CHAPTER X

PSYCHIC INCOME

§1

THE stage at which, in the previous chapter, we left income
 may be called the stage of final objective services.
In other words, it is the stage at which the wealth of the objective
 world at last acts upon the person of the recipient of
income. This final income is that for which the economist
is usually in search, and is that which the ordinary statistics
of workingmen’s budgets represent. It is clear from what
has been said, that in this final net income all interactions
between articles of external wealth drop out,—all the
transformations of production, such as the operations of
mining, agriculture, and industry, all the operations of
transportation, and all business transactions or exchanges.
For, in all such cases, the debits and credits inevitably
oceur in pairs of ‘equal and opposite items. The only
items which survive are the final personal uses of wealth,
ordinarily called “consumption.” Let us rather call them
enjoyable objective services. The main sorts of enjoyable
objective services are the following: services of nourishment,
 services of housing and warming, services of clothing
and personal adornment, services of personal attendance,
services of amusement, instruction, and recreation, services

 of gratification of vanity.

§2
Tt is usually recognized by economists that we must not
stop at the stage of this objective income.! There is one
more step before the process is complete. Indeed, no

1 See Fetter’s Principles of Economics, New York, 1904, Chap. VI.
166