Economic man

“ Honest Business, inclusive of all serviceable activities—service for service, to adopt a phrase in definition of Business—would be identical with Economics. Either, like the other, may be described superficially as the process of the science of making money.
Quite consistently with the foregoing survey, Economics has been described as the science of “mankind making a living.” This definition, too, excludes the solitary life by limiting Economic science to cooperative mankind—in other words, to Economic association. ”

“ He may think that too much importance, or if not too much importance, too exclusive an attention, is directed towards wealth. He may wish that economists would consider man as a being with [17] higher qualities, higher duties, and higher enjoyments than those which are concerned in the production, distribution, and consumption of commodities and services, and may regret to see him treated merely as a cause or a recipient of rents, profits, and wages. ”

“ This comparison naturally can only be essentially materialistic, hence, for the economist all pleasure enters into the field of material satisfaction, that is, of political economy. Thus all the other social facts, from law to morals, come to have an economic basis. ”

“ The pecuniary activities of men, efforts directed to acquisition and operations incident to the acquisition or tenure of wealth, are treated as incidental to the distribution to each of his particular proportion in the production of goods. Pecuniary activities, in short, are handled as incidental features of the process of social production and consumption, as details incident to the method whereby the social interests are served, instead of being dealt with as the controlling factor about which the modern economic process turns. ”

“ Living on one's income is becoming as much a part of American economic life as living by factory labor, or by mining, or by manufacturing, or by any other occupation upon which the community depends for its products. ”

“ Let it practice true and conscientious economy, not only in the expenditure and application of public moneys, but also in the method of levying them, so as to be equally just to all classes and all economical interests. ”

“ The present high cost of living raises questions in the theory of the economic aspect of life that have compelled the attention of the public. The theory of money, interest, savings, foreign investments, the place of gold in the world's economy is carried a step further and is popularly more extended. ”

“ The savings of labor which have fallen so largely into the hands of the few, making them rich men, have built our railroads, steamships, telegraphs, manufactories, thus in many ways adding to the means of production, and the facilities of commerce at home and abroad. These saved earnings in the hands of men seeking investment for profit have increased the wealth, resources, and refinements of civilization, made abundance possible, and brought it within reach of all, except the unfortunate, or the indolent and improvident. ”

“ This means wealth not alone in mere terms of money but in the economic sense of everything that is of use for the support or enjoyment of mankind. Of course "production and distribution" means the manufacture and transportation of all forms of this economic wealth. ”

“ Though such varied experience is perhaps impossible, much of the best recent economic thinking undoubtedly has come from men who have served in business or official capacities that have brought them into close contact with detailed realities of economic life. ”

“ The value of any commodity, therefore, to the person who possesses it, and who means not to use or consume it himself, but to exchange it for other commodities, is equal to the quantity of labor which it enables him to purchase or command. Labor, therefore, is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities.
The real price of everything, what everything really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it. ”

“ Economy no more means saving money than it means spending money. It means, the administration of a house; its stewardship; spending or saving, that is, whether money or time, or anything else, to the best possible advantage. In the simplest and clearest definition of it, economy, whether public or private, means the wise management of labour; and it means this mainly in three senses: namely, first, applying your labour rationally; secondly, preserving its produce carefully; lastly, distributing its produce seasonably. ”

“ Therefore, not all things which have an exchange value are wealth, in the only sense in which the term can be used in Political Economy. Only such things can be wealth the production of which increases and the destruction of which decreases the aggregate of wealth. ”

“ Trade, finance and commerce, by producing a regular flow of abundant income, brought into existence a new field of occupations and a new class--business and the businessmen. Herdsmen and farmers depended for their livelihood on nature, her niggardliness or generosity. The businessmen required only the presence of a group large enough to purchase goods and services, pay rent and interest, work for wages and leave the profits to the enterpriser. Each profit beyond the subsistence level enabled the businessmen to expand, buying more goods, hiring more labor, making still greater profits. ”

“ Given an equal amount of capital, both in brain-power and pounds sterling, your hours of work, your expenditure of energy, your capacity for diagnosis and research, your readiness at the reading of human nature, would bring you a far greater return of this world's goods in almost any other occupation that you care to name—incomparably so in commerce. ”

“ In urging a course of strict economy we admit that it is hard, embarrassing, perplexing, onerous, but it is by no means impracticable. A cool survey of one's expenditures, compared with his income; a wise balancing of ends to be gained; a firm and calm determination to break with custom wherever it is opposed to good sense, and a patience that does not chafe at small and gradual results, will do much towards establishing the principle of economy and securing its benefits. Economy has, however, deeper roots than even this—in the desires. It is there, after all, that we control our expenditures. ”

“ The man, however, must not only live by his trade, but live by it suitably to the qualifications which it requires. Besides possessing a little capital, he must be able to read, write, and account, and must be a tolerable judge, too, of perhaps fifty or sixty different sorts of goods, their prices, qualities, and the markets where they are to be had cheapest. ”

