§2.The science and art of soCiety have suffered so much from want of exact and measured information that it is only right and natural for immense importance to be attached to the collection of masses of ordered and measured social facts.If a sufficient number of trained investigators could be set to work to gather, measure, sift and tabulate, the various orders of crude fact relating to the employment, wages, housing, expenditure, health, thrift, education, and other concrete conditions of the poorer grades of town and country dwellers, it seems as if a number of accurate and valid generalisations would emerge by clear induction upon which could be constructed an absolutely scientific treatment of poverty.Or, again, to take a narrower and more distinctively economic issue, that of the shorter working day.If a careful series of observations and experiments could be made in a number of representative businesses, as to the effect upon the size, cost and quality of output produced by given reductions in the hours of labour among various classes of workers, it might appear as if an accurately graded social economy of the working day could be attained by calculations.
But though statesmen, philanthropists and reformers are more and more influenced in their judgments and policies by these measured facts, no safe mechanical rules for the guidance of their conduct in any social problem can be based upon them.The facts and figures which appear so hard and so reliable are often very soft and ineffective tools for the social practitioner.
There are several defects in them regarded as instruments of social progress.
It is hardly ever possible to prove causation by means of them.You may obtain the most exact statistics of housing conditions and of death-rates for the population of a group of towns, but you cannot prove to what extent 'back to back' houses affect infant mortality.No figures professing to measure the causal connection between drink and crime or insanity, income and birth-rate, or any other two social phenomena, possess the degree of validity they claim.Why? Because you can never isolate the factors completely in any organic or social problem, and you can never know how far you have failed to isolate them.You may, indeed, by varying the conditions of your experiments or observations sufficiently, obtain practical proof of organic causation, but you can seldom express this causation in terms of any quantitative accuracy.Still more is this true of psychological and social problems.
A purely descriptive science of society may attain a considerable degree of quantitative accuracy, but the laws expressing the causal relations of these measured facts will always lack the certainty of operation and the measurability of action belonging to the laws of chemistry and physics.
Now the chief facts with which the statesman and the social reformer are concerned in forming judgments and policies are these laws of causal relation, and not the crude measured facts that constitute the raw material of statistics.This comparative inexactitude or lack of rigidity in the laws of social science constitutes the.first difficulty in applying the science to the art of social conduct with the same amount of confidence with which the laws of physics and chemistry are applied to the mechanical arts.But another difficulty quite as grave as this want of rigidity in social facts is the instability of the standard.In all processes of physical measurement it is customary to make allowances for errors due to what is called 'the personal equation,' abnormalities of observation in the experimenter.
But the standard of human valuation, the enlightened common sense of a community, applied to interpret social phenomena in terms of 'utility'
or 'welfare,' will evidently be subject to much wider variations, and the interpretation of this standard by statesmen, or other individual agents of society, will be subject again to wide errors of personal bias.
Illustrating from the economic sphere which is our concern, that specialisation of industrial life which has made three quarters of our population town-dwellers and is making our nation continually more dependent upon foreign supplies of food, will have a very different value set on it by the narrower nationalism which believes the interests and ambitions of nations to be irreconcilable, and by the wider political outlook which conceives the economic interdependence of nations as in itself desirable and as the best guarantee of national security.Or again, a difference of view or sentiment regarding the relative worth of the personal qualities of enterprise and self-reliance on the one hand, of plodding industry and sociality upon the other, must materially affect the values given to such phenomena as emigration, public provision against unemployment, copartnership, taxation of high incomes or inheritances.
Indeed it is quite manifest that with every difference of the range of sympathy and imagination the meaning which enlightened common sense will give to social welfare, and to every fact submitted to this test, will vary.
These considerations may seem at first sight to invalidate the entire purpose of this book, the endeavour to apply a social calculus for the valuation of industry.So long as the cost and utility of economic material and process is expressed in terms of money, you have a fixed standard capable of yielding exact valuations.Endeavour to resolve this cost and utility into terms of human welfare or desirability, you appear to have adopted a fluctuating standard that can give no serviceable information.
