<h2>CHAPTER 41</h2>
<h3>REACTION OF CONSUMPTION ON PRODUCTION</h3>
<h4>§ I. REACTION UPON MATERIAL PRODUCTIVE AGENTS</h4>
<div class="sidenote">Essential mark of the consumption of goods</div>
<p>1. <i>Economic consumption is the enjoyment of the utilities which wealth
is capable of affording.</i> All wealth looks toward consumption. To take
away the prospect of the enjoyment of goods is to take away all their
value. Consumption involves generally the using up of a thing. Food is
consumed quickly, clothing more slowly, and houses wear out after many
years. The using up is, in some cases, due to the forces of nature, and
is not hastened by enjoyment. A house goes to ruin more rapidly if
uninhabited than with a careful tenant; clothing is destroyed more
quickly by moths than by wear. The use of many goods that give esthetic
pleasures, as art, painting, sculpture, and the enjoyment of fine
scenery or of beautiful building sites, does not destroy the things that
afford the pleasure. The idea that all value originates in labor has led
to false views on this question. The essential mark of consumption is
the using of the income as it arises, not necessarily the using up of
the material agents that afford it, though this frequently occurs as
well.</p>
<div class="sidenote">Consumers' choice as influencing value</div>
<p>2. <i>The kind of consumption affects the value of material agents.</i> Each
buyer helps to determine the use of productive agents. The control of
purchasing power means the potential control of industry to that degree.
It was necessary in discussing the enterpriser to recognize that the
buyer eventually dictates the direction of industry; the<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_393" id="Page_393">[Pg 393]</SPAN></span> enterpriser
seeks to produce that for which there is most demand. A change of taste
affects the value of natural agents. An increase in the demand for meat
affects the value of wheat and potatoes, and also the land used for
producing them. A change in the national diet may be equivalent to the
discovery or to the destruction of half a continent. If one chooses to
drink wine instead of buying statuary, he increases the value of
vineyards and decreases that of marble quarries: If one drinks beer, he
bids for barley; if he eats candy, he may be offering a bounty for
beets. Therefore, choosing vines or violets, pictures or pretzels, each
with his nickel helps to determine what shall be produced.</p>
<div class="sidenote">Inventions influencing value</div>
<p>The distribution of wealth thus affects the value of agents. The wealthy
spend relatively more for luxuries, the poor for food and other
essentials. Where wealth and incomes are very nearly equally
distributed, the demand of different families will be for much the same
kinds of goods. If there were no rich men, the demand for vineyards
producing fine wines would be less. The very best qualities of goods
take on the highest prices when there is a small, but very wealthy,
class of purchasers.</p>
<p>Inventions often shift demand, and value follows. The invention of the
bicycle with pneumatic tires, coincident with the adoption of electric
traction for street cars, reduced the price of horses between 1890 and
1895. This doubtless was a factor in agricultural land values at that
time. This change was sudden, extreme, and temporary, and there has
since been a gradual adjustment and a return to the former values.</p>
<div class="sidenote">Consumers' choice as affecting productive forces</div>
<p>3. <i>The production of the next period may be radically affected by the
use now made of agents.</i> Some consumption takes the form of using up and
reducing the stock of wealth. The demand for lumber causes the
disappearance of the forests, whereas the demand for oranges stimulates
the planting of orange trees. The reckless exploitation of natural<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_394" id="Page_394">[Pg 394]</SPAN></span>
resources leaves society poorer. Great herds of buffalo were slaughtered
to get the hides, which were of comparatively slight value. Rich land
has been exhausted to get a few harvests.</p>
<p>War is a use of wealth for ends believed at the time to be necessary and
believed to forward social welfare better in the long run than would
dishonorable submission; but it causes misery and leaves industry
prostrate. The forms taken by saving are affected by the choice of
expenditure. In war the savings of individuals are given to the
government and used for destructive purposes. The lender parts with his
wealth and society uses it up. While the lender has a claim on the
industry and on the remaining property of the community, society as a
whole is the poorer. If the savings had taken the form of public
buildings, libraries, railroads, and factories, the wealth and income of
society as a whole would have been enhanced.</p>
<div class="sidenote">Consumers' choice as affecting wages</div>
<p>4. <i>The kind of consumption affects the wages of the various classes of
labor.</i> That an increase in the supply of a given grade of labor reduces
its wages and encourages its use, and vice versa, is a truth that became
familiar in the study of wages. An influence also is exerted from the
side of goods upon the price of labor. A shift of demand from one kind
of goods to another depresses the wage of the one kind of labor and
raises that of the other. A low grade of labor that performs only simple
tasks, and those but badly, is injured if demand shifts to better
products. Back of the sweat-shop shirt is the problem of the inefficient
worker. Progress takes place by the effort of labor to increase its
efficiency and to move into higher paid callings, and at the same time
by the desire of the purchaser to buy as good a quality as he can.</p>
<div class="sidenote">The consumer's responsibility</div>
<p>Every buyer then determines in some degree the direction of industry.
