ALTERNATIVES SEEN AS BASIC ECONOMIC FACTS 203 
ing cost and diminishing return stop the wheels at last, and drop 
the man. He then faces a new alternative. He gives another 
expression to his demand for present goods, without which he 
must lose his chance. He pays interest. 
Look at the matter any way you will. We must have present 
goods that can be capitalized, and we must capitalize. But 
that we may have goods to capitalize somebody must speed up 
and work over-time, and the rest of us must now and then pay 
interest or lose our chance. 
The sixth and last of the basic economic facts here to be named 
is the alternative: Value-making must proceed rationally and 
realistically or it will proceed non-rationally and fantastically. 
The economist does not have to assume that objective value, or 
price, expresses anybody’s calculation of utility. He may dis- 
cover that it does not. Until we are able to make intellectual 
estimates of desirability we are free to measure it by “hunches,” 
wishful thinking, and credulity, in short, emotionally, and we do. 
It would be difficult to prove that the “classical” economists 
consciously assumed that values are measures of utility arrived 
at by calculation, but their pages abound in evidences that often 
they made the assumption unconsciously. Cournot and Bentham 
prepared the way for overt declaration that values essentially 
are such measures, Jevons, Menger, and Von Wieser made it. 
In a paper on “Concepts of Utility, Value and Cost,” * I under- 
took to give it definite and explicit expression. It can no longer 
be defended, except as an affirmation of what might be expected 
to occur in a world predominantly and highly intelligent. Our 
later psychology forbids us to affirm this of the world in which 
We now carry on. It is one of the striking evidences of prescience 
in Professor Clark’s account of value that it leaves the way open 
for a broader view. And one of his distinguished former students, 
Dr. B. M. Anderson, sometime professor of Economics at Colum- 
bia and at Harvard and now Economist of the Chase National 
Bank, has sketched the broader view in his study of Social Value. 
So, once more, we drift back to “the sociological character of 
political economy.” 
* Publications of the American Economic Association, 1891, Vol. VI, 
and see ibid., “The Idea and Definition of Value,” Vol. VIII.