Work and Wealth; A Human Valuation

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1914. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER XXII SOCIAL SCIENCE AND SOCIAL ART 1. The task of a human valuation of industry involved at the outset the arbitrary assumption of a standard of value. That standard consisted in a conception of human well-being applicable to the various forms of human life, man as individual, as group or nation, as humanity. Starting from that conception of the health, physical and spiritual, of the individual human organism, which is of widest acceptance, we proceeded to apply the organic metaphor to the larger groupings, so as to build up an intelligible standard of social well-being. This standard, at once physical and spiritual, static and progressive, was assumed to be of such a kind as to provide a harmony of individual welfares when the growing social nature of man was taken into due account. With the standard of human well-being we then proceeded to assign values to the productive and the consumptive processes of which industry consists, examining them in their bearing upon the welfare of the individuals and the societies engaging in them. Now this mode of procedure, the only possible, of course involved an immense petitio principii. The assumption of any close agreement as to the nature of individual well-being, still more of social well-being, was logically quite unwarranted. Economic values have, indeed, an agreed, exact and measurable meaning, derived from the nature of the monetary standard in which they are expressed. Now, no such standard of the human yalue_ of economic goods or processes can be established. Yet we pretended to set up a standard of social value and to apply a calculus based upon it, claiming to assess the human worth which underlies the economic costs and utilities that enter into economic values. Has this procedure proved utterly...