This opens up an exceedingly important issue in social economy.It has been assumed that a really enlightened society will so administer industry that a light day's labour shared among all will suffice to win the wealth necessary for the support of society and the satisfaction of the common material needs of its members.Thus an increasing proportion of human energy will be liberated for the performance of those activities which are pleasant and interesting to those who engage in them.A diminishing amount of time and energy will be applied to the mechanical processes of getting food and other materials from the earth, and of fashioning them and carrying them about.Thus there will be more time and energy for the fine arts and crafts, which depend less upon quantity of materials and more upon the skilled application of personal powers.From the standpoint of human welfare such an economy is obvious.It means, on the productive side, a progressive increase of activity that is humanly 'costless' and pleasurable, a progressive decrease of that which is costly and unpleasurable.On the consumptive side, it means the substitution of non-material wealth, such as books, pictures, poetry, science, which are virtually infinite in the human utility that they are capable of yielding, for material wealth which is mostly consumed in a single act of appropriation.The higher kind of goods thus brings a minimum of costs and a maximum of utilities, and that upon each side of the organic equation.
In most advanced nations of our time this gain in the relative importance of the arts and professions engaged in artistic, professional, recreative, educational, scientific and other creative activities, is recognised as being an evidence and a measure of advancing civilization, and some offset to the advance of material luxury.
§5.If, however, there is to be a continuous increase in the proportion of time and energy available for the production and consumption of the higher grades of non-material economic goods and for other activities of a non-economic nature, some limitation must take place of the demand and supply of material economic goods.If in any country, or throughout the industrial world, the growth of population were such as, in the old phrase, to press 'upon the means of subsistence,' the amount of productive energy needed for the arts of agriculture, mining, and the staple branches of manufacture and transport would be such as to defeat the economy of social progress just indicated.Even if the population did not advance, but were chiefly engaged in seeking fuller satisfaction of an increasing number of distinctively physical wants, the same result would follow.Larger drafts must continually be made upon the natural resources of the soil, by means of industries subject to what political economy calls "the law of diminishing returns," and an increasing proportion of labour must be engaged in these industries.Though mechanics and the division of labour in the manufactures, and even in agriculture, temper the tyranny of matter, enabling a given amount of routine toil to achieve an increasing output of goods, this policy of human liberation is impeded and may be entirely frustrated by a constant preference among large populations for a strictly quantitative satisfaction of new material wants.The root issue of social progress from the economic standpoint is here disclosed.It is the question of the relative importance of quantity of matter in the satisfaction of wants.In urging that social progress requires a progressive diminution of the part played by matter and the industries in which quantity of matter is a chief determinant factor, I do not merely mean that civilisation implies an increasing valuation of the intellectual and moral faculties and of their activities.Most of the fine arts require some matter for their manipulation and for their instruments; every branch of the intellectual life needs some material equipment.But in these occupations and in their products quantity of matter is of an importance that is slight, often wholly negligible.A fine art, a skilled craft, a machine industry, may each handle the same sort of material, metal, stone or wood, but the quantity of this material will have a rapidly increasing importance, as one descends from the manipulation of the artist to the craftsman and from the craftsman to the manufacturer.
If, then, we are to secure an economy of social progress in which relatively less importance is to be given to those industries which are less humanly desirable, alike in the work they involve and in the satisfaction their products yield, we must have a society which becomes increasingly qualitative in its tastes and interests and in its human constitution.A larger proportion of its real income must take shape in non-material goods, or in material goods which depend more for the satisfaction they yield upon their quality.
In a word, there must be a tendency to keep life simple in regard to material consumption.
But when one says that society itself must grow more qualitative in its constitution, a more difficult consideration emerges.
