Part 17

See, e.g., J. S. Mill, Political Economy, Book I; Marshall, Principles of Economics, Vol. I, Books II-V.

Cf., e.g., such an account as Barrows, Ethno-botany of the Coahuilla Indians.

What would be the scientific rating of the work of a botanist who should spend his energy in devising ways and means to neutralize the ecological variability of plants, or of a physiologist who conceived it the end of his scientific endeavors to rehabilitate the vermiform appendix or the pineal eye, or to denounce and penalize the imitative coloring of the Viceroy butterfly? What scientific interest would attach to the matter if Mr. Loeb, e.g., should devote a few score pages to canvassing the moral responsibilities incurred by him in his parental relation to his parthenogenetically developed sea-urchin eggs?

Those phenomena which Mr. Clark characterizes as "positive perversions" may be distasteful and troublesome, perhaps, but "the economic necessity of doing what is legally difficult" is not of the "essentials of theory."

It is a notable fact that even the genius of Herbert Spencer could extract nothing but taxonomy from his hedonistic postulates; e.g., his Social Statics. Spencer is both evolutionist and hedonist, but it is only by recourse to other factors, alien to the rational hedonistic scheme, such as habit, delusions, use and disuse, sporadic variation, environmental forces, that he is able to achieve anything in the way of genetic science, since it is only by this recourse that he is enabled to enter the field of cumulative change within which the modern post-Darwinian sciences live and move and have their being.

"The capital-goods have to be taken unit by unit if their value for productive purposes is to be rightly gauged. A part of a supply of potatoes is traceable to the hoes that dig them.... We endeavor simply to ascertain how badly the loss of one hoe would affect us or how much good the restoration of it would do us. This truth, like the foregoing ones, has a universal application in economics; for primitive men as well as civilized ones must estimate the specific productivity of the tools that they use," etc. Page 43.

Cf. a criticism of Mr. Fisher's conception in the Political Science Quarterly for February, 1908.

"The machine itself is often a hopeless specialist. It can do one minute thing and that only, and when a new and better device appears for doing that one thing, the machine has to go, and not to some new employment, but to the junk heap. There is thus taking place a considerable waste of capital in consequence of mechanical and other progress." "Indeed, a quick throwing away of instruments which have barely begun to do their work is often the secret of the success of an enterprising manager, but it entails a destruction of capital."

The position of the laborer and his wages, in this light, would not be substantially different from that of the capitalist and his interest. Labor is no more possible, as a fact of industry, without the community's accumulated technological knowledge than is the use of "productive goods."

Cf. Distribution of Wealth, chaps, xii, xiii, vii, viii; Essentials, chaps, v-x.

Essentials, p. 158.

Distribution, chap. xxiv.

Chap. xxiv.

Essentials, p. 40.

Among modern economic hedonists, including Mr. Clark, there stands over from the better days of the order of nature a presumption, disavowed, but often decisive, that the sensational response to the like mechanical impact of the stimulating body is the same in different individuals. But, while this presumption stands ever in the background, and helps to many important conclusions, as in the case under discussion, few modern hedonists would question the statement in the text.

Distribution, p. 394.

In Mr. Clark's discussion, elsewhere, the "quasi"-character of the productive share of the laborer is indicated by saying that it is the product "imputed" or "imputable" to him.

Essentials, p. 92. Et si sensus deficit, ad firmandum cor sincerum sola fides sufficit.

See pp. 102-113; also p. 172, note.

"The cheapest and poorest grades of articles." Page 113.

See p. 113.

The disappearance, and the method of disappearance, of such elements of differential utility and disutility occupies a very important place in all marginal-utility ("final-utility") theories of market value, or "objective value."

"Only the simplest and cheapest things that are sold in the market at all bring just what they are worth to the buyers." Page 113.

It is, e.g., open to serious question whether Mr. Clark's curves of final productivity (pp. 139, 148), showing a declining output per unit in response to an increase of one of the complementary agents of production, will fit the common run of industry in case the output be counted by weight and tale. In many cases they will, no doubt; in many other cases they will not. But this is no criticism of the curves in question, since they do not, or at least should not, purport to represent the product in such terms, but in terms of utility.

To resort to an approximation after the manner of Malthus, if the supply of goods be supposed to increase by arithmetical progression, their final utility may be said concomitantly to decrease by geometrical progression.

Cf. Essentials, chap. iii, especially pp. 40-41.

The current marginal-utility diagrams are not of much use in this connection, because the angle of the tangent with the axis of ordinates, at any point, is largely a matter of the draftsman's taste. The abscissa and the ordinate do not measure commensurable units. The units on the abscissa are units of frequency, while those on the ordinate are units of amplitude; and the greater or less segment of line allowed per unit on either axis is a matter of independently arbitrary choice. Yet the proposition in the text remains true,--as true as hedonistic propositions commonly are. The magnitude of the angle of the tangent with the axis of ordinates decides whether the total (hedonistic) productivity at a given point in the curve increases or decreases with a (mechanical) increase of the productive agent,--no student at all familiar with marginal-utility arguments will question that patent fact. But the angle of the tangent depends on the fancy of the draftsman,--no one possessed of the elemental mathematical notions will question that equally patent fact.

A similar line of argument has been followed up by Mr. Clark for capital and interest, in a different connection. See Essentials, pp. 340-345, 356.