Though the term Business, as we use it here, must be extended so as to include all sorts of centres of economic activity not commonly included, such as a school, a doctor's practice, a theatre, it will be best to take for our leading case an ordinary manufacturing business.Here are gathered into close cooperation a large number of human and non-human factors of production.The centre of the little system is the manager, employer, or director, whose ideas, desires, and purposes govern and regulate the movements of the various forms of capital and labour.This man has got together on his premises a quantity of machinery and other plant which express a complicated growth of invention running far back into the past and derived from great numbers of human brains.These machines and plant embodying these inventive ideas were made by past labour of various kinds.This manager or director, in planting the Business, chose what seemed the best apparatus for the purposes he had in mind.He induced a number of investors or capitalists to lend the money which enabled him to obtain this apparatus, and to hire the various sorts of labour power required to operate it.This labour power itself is the product of the energies of man in the past, the direct ancestry of the labourers who produced the beings that give forth the labour-power, the past generations of men whose growing knowledge and practice yielded the training and the habits of industry and of cooperation essential for the productiveness of labour in the modern arts of industry.
Here are evidently many different sorts of human effort, some of them physical, others intellectual, some pleasurable, others painful, some beneficial, others detrimental, to the individuals who give out the effort, or to society.
All of these productive energies rank in Political Economy as 'costs', and as such are remunerated out of the product.Which of these are human 'costs' and in what sense and what degree? Such are the questions that lie immediately before us, if we are seeking to reduce our £2,000,000,000to terms of human well-being.
§9.In this conversion of economic into human costs we can best begin by considering the fundamental distinction between creation and imitation, enforced with so much penetration by the French sociologist, M.Tarde.
It is not in its primary significance a doctrine of costs, but a division of productive energy into two classes.All social progress, indeed all social changes upwards or downwards, according to this theory, comes about in the following way.Some unusually powerful, original, or enterprising person, assisted often by good fortune, makes what is called a discovery, some true and useful way of doing things or of thinking about things, or even of saying things.This new truth, new phrase, new dodge, is capable of being recognised as interesting or useful, not only by its discoverer, but by the many who had not the wit or the courage or the luck to discover it for themselves.By suggestion, infection, contagion, or conscious imitation, or by any combination of those forces and habits that constitute the social nature of man, the novelty becomes adopted and applied by an ever-growing number of persons, over a widening area, until it becomes an accepted practice or convention of the whole society.Every new religious or moral idea or sentiment, every scientific law, every invention in the arts of industry, every development of a new taste, thus proceeds from one or more special centres of original discovery, and spreads by a well-nigh automatic process of expansion or imitation.