The market is a democracy where every penny gives a right of vote. It is
the thought of the society called "The Consumers' League" that through
purchases, pressure<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_395" id="Page_395">[Pg 395]</SPAN></span> may be brought to bear upon the employer to provide
better conditions of work. The members of The Consumers' League refuse
to buy goods not made under sanitary conditions. Undoubtedly there is
here a great economic force which an enlightened public opinion, even
without a formal association, can make in large measure effective. Every
individual may organize a consumer's league, leaguing himself with the
powers of righteousness. Will he read a yellow journal or a pink or a
white one? A nickel or two will buy either. He has a dollar; will he go
to the theater or buy ten dishes of ice-cream? He decides to buy a book,
and more type and paper are made, and more printers are employed; he
subscribes to foreign missions and Christian workers penetrate farther
into Africa. Every purchase has far-reaching consequences. You may spend
your monthly allowance as an agent of iniquity or of truth. You cannot
escape a choice even by burying the money, for that is either a demand
for gold or a gift to the issuer of paper currency.</p>
<h4>§ II. REACTION UPON THE EFFICIENCY OF THE WORKERS</h4>
<div class="sidenote">Instinctive choice as related to welfare</div>
<p>1. <i>All consumption works some temporary change in the consumer, making
him a more or less efficient producer.</i> Most consumption goods are used
to gratify a wish of the moment. Many actions are governed by impulse
rather than by reason; but in general this impulse is in harmony with
the interests of efficiency. In primitive society instinct and appetite
must generally have been safe guides. Food not merely appeased hunger
and gratified the palate, but it gave strength. Sensations of cold,
hunger, and thirst were developed by nature to stimulate men to do the
things that helped them to survive. In primitive societies there are few
chances to seek pleasures that are not favorable to efficiency. In the
struggle for existence the more efficient tribes survive, and those that
develop many abnormal tastes must perish.<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_396" id="Page_396">[Pg 396]</SPAN></span> But the conditions of modern
life are more complex, and temptations beset men on every side. Tastes
are pampered and appetite is gratified at the expense of later welfare.</p>
<div class="sidenote">Choice of foods</div>
<p>2. <i>The physical efficiency of the worker is conditioned on wise
consumption.</i> Chemists and physiologists are telling now in accurate
terms how the nutritive values of foods differ. Food values are not
measured by the pleasure afforded the palate. The wide variety and
greater choice now possible, even to the modest purse, make the chance
of error much greater than in simpler conditions. This subject, already
touched upon in the sections on the efficiency of labor, deserves
further notice. From youth to age, the foolish choice of goods yields
its harvest of ultimate misery. When babies are fed on crackers dipped
in coffee, or, as among the Italian immigrants, on stale bread dipped in
sour wine, there is a poor foundation laid for a vigorous manhood. Rich
and poor cook too much for taste and too little for nutrition or
digestion. Much cooking is still done in ways fit only for our
grandfathers who had cast-iron stomachs and worked in the open air.
Culinary methods have not been adapted as yet to a sedentary life.</p>
<div class="sidenote">Of drinks</div>
<p>Drinking tempts some men not only by taste, but by the appeal to
sociability; to other coarser natures the joys of Bacchus offer the one
hope of exhilaration. The pleasure from alcoholic liquor may at the
moment outweigh the cost in money, but a diseased appetite forbids any
reckoning of the vast psychic cost that follows. The coin paid for the
drink is the beginning of the expense; misery, disgrace, degeneracy, and
bestialty too often are the unreckoned items.</p>
<div class="sidenote">Of clothing</div>
<p>Clothing is primarily for ornament, secondly for physical comfort. That
was the historical order, and it is the logical order in most minds
to-day. How badly the two needs are harmonized! No wonder that the
savage suffers in adopting civilized dress. Travelers describe the
African potentate, attired in a high hat and a bracelet, striving to
outshine<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_397" id="Page_397">[Pg 397]</SPAN></span> his rival resplendent in full-dress coat and a palm-leaf fan.
