第18章 REAL INCOME: COST AND UTILITY(4)

But in truth the consideration of the so-called 'concrete' nature of these goods is as irrelevant to our analysis as that of the money ticket placed on them.For from the standpoint of welfare these goods are nothing but the activities of those who produce and consume them, or, if it be preferred, the human processes of production and consumption.The human meaning of any given stock of wheat in our national supply will consist of the efforts of body and mind, the thought and desire and directed skill, put into the several processes of preparing the soil, sowing, tending, reaping and marketing the wheat, undergone by the farmer in Manitoba or in Norfolk, the merchant, shipper, miller, baker who convey it from the farm and convert it into bread, and finally the activities of mastication, digestion and assimilation with the accompanying satisfaction as it passes into the physical system of the consumer.And so with every other sort of concrete marketable goods or services.From the standpoint of human value, they are wholly resolvable into the physical and mental activities and feelings of the human beings who produce and consume them.It is the balance of the desirable over the undesirable in these several activities and feelings that constitutes the human value of any stock of marketable goods.The standard of desirability will be the conception of the organic wellbeing of the society to which the individuals whose activities and feelings are concerned belong.

Or the several stages of interpretation may be expressed as follows.

A given money income must first be resolved into the concrete goods which it expresses: those goods must then be resolved into the various efforts of production and satisfactions of consumption, estimated according to the current ideas and desires of the individuals who experience them.these current individual estates of the desirable must be adjusted by reference to an ideal standard of the socially desirable.The extent of this latter process of adjustment will, of course, depend upon how far the actual current ideas and feelings of individuals are kept in essential harmony with the true standard of social well-being by the natural evolution of an organic society.

§6.Our task in seeking to devise a method for the human interpretation or valuation of industry consists then in confronting the goods which form the net consumable income of the community, and in finding answers to the two related questions:

What are the net human costs involved in their production?

What are the net human utilities involved in their consumption?

A simple sum in subtraction should then give us the result we seek -- so far as any such quantitative calculus is valid and feasible.5Now though economists, of course, are well aware that many of the processes of production contain elements of pleasure and utility to the producers, while some of the processes of consumption contain elements of pain and cost to the consumers, they have, rightly from their standpoint, ignored these qualifications in their general formulae, and have represented 'goods'

from the producer's side as consisting entirely of accumulated costs, while from the consumer's side they constitute pure utility.Though our brief preliminary survey of the origins of industry indicates that no such sharp distinction between production and consumption can ultimately be maintained, and that throughout the whole continuous career of goods from cradle to grave the activities bestowed on them are composites of pleasure and pain, cost and utility, organic gain and organic loss, socially desirable and socially undesirable, it will be expedient to take our start from the commonly-accepted economic position, and to give separate consideration to the human values underlying processes of production on the one hand, processes of consumption on the other.

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In order to express business 'costs' in terms of human cost, we require to know three things:

1.The quality and kind of the various human efforts involved in the business 'cost'.

2.The capacities of the human beings who give out these efforts.

3.The distribution of the effort among those who give it out.

Corresponding strictly to this analysis of 'costs' of Production will be the analysis of 'utility' of Consumption.There we shall want to know:

1.The quality and kind of the satisfaction or utility yielded by the 'economic utility' that is sold to consumers.

2.The capacities of the consumers who get this 'economic utility'.

3.The distribution of the economic utility among the consuming public.

The humanist criticism of industry is condensed into this analysis.

The humanist requires that the effort expended on any sort of production shall be such as to contain a minimum of painful or injurious or otherwise undesirable activity.His complaint is that industry, as actually organised and operated under a system which treats all forms of productive human effort as marketable goods, does not secure this human economy.The humanist requires that the persons set to give out undesirable effort, 'human cost', shall be those best capable of sustaining this loss.Weak women or children, for example, shall not be set to do work heavy or dangerous in its incidence, when strong men are available who could do it easily and safely.The humanist requires that undesirable or humanly costly work shall not merely be confined to classes of persons capable of performing it most easily and safely, but that the distribution of such effort shall, as regards length of time and intensity of pace, be such as to reduce the human cost per unit of product to a minimum.The humanist criticism of industry upon the Costs side consists.pointing out that there is no adequately reliable or normal in tendency for the business economy of costs to conform to this three-fold human economy.

Similarly, turning to the consumption side, the humanist points out: