Socioeconomics

“ 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. ”

“ Where will you find wealth devoted with the most lavishness to non-productive use - costly buildings, fine furniture, luxurious equipages, statues, pictures, pleasure gardens and yachts? Where will you find in largest proportion those whom the general production suffices to keep without productive labour on their part? Is it not where population is dense rather than where it is sparse? ”

“ In this another limiting force will be brought to bear upon the increase of population.
Thus, as the sum of human wealth increases, through the exercise of intelligence in industrial operations, it will necessarily be divided among a population not increasing in an equal ratio. The average wealth of all classes of the community must increase in consequence, the necessary amount of active muscular labor be reduced, and more time be given for rest, enjoyment, or indulgence in mental culture. ”

“ You have attained nearly all that our most advanced political economists regard as the perfection of economical order—a population nearly stationary, and a soil much more than adequate to their support; a general distribution of property, total absence of permanent poverty, and freedom from that gnawing anxiety regarding the future of ourselves or our children which is the great evil of life upon Earth and the opprobrium of our social arrangements. ”

“ Since human life, however, is the life of man in society, individual existence moves within the framework of the social structure and is modified by it. What the conditions of maintenance are to the individual, the similar relations of production and consumption are to the community. To economic causes, therefore, must be traced in the last instance those transformations in the structure of society which themselves condition the relations of social classes and the various manifestations of social life." The Economic Interpretation of History, p. ”

“ 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. ”

“ That is to say, that in the older country the consumption of wealth in proportion to population is greater, although the proportion of labor devoted to the production of wealth is less—or that fewer laborers produce more wealth; for wealth must be produced before it can be consumed. ”

“ Whether we compare different communities with each other, or examine the same community at different times, it is obvious that the progressive society, which is marked by increase of population, is also marked by an increased consumption and an increased accumulation of wealth, not merely in the aggregate, but per capita. ”

“ Suppose that a company of artificers, provided with tools, and with food sufficient to maintain them for a year, arrive in the country and establish themselves in the midst of the population. These new settlers occupy themselves in producing articles of use or ornament adapted to the taste of a simple people; and before their food is exhausted they have produced these in considerable quantity, and are ready to exchange them for more food. The economical position of the landed population is now most materially altered. They have an opportunity given them of acquiring comforts and luxuries. ”

“ The desire to possess one of these small properties would probably become, as on the Continent, an inducement to prudence and economy pervading the whole labouring population; and that great desideratum among a people of hired labourers would be provided, an intermediate class between them and their employers; affording them the double advantage, of an object for their hopes, and, as there would be good reason to anticipate, an example for their imitation. ”

“ The production, distribution, and use of material things is the subject that absorbs the economist. The sociologist makes use of the facts and principles of economics to throw light on the economic functions of society, but the economic field is only one sector of his concern. In a similar way political science is related to sociology. It deals with the organization and development of government and embraces the departments of national and international law, but the governmental function of the social group is but one of the divisions of the interests that absorb the sociologist. ”

“ The average of wages, the certainty of employment, the social privileges, and the independence of the wage-earning and agricultural population, when compared with the increase of wealth and social production, are steadily and rapidly decreasing. ”

“ They realized that there is a prudential reason, which sociologists would call "a principle of the structural economy of society," for placing some of the strength of the strong at the disposal of the weak. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Principles common to all societies The fundamental truth, which in all economic reasoning must be firmly grasped and never let go, is that society in its most highly developed form is but an elaboration of society in its rudest beginnings. Principles that are obvious in the simpler relations of men are merely disguised and not abrogated or reversed by the more intricate relations that result from the division of labour and the use of complex tools and methods. ”

“ Social Economy the Chief Subject of Study.—We care most to know how an organized society produces and uses its wealth, and in making this inquiry we encounter at once phenomena that are not universal. [Pg 60] The civilized society creates its wealth coöperatively, by the joint action of its various members; that is, it proceeds by means of a division of labor and an exchanging of products. Moreover, it has, in some way, to share the sum total of its gains among its various members. ”

“ In the first place the influence of sociology seems to us fitted to lead to improvement in the method of inquiry in economic science. In the second place the facts examined by the sociologist appear to us to be of a nature to throw a peculiar light upon many of the phenomena which the economist observes.
Let us notice, in the first place, the action of the sociological spirit upon economic method. It is fundamental to sociology to desire to embrace all societies in all times and in all places. ”