Civilization is making headway there; but the student of primitive
peoples finds one of the important causes of their decay to be their bad
judgment in adopting civilized dress, unsuited to their customs and
climate. A mistake is made likewise by workers in physical tasks in
imitating the dress of the wealthy and professional classes. The dress
of the higher classes often is chosen because of its unsuitableness for
an active worker. It serves thus to mark its wearer as one engaged in
delicate tasks or as a person of leisure. Possibly, therefore, because
of their strong social ambitions, the manual workers in America more
than elsewhere adopt a costume that is not sensible or sanitary.</p>
<div class="sidenote">Reactions of enjoyment upon the intelligence</div>
<p>3. <i>The intelligence of the worker is affected by the form of his
enjoyments.</i> This does not refer to the use made of spare time for
regular study in night schools, correspondence schools, vacation work,
but to the use of time when seeking recreation. The choice of recreation
reacts upon the nature of the man. Will he read a book or play
billiards? In proper proportions both may be good, in excess both are
evil. Liking realism, does he read Howells or the blood-curdling serial
entitled "Piping the Mystery"? Does he devote his spare hours to the
"Scientific American" or to the "Police Gazette"? At the moment there
may be as much pleasure in one as in the other (and one might add, in
Hibernian phrase, "Yes, and more too."). Does he enjoy music, the
theater, or the cheaper attractions of Coney Island and the Bowery? Is
his recreation permeated with a certain intellectual ambition? There may
be just as much momentary joy in one choice as in another, and life is
shaped by the direction of one's enjoyments. Much depends on the natural
bent; some natures incline to the healthy as the plant grows toward the
sun. With most characters much depends on the influences of neighborhood
life; thus the boy's clubs and college settlements of the cities, the
schools and playgrounds of the villages, are tending to surround<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_398" id="Page_398">[Pg 398]</SPAN></span> child
life with healthier conditions, that will mould it into better social
habits.</p>
<div class="sidenote">Reaction upon the character</div>
<p>4. <i>The form of the worker's expenditures affects his industrial
virtues.</i> This is not a moral lecture; it is a look at the economic side
of the subject. There are some moral qualities, however, that are
closely connected with efficiency, while others are not. Some
individuals are corrupt in private personal relations, but "square" in
business dealings. But usually there is some connection between the two,
and under modern conditions this is becoming closer. Fitness for daily
tasks is affected by the daily thoughts of the worker. Sordid and foul
thoughts, like an internal malady, sap the economic efficiency of the
worker; clean, bright thoughts act as a tonic. Drink, gambling, fast
living, unfit men for positions of trust, while many pastimes leave the
moral nature cleaner and stronger. Few can live a double
life—honorable, conscientious, and exact in one part of the day, and
corrupt in another. Dr. Jekylls and Mr. Hydes are not often found in
real life. The habitual train of thought in leisure hours possesses and
controls the man throughout his work. It is said that "A man is what his
work makes him," but it is equally true that a man's work tends to
become what he is. A man fit for a higher kind of work rises to it in
the usual order of things; but no matter how humble the task, it
partakes of the worth and wholesomeness of its doer.</p>
<h4>§ III. EFFECTS ON THE ABIDING WELFARE OF THE CONSUMER</h4>
<div class="sidenote">Production vs. welfare</div>
<p>1. <i>Man and his welfare are the end and aim of the economic process.</i>
The starting point of industry is wants; the goal is welfare. Momentary
gratification is only a way-station, not the journey's end. Too often,
in economic reasoning, things are looked at from the employer's point of
view. The older writers, such as Ricardo and Mill, were inclined to take
what John B. Clark has called the "feed<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_399" id="Page_399">[Pg 399]</SPAN></span> and work" view,—the view that
the workman is merely an agent of production, a means to an end; that
his food, the same as coal for an engine, is to be thought of rather as
employer's cost than as consumer's gratification. But, in the broader
view, the welfare of men as men is the subject most worthy of economic
study. The workman's food is to gratify his hunger, primarily; not
merely to make him a better working machine. This reverses the order of
the older reasoning. The use made of the income is itself a kind of
production—its last stage. Is the process, on the whole, worth while?
