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

Structure type:: Chapter

Title:: The relation between statics and dynamics / John Maurice Clark

Collection:: Economics Books

54 ECONOMIC ESSAYS IN HONOR OF JOHN BATES CLARK an approximate relation between price and utility, the theory is true. While it is, as has been said, a natural derivative from the Bentham psychology, it does not depend on the “calculus of pleasure and pain,” but can be presented in terms of any other description of human motives; so long as the motives behave in a certain way. The essential assumption is that the individual has a scale of values or preferences: good or bad, wise or foolish, conscious or unconscious; and that his various economic acts are the expressions of this one scale of values.’ They are consistent; the scale holds while he is making the various decisions which are involved in the budgeting of his time, energy and resources.” Thus the values in his personal economy reach an equilibrium which is the parallel of the static equilibrium of prices in a market. This fact is expressed either as an actual tendency, or as an ideal of good personal manage- ment. As indicated, it has sufficient truth to justify its place in a static economics, being itself a static assumption. In contrast, in the attempt to put together the most realistic picture of human nature for which the materials are readily available, one is struck by its prevailing dynamic character. It contains static elements, but they differ essentially from the static character of the marginal-utility assumption. Man is a mechanism of stimulus and response, conditioned not only by the present stimuli to which he may be exposed, but by past stimuli which have played their part in shaping the personality with which he now responds. Desires and ideas are not separate, but ideas are themselves impulses to action. Deliberative choice—the nearest approach to the rational action of theory—is a check on this tendency to act on the immediate stimulus, and a very imperfect check. Even the static ele- ments of instinct or inborn tendency, habit and custom, change their quality when placed in a changing environment. Adapted to a past environment, they may be unadapted to the present, 1 No consideration is here given to that form of the utility theory which attempts to be completely agnostic as to how human choices behave and to deal only with momentary preferences. But the writer believes that this type of theory acquires meaning just so far as there is attached to it some premise as to how choices actually do behave. 2 The writer has elsewhere gone into this point in more detail. See «Economics and Modern Psychology,” Jour. of Pol. Econ., 26; 1-30, 136-66 ; Jan.-Feb., 1918. These articles contain the material on which this entire section is based.

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