THE RELATION BETWEEN STATICS AND DYNAMICS S57 
satisfaction, or may be reasonably satisfied without knowing 
that a different policy would not have worked stili better. Even 
successful business policies are commonly of this latter sort. 
They are not the best that could have been done; but so long as 
the errors are not greater than those of one’s competitors, one 
may never be forced to those further experiments by which alone 
it can be determined that anything better is possible. Even 
where sampling is relatively easy, as with consumption goods 
which are bought repeatedly, it involves some trouble, and is not 
likely to be carried to anything like completeness. And thus 
many errors persist, and it is possible to fool some of the people 
all of the time. 
Some errors are cumulative in their effects rather than self- 
correcting. They have permanent effects on the individual’s char- 
acter or opportunities for revising his course for the future. This 
is particularly true of the choice of an occupation. By accepting 
a poverty wage and a low standard of living one may be accepting 
also a low level of efficiency which will tend to make the poverty 
permanent; * or by entering the field of casual labor, one may be 
accepting also the mentality and social ideas and ideals which 
go with it, and which may be inconsistent with those qualities 
we think of as the “economic virtues,” and with the ability to 
strive effectively for something better. This does not mean that 
free choice is not still the best system, but it does give added 
meaning to the well-known principle that freedom needs to be 
limited and safeguarded to prevent it from being so used as to 
destroy or limit effective freedom for the future: and it 
emphasizes the point made by Cooley, that freedom and degenera- 
tion are definitely linked together. Moreover the ideal to be 
sought is not a static one of perfect use of freedom, but a dynamic 
one of an educational character. It involves tasks proportioned 
to one’s ability to perform them with sufficient success so that 
one may grow in the process, and safeguards against the most 
disastrous results of errors. 
This raises the question of levels of intelligence and capacity, 
and here we are faced with the fact of great differences within the 
population. Dynamic economies cannot work successfully with 
the idea of one “economic man.” Even if the non-existent 
average individual could be found, still departures from this 
average would be important enough to demand consideration. 
! Cf. Marshall, Principles of Economics, (5th ed.), pp. 560-63. 569.