This economic standardisation, as we recognise, is not identical in motives or in operation as it bears respectively upon the productive and consumptive functions.On its productive side it is regulated by considerations of private business profits.Its primary aim is to get men to work in such a way as to produce the largest margin between the wage necessary to evoke full efficiency under 'scientific management' and the market value of the output.Indirectly, it is claimed, this policy redounds to the advantage of industrial society in an increase of the body of consumable wealth, some considerable share of which will pass into the general store.On its consumptive side the scientific standardisation works differently.It is plied more directly as a social-economic art, working out for the family, as well as for the individual workman, a standard of living, physical, intellectual, and moral, conducive to the interests of society regarded as an economic or wealth-producing entity.16 But though society, in thus seeking to secure standards of economic efficiency for its family units, is not directly concerned in furthering the profit-seeking ends of private business firms, indirectly it is doing so.For, so long as expenditure of income, or family budgets, are estimated strictly in accordance with the economic efficiency they yield to the present and prospective working members, the process is in reality supplementary to the science of business management.For the better birth, better rearing, better health and education which it furnishes, will all eventually be translated into larger quantity and better quality of labour-power for scientific management to handle in its various profit-making processes.
Now the thoughtful members of the working-classes have always half-instinctively regarded with some suspicion the endeavours of social reformers to make them use cheaper foods yielding more nutriment for the money, temperance movements to keep down their conventional necessaries, and technical education to make their labour-power more productive.For they have doubted whether the cheaper living or the increased productivity would necessarily come home to them in improved conditions of life.Nor has their suspicion been wholly groundless.Though in the long run, it might seem to follow that as consumers and even perhaps, though less surely, as wage-earners, they would get some gain from the more economical use of their labour-powers, the bulk of the visible gains might very well pass into the hands of the employing classes in higher profits or salaries of management.
This consideration opens the deeper criticism which humanism and Sociology are entitled and required to press upon the policy of the industrial economists.
Every improvement in the technique of the arts of industry or of consumption may be considered as conducive to economic progress, yielding an increase of marketable wealth.But, if such improvements increase the human costs of production, or diminish the human utilities of consumption, as may happen if they consist largely in the standardising of productive and consumptive processes, they may bring no increase, possibly may bring a decrease, of human welfare.Proposals for scientific management or for standardised dietaries are not indeed to be condemned, upon the general application of such criticism.For it is agreed that such standardisation within certain limits is socially advantageous.The question, therefore, is partly one of degree, partly as to the security there exists that the economic gains of the improved economy shall be properly apportioned.
