses, and methods of classification, all of which imply the acceptance of principles derived from a wider field of thought. The same holds again of the next higher grade of students, the intellectual middlemen who utilise the ‘facts’ got by the detailed workers ‘at the face.’ They too must bring wider principles to correlate and to interpret the results got by the humbler workers. So at each stage of the inductive process, laws and standards derived from a higher intellectual stage are brought to bear.
Even if such studies were prompted entirely by a disinterested desire for knowledge, it is evident that their success implies the inspiration and application of some general ideas, which in relation to these studies are a priori. But regarding these studies as designed primarily to assist the art of social policy, we must recognise that the inner prompting motive of every question that is put at each stage of such enquiries, the inner regulative principle of the division of labour and of the correlation of the results, is the desire to realise some more or less clear conception of general human well-being. It must, of course, be admitted that this procedure rests upon a sort of paradox. The general conception of human well-being is itself vague and unsubstantial, until it has acquired and assimilated the very sorts of knowledge the collection of which it is here assumed to be able to direct. This paradox, however, is familiar to all who reflect upon the progress of knowledge in any department and for any purpose. I only name it here in order to anticipate the objection of those disposed to question the validity of assuming any sort of standard of human welfare, and to insist upon testing each economic issue upon what they call ‘its own merits.’ The application of a general survey and a general standard of values is none the less a logically valid and a practically useful procedure, because the new facts which its application discloses afford more fulness and exactitude to the survey, while the standard is itself made clearer and more effective thereby.
Assuming it to be admitted, then, that a human valuation of economic processes is possible and desirable, both for the enlargement of knowledge and for purposes of social policy, the questions next arise, ‘How shall we conceive and describe the standard of human valuation, and how shall we apply it to the interpretation of the present economic system?’
§ 2. Before facing these questions, however, it will be well to have before our minds a clear outline picture of this economic system which we seek to value. It consists of two complex operations, constantly interacting, known as Production and Consumption of wealth. By wealth is understood all sorts of vendible goods and services. So far as material wealth is concerned, it is ‘produced’ by a series of processes which convert raw materials into finished goods of various sorts and sizes and dispose them in such quantities as are required, for the satisfaction of consumers or as instruments in some further process of production. Similarly, in the case of professional, official, domestic, industrial, commercial, and other personal services, which also rank as wealth,1 a variety of productive processes go to prepare them and to place them at the disposal of consumers. The processes of production may thus be classified as extractive, manufacturing, artistic, transport, commercial, professional, domestic. Thus it is seen that the work of ‘distribution’ and ‘exchange,’2 sometimes distinguished from the work of production, is here included in that category.
Now, the first difficulty confronting us in our search for a human valuation of this economic system consists in the obscurity in which half this system lies. For though there is everywhere a formal recognition that consumption is the end or goal of industry, there is no admission that the arts of consumption are equally important with the arts of production and are deserving of as much attention by students or reformers of our ‘economic system.’ On the contrary, so absorbing are the productive processes in their claims upon the physical and mental energies of mankind, that the economic system, alike for practitioners and theorists, has almost come to be identified with these processes. This depreciation and neglect of Consumption no doubt has been natural enough. So much more conscious energy of thought and feeling, and so much more expenditure of time and effort have gone into the discovery, development and practice of the productive arts. Their practice has involved so much more publicity, so much wider and more varied intercourse, and therefore so much more organisation. Consumption, on the other hand, has been so much more passive in its character, so private and individual in the acts which comprise it, so little associated with sequences of thought or purpose, that it has hardly come to be regarded as an art. Hence, even in the more elaborate civilisations where much detailed skill and attention are devoted to the use and enjoyment of goods and services, the neglect of consumptive processes by economic science remains almost unimpaired. The arts of production remain so much more exacting in their demands upon our attention.
