While an elaborate division of intellectual labour has been applied, both to the study of the objective structure of industry and to the psychology of the various agents of production, no corresponding studies of consumption have been made.When the products of industry pass over the retail counter, economic science almost entirely loses count of them.They pass from sight into the mysterious maw of 'the Consumer.' it has never occurred to the economist that it is just as important to have a clear and close knowledge of what happens to products when they have become consumer's goods, as it is to trace their history in the productive stages.It would, of course, be untrue to say that modern economists completely ignore methods and motives of consumption.Their studies of value and of markets compel them to direct equal attention to forces regulating Supply and Demand, and many of them assign a formal superiority to the demand for final commodities which issues from Consumers, as the regulator of the whole industrial system.But while this has evoked some interesting enquiries into quantities and modes of consumption, the main interest of these enquiries has lain, not in the light they shed upon the use and enjoyment got from consumption, but in the effects of that consumption upon demand as a factor in problems of price and of production.In a word, the economic arts of consumption still run in subordination to the arts of production, and the very nature of the interest taken in them attests their secondary place.Half of the field of economic survey important from the standpoint of human welfare thus stands unexplored or ill-explored.
§3.A necessary result of this identification of economic subject-matter with the productive apparatus, has been to impose upon the study of economics a distinctively mechanical character.The network of businesses and trades and processes, which constitutes industry, may indeed, by an interpretative effort of imagination, be resolved into the myriads of thoughts, desires and relations which are its spiritual texture.Every business, with its varied machinery and plant, its buildings, materials, etc., is the embodiment of conscious human effort, and the personnel of management and operatives represent a live current of volition and intelligence, directing and cooperating with it.A business, thus regarded, is a distinctively spiritual fabric.
Nor is this true only of those industries employed in fashioning material goods.The complicated arrangements of communications and of commerce with their ganglia of markets, by which goods pass from one process to another and are gathered, sorted and distributed in regulated channels throughout the world of workers and consumers, represent an even more delicate adjustment of psychical activities.Economic science tends, undoubtedly, to become less material in its outlook and treatment, and to give more attention to the psychological supports of the industrial system.Not only have we many special studies of such economic questions as saving and investment, business administration and other critical operations of will and judgment, but in such works as those of M.Tarde in France, and Mr.Wicksteed in this country, we find attempts at a systematic psychological interpretation of industry.Economics, indeed, according to the latter writer, is a branch of the science of 'preferences,' the application of intelligent human volition to the satisfaction of economic wants.
And yet the science remains distinctively mechanical and unfitted for the performance of any human interpretation of industry.This is due to the failure of our psychological economists to tear themselves free from the traditions of a Political Economy which in its very structure has made man subservient to marketable wealth.The accepted conception of the Art of Political Economy is that it is directed to the production of wealth whose value is attested by the purely quantitative calculus of money' and the Science of Political Economy is virtually confined to discovering and formulating the laws for the production of such wealth.The basic concepts of Value, Cost, and Utility, are subjected to this governing presupposition.
Their primary significance is a monetary one.The value of any stock of wealth is signified in money, the cost of its production, the utility of its consumption, are registered in monetary terms.The psychological researches which take place into processes of thought and desire are not regarded as having significance on their own account, but merely as means or instruments in the working of industrial processes.The study of motives, interests, and ideas in the process of invention, or in the organisation and operation of some productive work, treats these thoughts and feelings not in their full bearing upon human life, its progress or happiness, but in exclusive relation to the monetary end to which they are directed.