“ To discover the cause which, as population increases and the productive arts advance, deepens the poverty of the lowest class, we must find the law which determines what part of the produce is distributed to labor as wages. To find the law of wages, or at least to make sure when we have found it, we must also determine the laws which fix the155 part of the produce which goes to capital and the part which goes to land owners, for as land, labor, and capital join in producing wealth, it is between these three that the produce must be divided. ”

“ CHAPTER SEVEN THE ECONOMICS OF CIVILIZATION Politics involves the exercise of authority—the policy making, planning, control, direction and administration of a community. Economic forces provide the wealth, income and livelihood—the wherewithal upon which a community depends for its physical existence, its survival, its geographical extension, the continuance of its life cycle. ”

“ We see, however, by this, that there is a distinction more important to the wealth of a community than even that between productive and unproductive labor; the distinction, namely, between labor for the supply of productive, and for the supply of unproductive, consumption; between labor employed in keeping up or in adding to the productive resources of the country, and that which is employed otherwise. Of the produce of the country, a part only is destined to be consumed productively ”

“ Thus social capital and its counterpart, the whole of social surplus value, are not merely real quantities, having an objective existence, but, what is more, the relation between them, the average profit, guides and directs the whole process of exchange. ”

“ This shows that the modern economic development has indeed been favorable to the entire population by increasing the income and by increasing the number of members of each economic-social class, but that the distribution has been a very uneven one, the rich being mostly favored, then the lower classes, and the middle class least. ”

“ Present labour obtains a constantly increasing proportion of a constantly increasing quantity, while the claims of the accumulations of past labour (capital) are rewarded with an increasing quantity, but rapidly diminishing proportion; and that there is thus, with the growth of population and wealth, a daily tendency toward improvement and equality of condition. ”

“ Again, many non-economic forces continually obtrude themselves upon the student of industrial conditions, such as custom, invention, imitation, standards, ideals, and the like. These are general social forces which play throughout all phases of human social life and so show the dependence of industry upon society in general, and, therefore, of economics upon sociology. ”

“ Supposing, therefore, that the actual comforts of the labourer remain the same, profits will fall or rise, according as population, or improvements in the production of food and other necessaries, advance fastest. ”

“ The element in the total industrial product which is due to the social organism is represented by the difference between the value of what one man produces as a worker in connection with the social organization and what he could produce in a condition of isolation. Working in concert with his fellows by aid of the social organism, he and they produce enough to support all in the highest luxury and refinement. ”

“ Under this twofold influence, society would exhibit these leading features: a well-paid and affluent body of labourers; no enormous fortunes, except what were earned and accumulated during a single lifetime; but a much larger body of persons than at present, not only exempt from the coarser toils, but with sufficient leisure, both physical and mental, from mechanical details, to cultivate freely the graces of life, and afford examples of them to the classes less favourably circumstanced for their growth. ”

“ What the laborers require to live, and to marry, and beget children in sufficient numbers to supply the labor market, is their standard of life. This they obtain and no more. Labor costs labor, and is measured by labor; but labor produces more than it consumes, and this surplus-value is rent. ”

“ In the social production of their life men enter into fixed, necessary relationships in production, independent of their will, relationships which correspond to a definite stage in the development of their material powers of production. The sum total of these relationships forms the economic structure of society, the real basis upon which the juristic and political superstructure is erected, and to which definite forms of social consciousness correspond. The form of production of the material life conditions the social, political, and intellectual life-process in general. ”

“ Such deference is deeply grounded in human nature; but they will judge for themselves of the persons who are and are not entitled to it.
§ 3.It appears to me impossible but that the increase of intelligence, of education, and of the love of independence among the working classes, must be attended with a corresponding growth of the good sense which manifests itself in provident habits of conduct, and that population, therefore, will bear a gradually diminishing ratio to capital and employment. ”

“ If all instruments of production were held in joint property by the whole people, and the produce divided with perfect equality among them, and if in a society thus constituted, industry were as energetic and the produce as ample as at present, there would be enough to make all the existing population extremely comfortable ”

“ But such extra capital and labour do not come quickly; since, in a balanced community, not increasing in population and wealth, labour and capital have to be drawn from other industries, where they are already yielding the ordinary returns. ”

“ The main factor in the production of wealth among civilized men is the social organism, the machinery of associated labor and exchange by which hundreds of millions of individuals provide the demand for one another's product and mutually complement one another's labors, thereby making the productive and distributive systems of a nation and of the world one great machine. ”

“ 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. ”