68 ECONOMIC ESSAYS IN HONOR OF JOHN BATES CLARK

other methods, by the limitation of output to maintain price,
and by the adjustment of rights through litigation and
through the more fundamental process of modifying the
rights themselves by statutes or court decisions which make
new law.
Thus all these things are productive from the purely private
standpoint, though the gains of some individuals must usually be
weighed against the losses of others. These activities are also
essential contributing factors in the process of technical production
 and of social creation of utilities; performing certain essential
functions; though they are not the only possible agencies by
which these functions can possibly be performed: merely the
agencies to which these functions are entrusted under the present
economic system. They are thus productive as a whole, in all
the main senses of the term; but particular acts may still be
purely parasitic, increasing the gains of one person wholly at the
expense of others. They involve conflicts of interest, in which
the gain or loss of any one party cannot be taken as a gauge of
the resultant gain or loss to the community.
These conflicts of interests are unavoidable, and any system of
settling them inevitably involves “wastes” of some sort, and the
defeating of certain interests that others may prevail. Thus the
mere existence of “wastes” in the present system does not necessarily
 carry condemnation, any more than the fact that the
present system of handling these conflicts performs a necessary
productive function carries necessarily a verdict of approval.
A discriminating study of the facts should furnish the scientific
basis on which efforts at improvement may be based, but parasitic
activities can at best be minimized, and never totally eliminated.
These are some of the difficulties necessarily faced by the dynamic
concept of production.

14. Conclusion

From the foregoing it appears that there are many factors in
dynamics which involve qualititive or “chemical” changes in the
static assumptions, and require new inductions to establish their
effects. Does the change to dynamics, then, mean the disappearance
 of statics as such in the pursuit of a study of a wholly
different type? This is a question which will ultimately be
answered by the test of experience. Dynamic study must not