The early influence of this dominance of the productive standpoint in economic science has had effects upon the terminology and structure of that science which are serious obstacles to the human interpretation of industry. Unconsciously, but consistently, the early structure of the science was built with exclusive regard to the industrial or productive processes. The art out of which the science grew was concerned with the progress of agricul
ture, manufacture, and commerce, or with problems of money, taxation, and population, regarded mainly or wholly from the productive standpoint. The underlying assumption everywhere was the question, ‘How will this or that policy affect the quantity of wealth produced in the country?’ always with an important corollary to the effect, ‘How will it affect the quantity of wealth, passing as rents, profits, interest, or wages to the several classes of the nation?’ But nowhere was there any direct consideration of the arts of consumption, with one particularly instructive exception. The only bit of attention paid by our early classical economists to processes of consumption was to distinguish ‘productive’ from ‘unproductive’ consumption, that is, to suggest a valuation of consumption based entirely upon its subordination to future purposes of production. Their condemnation of luxurious expenditure and waste, alike in the wealthy and the working-classes, was not primarily directed against the loss of real enjoyment, or human well-being, or the moral degradation involved in such abuse of spending power, but against the damage to the further processes of making wealth by reducing the rate of saving or by impairing the working efficiency of labour. Though occasional considerations of a more distinctively humane or moral character entered into the tirades against luxury, or the dietetic advice offered by these economic teachers, the main trend of their reflections on the use of wealth was quite evidently dominated by considerations of increased production. This tendency further impressed itself upon the central concept of economic science, that of value, which was treated by these early makers of Political Economy exclusively from the productive standpoint of ‘costs.’ When, however, later theorists, beginning with Jevons in this country, sought to convert the formal goal of consumption into the real goal, by substituting ‘utility’ for ‘cost’ as the determinant of value, it might have been supposed that they would have been impelled, passing through the gateway of utility into consumption, to open up that hitherto neglected country. But no such thing has happened. While an elaborate division of intellectual labour has been applied, both to the study of the objective structure of industry, and to the psychology of the various agents of production, no corresponding studies of consumption have been made. When the products of industry pass over the retail counter, economic science almost entirely loses count of them. They pass from sight into the mysterious maw of ‘the Consumer.’ It has never occurred to the economist that it is just as important to have a clear and close knowledge of what happens to products when they have become consumer’s goods, as it is to trace their history in the productive stages. It would, of course, be untrue to say that modern economists completely ignore methods and motives of consumption. Their studies of value and of markets compel them to direct equal attention to forces regulating Supply and Demand, and many of them assign a formal superiority to the demand for final commodities which issues from Consumers, as the regulator of the whole industrial system. But while this has evoked some interesting enquiries into quantities and modes of consumption, the main interest of these enquiries has lain, not in the light they shed upon the use and enjoyment got from consumption, but in the effects of that consumption upon demand as a factor in problems of price and of production. In a word, the economic arts of consumption still run in subordination to the arts of production, and the very nature of the interest taken in them attests their secondary place. Half of the field of economic survey important from the standpoint of human welfare thus stands unexplored or ill-explored.
§ 3. A necessary result of this identification of economic subject-matter with the productive apparatus, has been to impose upon the study of economics a distinctively mechanical character. The network of businesses and trades and processes, which constitutes industry, may indeed, by an interpretative effort of imagination, be resolved into the myriads of thoughts, desires and relations which are its spiritual texture. Every business, with its varied machinery and plant, its buildings, materials, etc., is the embodiment of conscious human effort, and the personnel of management and operatives represent a live current of volition and intelligence, directing and cooperating with it. A business, thus regarded, is a distinctively spiritual fabric. Nor is this true only of those industries employed in fashioning material goods. The complicated arrangements of communications and of commerce with their ganglia of markets, by which goods pass from one process to another and are gathered, sorted and distributed in regulated channels throughout the world of workers and consumers, represent an even more delicate adjustment of psychical activities. Economic science tends, undoubtedly, to become less material in its outlook and treatment, and to give more attention to the psychological supports of the industrial system. Not only have we many special studies of such economic questions as saving and investment, business administration and other critical operations of will and judgment, but in such works as those of M. Tarde in France, and Mr. Wicksteed in this country, we find attempts at a systematic psychological interpretation of industry. Economics, indeed, according to the latter writer, is a branch of the science of ‘preferences,’ the application of intelligent human volition to the satisfaction of economic wants.