This can only be judged by finding whether, on the whole, the welfare of
man has been furthered.</p>
<div class="sidenote">The marginal application of income</div>
<p>2. <i>An income yields the maximum gratification when it is apportioned
among goods so that their marginal utilities, as nearly as possible, are
equal.</i> Even a small income is income capable of many applications. The
choice lies among many thousands of articles. Utility varies not only
according to the kinds of good, but according to the varying quantities
of each. Every moment, therefore, the conditions of a choice are
changing. The best use of income forbids the purchase of an additional
unit of any good unless it affords the highest gratification obtainable,
at the moment, at an equal price. Various circumstances prevent the
exact application of this rule. Expenditure is a matter of habit, in
large measure, rather than a matter of judgment. The knowledge needed
for a rational choice very often is lacking. Appetites change, making
unwise the old purchases, yet men go on buying the same things in the
same proportions simply because a readjustment that would give greater
gratification requires thought. Finally, the best economic adjustment
must conform to the abiding physical and moral welfare of the user, not
to a temporary impulse; and such a choice is far more difficult than
that of the temporary good.</p>
<div class="sidenote">Progress and the refinement of desires</div>
<p>3. <i>Progress takes place where new wealth gratifies marginal wants as
intense as those of the preceding period.</i> If the utility of every kind
of goods decreased uniformly as<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_400" id="Page_400">[Pg 400]</SPAN></span> wealth increased, desire would steadily
decline in intensity. But old wants vary and new wants develop with
prosperity. Desire grows by what it feeds on. Ambition passes on to
other and higher peaks. The direction of the individual man's life thus
is determined by the expenditure of his increasing income. Wealth makes
possible a new adjustment of life, a new character, both in the
individual and in the society.</p>
<div class="sidenote">Wealth a means to living</div>
<p>The thought that needs emphasis in this connection is that, while
production and consumption are separable in thought and distinguishable
in practice, they are not opposed in their ultimate purpose. The highest
fruits of production are in the lessons of sacrifice and discipline, and
in its opportunities for experience and self-expression. The best result
of the consumption of wealth is not the gratification of appetite, but
the strengthening of the spiritual forces within men. The world is to
rise to a higher social stage not by banishing labor and by multiplying
sensual enjoyments of the commoner sort. Wealth, even in an economic
view, is not the end of life, but merely the means to its realization.</p>
<div class="sidenote">Variety and harmony in the choice of goods</div>
<p>4. <i>Enjoyment is increased by a proper variety and harmony of goods.</i> As
the old kinds of goods increase in amount and fall in value, there must
be a substitution of new goods. An element added to the dress or to the
diet heightens greatly the total gratification. The result is a unit.
Think of a dinner without butter, or a cranberry-pie without sugar, or a
dress-suit without a linen collar. Certain combinations are essential to
the requirements of developed taste and present a problem of
complementary goods. Combinations of complementary goods enhance the
enjoyment; inharmonious combinations decrease it. That certain things
"go together" is a fact that rests often in the nature of things.
Complementary colors please the eye; well-seasoned dishes please the
palate.</p>
<p>Again, the harmony of goods is affected by the special nature of the
occupation. A farmer with his out-of-door<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_401" id="Page_401">[Pg 401]</SPAN></span> life can use tobacco with far
less danger than the sedentary worker. A piano player cannot be a
base-ball player: the one requires soft and supple hands, the other hard
and callous ones. The young man must give up the piano or the game, or
play both badly. The harmony may rest on a still more complex social
adjustment. The loss to the man whose life is in the main on a higher
plane is greater if he descends occasionally to a lower. A ditch-digger,
looking at the question short-sightedly, may deem "a good drunk" a very
desirable form of enjoyment. But a brain-worker, whose joy as well as
efficiency depends on the clearness of his intellectual processes, must
see that in his case the perils and the costs are much greater.</p>
<div class="sidenote">Unity of choice in happiness and in character</div>
<p>Wise consumption depends not alone on physical pleasures, but on the
spiritual unity of the uses made of goods. Happiness and character are
akin in the qualities of simplicity and unity. Happiness, so far as it
depends on wealth, is a harmony of gratifications. Character is a
harmony of actions, a group of complementary deeds. There can be no
harmony, without a central, simple, guiding principle. The wise and
moral use of goods and the economic use of them are therefore for the
individual essentially the same. Life is a unity. The results of the
choice of goods are reflected in the health, intelligence, happiness,
morality, and progress of society. It is vain for the economist to
ignore the ultimate relations between economic choice and morality; it
is folly for the moralist to ignore the economic bases of right and
wrong in human conduct.</p>
<hr class="chap" />
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_402" id="Page_402">[Pg 402]</SPAN></span></p>
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