The processes of production may thus be classified as extractive, manufacturing, artistic, transport, commercial, professional, domestic.Thus it is seen that the work of 'distribution' and 'exchange,'2 sometimes distinguished from the work of production, is here included in that category.
Now, the first difficulty confronting us in our search for a human valuation of this economic system consists in the obscurity in which half this system lies.For though there is everywhere a formal recognition that consumption is the end or goal of industry, there is no admission that the arts of consumption are equally important with the arts of production and are deserving of as much attention by students or reformers of our 'economic system.' On the contrary, so absorbing are the productive processes in their claims upon the physical and mental energies of mankind, that the economic system, alike for practitioners and theorists, has almost come to be identified with these processes.This depreciation and neglect of consumption no doubt has been natural enough.So much more conscious energy of thought and feeling, and so much more expenditure of time and effort have gone into the discovery, development and practice of the productive arts.Their practice has involved so much more publicity, so much wider and more varied intercourse, and therefore so much more organisation.Consumption, on the other hand, has been so much more passive in its character, so private and individual in the acts which comprise it, so little associated with sequences of thought or purpose, that it has hardly come to be regarded as an art.Hence, even in the more elaborate civilisations where much detailed skill and attention are devoted to the use and enjoyment of goods and services, the neglect of consumptive processes by economic science remains almost unimpaired.The arts of production remain so much more exacting in their demands upon our attention.
The early influence of this dominance of the productive standpoint in economic science has had effects upon the terminology and structure of that science which are serious obstacles to the human interpretation of industry.unconsciously, but consistently, the early structure of the science was built with exclusive regard to the industrial or productive processes.The art out of which the science grew was concerned with the progress of agriculture, manufacture, and commerce, or with problems of money, taxation, and population, regarded mainly or wholly from the productive standpoint.The underlying assumption everywhere was the question, 'How will this or that policy affect the quantity of wealth produced in the country?' always with an important corollary to the effect, 'How will it affect the quantity of wealth, passing as rents, profits, interest, or wages to the several classes of the nation?' But nowhere was there any direct consideration of the arts of consumption, with one particularly instructive exception.The only bit of attention paid by our early classical economists to processes of consumption was to distinguish 'productive'
from 'unproductive' consumption, that is, to suggest a valuation of consumption based entirely upon its subordination to future purposes of production.
Their condemnation of luxurious expenditure and waste, alike in the wealthy and the working-classes, was not primarily directed against the loss of real enjoyment, or human well-being, or the moral degradation involved in such abuse of spending power, but against the damage to the further processes of making wealth by reducing the rate of saving or by impairing the working efficiency of labour.Though occasional considerations of a more distinctively humane or moral character entered into the tirades against luxury, or the dietetic advice offered by these economic teachers, the main trend of their reflections on the use of wealth was quite evidently dominated by considerations of increased production.This tendency further impressed itself upon the central concept of economic science, that of value, which was treated by these early makers of Political Economy exclusively from the productive standpoint of 'costs.' When, however, later theorists, beginning with Jevons in this country, sought to convert the formal goal of consumption into the real goal, by substituting 'utility' for 'cost'
as the determinant of value, it might have been supposed that they would have been impelled, passing through the gateway of utility into consumption, to open up that hitherto neglected country.But no such thing has happened.
