Author: Simon N Patten

Publisher: BEYOND BOOKS HUB

Published: 2021-01-01

Total Pages: 144

ISBN-13:

It Is the purpose of this essay to bring all those facts into harmonious relations to one another which throws light upon the laws regulating the consumption of wealth. These laws are not merely the laws of human enjoyment. Doubtless, the desire for happiness is always an important element in determining consumption, yet it is modified by many other elements to such a degree that our consumption could not be inferred solely from the relative intensity of our desires. Economists have too often forgotten that the pains of producing 'commodities have an influence upon the order of their consumption. We produce to consume, but what we will desire to consume is largely determined by the cost of production. While production is determined by consumption, the latter is itself largely modified by the former. Every improvement in production thus changes the order in which different commodities are consumed, by taking more from the cost of some commodities than from others. There is, moreover, a great need to examine the laws of human enjoyment. Men do not always have the same desire for a commodity. With individuals the change is very slow, but from age to age there are important modifications in the demand for commodities. Some pleasures are growing while others cease to have their former power. There seems, also, to be a general direction along which changes in consumption are forcing mankind, the causes of which must be discovered before the laws of consumption can be explained. It is doubtless true that consumption as a whole needs no encouragement : all that is produced will find consumers, if there are no obstacles in the way. The interest of the public lies solely in the direction which the consumption of a given amount of wealth will take under different conditions. Improvements in production, and the growth of new states, as well as the gradual modification of inherited ideas and customs, have during this century changed the direction of consumption so fully as to create a new order of consumption. Another epoch in the development of mankind has arrived, in which men will be compelled to change their habits and diet, in order to avoid the new evils, and to secure the new pleasures connected with their present environment. These changes are of especial importance to a new country like America, where all the elements which determine the direction of consumption have been already so much modified that the habits, instincts and feelings we have inherited from our forefathers are no longer safe guides for us to follow. Our climate and our food supply are so different from that of Europe that we must learn to eat and drink new articles, and clothe ourselves in a new way, before we can make the best use of our resources with the least pain and suffering on our part. The extreme cold of our winters and the great heat of our summers will necessitate a much greater change in the food and clothing from summer to winter than is needed in the more even climate of Europe. Pork and corn will not be too warm as foods for winter, nor will rice and fruit be too cool for summer. Drinking habits which are harmless, or at least not very injurious in the damp or cool climate of Europe, become destructive of health and honor in the dry, parching heat of an American summer. The German who sleeps at home all the year through between two feather ticks, soon changes his habit of sleeping when he arrives in America. He thinks, however, that he can still drink a quart of beer with as little harm as in his old home. It will take a much longer time to break up his drinking than his sleeping habits ; yet the same causes are working in both cases, and will force him, or at least his descendants, to become American in the one respect as in the other. In order to bring out clearly the laws of consumption, it will be necessary to view the field of economic phenomena from a new standpoint. Just as the point of view giving the best analysis of production is different from that needed for good results in distribution, so in consumption, yet another analysis vii of the same phenomena must be made before its laws can be clearly seen. The distinctions which must be emphasized to show the workings of primary laws of consumption are very different from those which are decisive in establishing the best known laws of production and distribution. The effects of primary laws become prominent only in exceptional cases, and the search for such cases takes the student into a very different quarter of the economic world from that into which other investigations have taken him. There is also another way in which the study of consumption seems likely to differ from that of the better known departments of economics, and especially from that of production. In the progress of a science, the inductive truths are more easily recognized and are those which are first discovered and emphasized. The more deductive laws are obscured by the effects of transient causes which hide them from view until the more apparent truths of the science have been seen and developed. Production as a department was worked out before distribution, because more of its laws are inductive. If Adam Smith had not previously developed the doctrines of production, the work of Ricardo would have been impossible. In consumption, we have a department which is of necessity much more deductive than either of the other departments of economics. It has its basis on facts in human nature and in society, which are of the most primary character, and hence are most easily hidden beneath a mass of obscuring facts that have their origin in a multitude of secondary causes. The theory of consumption rests upon the laws of pleasure and pain, modified by the social environment in which men live. There must therefore be an air of unreality in a discussion carried on in terms so far removed from the concrete world. So many secondary facts are for the time overlooked, in order to show the working of primary laws, that the conclusions reached often seem to conflict with well-established inductions. The ultimate laws of science, however, cannot be investigated in any other way. They are so far from the surface that their effects come into view mingled with a multitude of effects of more apparent causes, from which they must be artificially separated before they can be studied with care. There is no likelihood that the influence of these secondary causes will be overlooked. When the effects of the primary laws are fully recognized, it will be an easy task to show how they are modified in society by disturbing causes. Until that time comes, it is better to fix the attention solely upon the fundamental laws and their influence upon society, even though there is some danger that for a time the counter forces may be neglected.