Economic essays

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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

Structure type:: Chapter

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

Collection:: Economics Books

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.

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