And yet the science remains distinctively mechanical and unfitted for the performance of any human interpretation of industry. This is due to the failure of our psychological economists to tear themselves free from the traditions of a Political Economy which in its very structure has made man subservient to marketable wealth. The accepted conception of the Art of Political Economy is that it is directed to the production of wealth whose value is attested by the purely quantitative calculus of money, and the Science of Political Economy is virtually confined to discovering and formulating the laws for the production of such wealth. The basic concepts of Value, Cost, and Utility, are subjected to this governing presupposition. Their primary significance is a monetary one. The value of any stock of wealth is signified in money, the cost of its production, the utility of its consumption, are registered in monetary terms. The psychological researches which take place into processes of thought and desire are not regarded as having significance on their own account, but merely as means or instruments in the working of industrial processes. The study of motives, interests, and ideas in the process of invention, or in the organisation and operation of some productive work, treats these thoughts and feelings not in their full bearing upon human life, its progress or happiness, but in exclusive relation to the monetary end to which they are directed.
§ 4. It is no concern of ours to criticise this attitude in the sense of condemnation. But it is important to realise that no progress of psychological analysis will enable economic science to supply a human valuation of industry so long as all the human functions involved in economic processes are measured, assessed, and valued, according to their bearing upon the production of a ‘wealth’ which has no directly assignable relation to human welfare, but is estimated by a purely monetary measure. The net effect of this conception of the economic system as an elaborate arrangement of material and spiritual factors, contributing to the production and distribution of a stream of various goods valued by a monetary standard, is to leave upon the mind the impress of a distinctively mechanical apparatus. No one, for example, can read the masterly work of Mr. Wicksteed1 without recognising that his delicate, elaborate measurements and balances of motives and preferences, while involving and implying actions that no one but man can perform, treat not only industry, but humanity itself as a psychological mechanism.
This distinctively mechanical character is inherent in the structure of an economic science based upon the subserviency of all human activities to a purely quantitative conception of wealth, and a purely monetary standard of value. This character of economic science is, of course, by no means disabling for all purposes. On the contrary, it furnishes valid instruments for the interpretation of many important groups of phenomena in the business world, and for the solution of certain problems where purely quantitative standards and methods are applicable. Indeed, the increasing devotion of economists to problems of money, price, and other definitely monetary questions, may be taken as a half-instinctive recognition of the real inadequacy of current economics for any very useful solution of those more vital problems into which closely human considerations enter as governing factors. As we proceed, we shall realise in more detail the nature of the incapacity of current economics to furnish any rules for settling issues that relate to wages, hours of labour,
State interference with private industry, private property, and other human problems which are in first appearance ‘economic.’
Three defects appear, then, to disqualify current economic science for the work of human valuation. First, an exaggerated stress upon production, reflected in the terminology and method of the science, with a corresponding neglect of consumption. Secondly, a standard of values which has no consistent relation to human welfare. Thirdly, a mechanical conception of the economic system, due to the treatment of every human action as a means to the production of non-humanly valued wealth.
§ 5. These warning-posts may help us to discover and to formulate an intellectual procedure more suited to our needs. A human valuation of industry will give equal attention to Production and Consumption, will express Cost and Utility in terms of human effort and satisfaction, and will substitute for the monetary standard of wealth a standard of human well-being. This assertion of vital value as the standard and criterion is, of course, no novelty. It has underlain all the more comprehensive criticisms of orthodox political economy by moralists and social reformers. By far the most brilliant and effective of these criticisms, that of John Ruskin, was expressly formulated in terms of vit...