“ The economical workings of society afford numerous cases in which the effects of a cause consist of two sets of phenomena: the one immediate, concentrated, obvious to all eyes, and passing, in common apprehension, for the whole effect; the other widely diffused, or lying deeper under the surface, and which is exactly contrary to the former. Take, for instance, the common notion so plausible at the first glance, of the encouragement given to industry by lavish expenditure. A, who spends his whole income, and even his capital, in expensive living, is supposed to give great employment to labor. ”

“ We must examine the nature of Capital with care, and follow its varied forms without confusion, because it is the only other factor besides labor in the production of commodities, that has to be paid for out of their sale. ”

“ Thus, neither in its common meaning nor in the meaning expressly assigned to it in the current political economy, can profits have any place in the discussion of the distribution of wealth between the three factors of production. Either in its common meaning or in the meaning expressly assigned to it, to talk about the distribution of wealth into rent, wages, and profits is like talking of the division of mankind into men, women, and human beings. ”

“ In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material powers of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society—the real foundation, on which rise legal and political superstructures and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. ”

“ In no case, we find, is the mere money which passes from one person to another, the fundamental matter in any economical phenomenon. If we look more narrowly into the operations of the producer, we shall perceive that the money he obtains for his commodity is not the cause of his having a profit, but only the mode in which his profit is paid to him.
The cause of profit is, that labour produces more than is required for its support. ”

“ Sir Henry Taylor has observed that "industry must take an interest in its own fruits, and God has appointed that the mass of mankind shall be moved by this interest, and have their daily labour sweetened by it." The earnings and savings of industry should be intelligent for a purpose beyond mere earnings and savings. We do not work and strive for ourselves alone, but for the benefit of those who dependent upon us. Industry must know how to earn, how to spend, and how to save. ”

“ Another familiar demonstration of this natural Economic law that men both individually and in the mass seek to satisfy their Economic desires with least exertion, is the human craving for Labor-saving invention. ”

“ We have surveyed the field of economical facts, and have examined how they stand related to one another as causes and effects; what circumstances determine the amount of production, of employment for labour, of capital and population; what laws regulate rent, profits, and wages; under what conditions and in what proportions commodities are interchanged between individuals and between countries. We have thus obtained a collective view of the economical phenomena of society, considered as existing simultaneously. ”

“ The economic interest, as a function of intelligence, finds its proper expression in a valuation set upon one thing in terms of another—a valuation that is either a step in a settled plan of spending and consumption or marks the passing of an old plan and our embarkation on a new. From such a view it must follow that the economic betterment of an individual or a society can consist neither in the accumulation of material wealth alone nor in a more diversified technical knowledge and skill. ”

“ In speaking of money in this connection, I am of course speaking of coin, for although paper money may perform all the functions of coin, it is not wealth, and cannot therefore be capital.
9 Industry is limited by capital.... There can be no more industry than is supplied with materials to work up and food to eat. Self-evident as the thing is, it is often forgotten that the people of a country are maintained and have their wants supplied not by the produce of present labor, but of past. ”

“ Encreased wealth among the various classes of the community, may be viewed In the same light as capital; it flows from increased trade, and it produces a still further increase of trade. The views, and desires, and habits of mankind, are like their knowledge, they are and must be progressive: and if accompanied, as they generally are, by increased means, they must give birth to increased industry and skill, and their necessary consequences, increased trade and wealth. ”

“ The higher civilization advances, the dearer all those commodities in the production of which the factor nature with [pg 390] value in exchange predominates are apt to become; and the cheaper, on the other hand, all those in which labor and capital play the principal productive part.790 This is accounted for, not only by the almost unlimited capacity of labor and capital to be increased, while the natural forces which have value in exchange are susceptible of increase to so small an extent ”

“ Her economy was not the mean, penny-wise, pound foolish policy which many mistake for true economy. It was the art of calculation joined to the habit of order, and the power of proportioning our wishes to the means of gratifying them. ”

“ Now these are the facts, and with them before them who will pretend to say that the class who have not produced anything have added to the aggregate wealth? Whence has come this increase of wealth? From the wealth producers, from the labouring classes and from no other source. Industry being the sole source of wealth, it could have come from no other source. ”

“ Where the economic life of a people is still undeveloped, and the production of one enterprise is not from the first based on the estimated consumption of another, the circulation of goods brings with it great profits and great losses ”

“ In studying the law which would govern economic society if no essential economic changes were taking place,—in reducing society, as it were, to a static state,—we find that there is a certain set of characteristics which land shares with those capital goods which are the products of human industry. ”

“ Speculation for economic theory is a purely commercial phenomenon, a hazarding of capital on the supposition that desires will be found ready and waiting for the commodity produced—with a sufficient offering of purchasing power to afford a profit. ”

“ Even if we put aside all questions which involve a consideration of the effects of industrial institutions in modifying the habits and character of the classes of the community, ... that enough still remains to constitute a separate science, the mere enumeration of the chief terms of economics—wealth, value, exchange, credit, money, capital, and commodity—will suffice to show. ”

“ The proper view of capital is, that anything whatever, which a person possesses, constitutes his capital, provided he is able, and intends, to employ it, not in consumption for the purpose of enjoyment, but in possessing himself of the means of production, with the intention of employing those means productively. Now the means of production are labour, implements, and materials. The only productive power which anywhere exists, is the productive power of labour, implements, and materials. ”