Economic essays

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Monograph

Identifikator:: 1753623200

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-136107

Document type:: Monograph

Title:: Economic essays

Place of publication:: New York

Publisher:: Macmillan

Year of publication:: 1927

Scope:: viii, 368 S.; Ill., graph. Darst.

Digitisation:: 2021

Collection:: Economics Books

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Document type:: Monograph

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Title:: Alternatives seen as basic economic facts / Franklin H. Giddings

Collection:: Economics Books

196 ECONOMIC ESSAYS IN HONOR OF JOHN BATES CLARK be protected and fed, and the more complex the life into which he is born the longer and more elaborate must be the unearned pro- vision made for him. He must be educated, and for the higher walks of life, expensively educated. As he begins to earn he must find kindly fellow men willing to take the trouble to put up patiently with his blunderings, in faith that he may presently amount to something. He may need gifts, or loans, of capital. Can we doubt that in the infancy of the human race those bands survived and improved in which there were beginnings of mutual ald, and to which nature gave bounty no less than adversity? Can we doubt that the American people is the economic giant of today because it found awaiting its exploitation unexampled unearned resources, to be had for the taking? All this is platitude, of course. But it is more. It carries the implication that while there is an economy of a biological sort (an ecology) which is antecedent to the scheme of relationships and activities which we call Human Society, it is no less certain that society is antecedent to all that we nowadays call the economic life, the life of the otkos, of the business world, of the nations. Some such thought as this I suppose was in the back of my head when I wrote the first paper that I read before the American Economic Association, namely, “The Sociological Char- acter of Political Economy.” The second alternative, curtly stated is: Help, or be thrown out. The day comes when the man who has been “brought up,” who has been sustained before he could “earn his keep” must begin to earn and to do as he has been done by. He can no longer be a burden. He must work, or now, in the normal course of things, he must starve. More, he must lend a hand, he must cooperate. It is not enough that he provide for himself. And this, as before, is because he is not an isolated being; he is part of a scheme of things, a society. Once a Yale student was asked by Professor Sumner what a Robinson Crusoe would need to begin an economic life with. The boy shot back, “Free trade, hard money, and a stick.” Like enough. Not being a Crusoe the normal man, whatever else he has to begin life with, must at all costs have the appraisal of his fellows as a creature suffi- ciently worth while to be allowed to live. In savagery, if he fails to achieve such valuation he may be outlawed or knocked on the head. In civilization he is an outcast from respectability,

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