I.In an age when human problems of a distinctively economic character, relating to wages, hours of labour, housing, employment, taxation, insurance and kindred subjects, are pressing for separate consideration and solution, it is particularly important to enforce the need of a general survey of our economic system from the standpoint of human values.Social students, of course, are justified by considerations of intellectual economy in isolating these several problems for certain purposes of detailed enquiry.But the broader human setting, demanded for the judgment or the policy of a statesman or reformer, can never be obtained by this separatist treatment.For the interactions which relate these issues to one another are numerous and intimate.Taking as the most familiar example the groups of questions relating to the working-classes, we recognise at once how the wages, hours, regularity of employment and other considerations of labour, overlap and intertwine, while, again, the questions relating to conditions of living, such as housing, food, drink, education, recreation, facilities of transit, have similar interrelations as factors in a standard of comfort.Nor is it less evident that conditions of labour and conditions of living, taken severally and in the aggregate, interact in ways that affect the efficiency and well-being of the people.
The special and separate studies of these various problems must then, in order to be socially serviceable, be subject to the guidance and direction of some general conception which shall have regard to all sorts of economic factors and operations, assessing them by reference to some single standard of the humanly desirable.This general survey and the application of this single standard of valuation are necessary alike to a scientific interpretation of the economic or industrial world and to a conscious art of social-economic progress.They must exert a control over the division of intellectual labour on the one hand, and over the utilisation of such labour for social policy upon the other.The notion that, by setting groups of students to work at gathering, testing, measuring and tabulating crude facts, relating, say, to infant mortality, expenditure on drink, or wages in women's industries, valuable truths of wide application will somehow be spontaneously generated, and that by a purely inductive process there will come to light general laws authoritative for social policy, is entirely destitute of foundation.
The humblest grubber among 'facts' must approach them with some equipment of questions, hypotheses, and methods of classification, all of which imply the acceptance of principles derived from a wider field of thought.The same holds again of the next higher grade of students, the intellectual middlemen who utilise the 'facts' got by the detailed workers 'at the face.'
They too must bring wider principles to correlate and to interpret the results got by the humbler workers.So at each stage of the inductive process, laws and standards derived from a higher intellectual stage are brought to bear.
Even if such studies were prompted entirely by a disinterested desire for knowledge, it is evident that their success implies the inspiration and application of some general ideas, which in relation to these studies are a priori.But regarding these studies as designed primarily to assist the art of social policy, we must recognise that the inner prompting motive of every question that is put at each stage of such enquiries, the inner regulative principle of the division of labour and of the correlation of the results, is the desire to realise some more or less clear conception of general human well-being.It must, of course, be admitted that this procedure rests upon a sort of paradox.The general conception of human well-being is itself vague and unsubstantial, until it has acquired and assimilated the very sorts of knowledge the collection of which it is here assumed to be able to direct.This paradox, however, is familiar to all who reflect upon the progress of knowledge in any department and for any purpose.I only name it here in order to anticipate the objection of those disposed to question the validity of assuming any sort of standard of human welfare, and to insist upon testing each economic issue upon what they call 'its own merits.' The application of a general survey and a general standard of values is none the less a logically valid and a practically useful procedure, because the new facts which its application discloses afford more fulness and exactitude to the survey, while the standard is itself made clearer and more effective thereby.
Assuming it to be admitted, then, that a human valuation of economic processes is possible and desirable, both for the enlargement of knowledge and for purposes of social policy, the questions next arise, 'How shall we conceive and describe the standard of human valuation, and how shall we apply it to the interpretation of the present economic system?'
§2.Before facing these questions, however, it will be well to have before our minds a clear outline picture of this economic system which we seek to value.It consists of two complex operations, constantly interacting, known as Production and Consumption of wealth.By wealth is understood all sorts of vendible goods and services.So far as material wealth is concerned, it is 'produced' by a series of processes which convert raw materials into finished goods of various sorts and sizes and dispose them in such quantities as are required, for the satisfaction of consumers or as instruments in some further process of production.Similarly, in the case of professional, official, domestic, industrial, commercial, and other personal services, which also rank as wealth,1 a variety of productive processes go to prepare them and to place them at the disposal of consumers.
