Author: Simon N Patten
Publisher: BEYOND BOOKS HUB
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 144
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It Is the purpose of this essay to bring all those facts into harmonious relations to one another which throws light upon the laws regulating the consumption of wealth. These laws are not merely the laws of human enjoyment. Doubtless, the desire for happiness is always an important element in determining consumption, yet it is modified by many other elements to such a degree that our consumption could not be inferred solely from the relative intensity of our desires. Economists have too often forgotten that the pains of producing 'commodities have an influence upon the order of their consumption. We produce to consume, but what we will desire to consume is largely determined by the cost of production. While production is determined by consumption, the latter is itself largely modified by the former. Every improvement in production thus changes the order in which different commodities are consumed, by taking more from the cost of some commodities than from others. There is, moreover, a great need to examine the laws of human enjoyment. Men do not always have the same desire for a commodity. With individuals the change is very slow, but from age to age there are important modifications in the demand for commodities. Some pleasures are growing while others cease to have their former power. There seems, also, to be a general direction along which changes in consumption are forcing mankind, the causes of which must be discovered before the laws of consumption can be explained. It is doubtless true that consumption as a whole needs no encouragement : all that is produced will find consumers, if there are no obstacles in the way. The interest of the public lies solely in the direction which the consumption of a given amount of wealth will take under different conditions. Improvements in production, and the growth of new states, as well as the gradual modification of inherited ideas and customs, have during this century changed the direction of consumption so fully as to create a new order of consumption. Another epoch in the development of mankind has arrived, in which men will be compelled to change their habits and diet, in order to avoid the new evils, and to secure the new pleasures connected with their present environment. These changes are of especial importance to a new country like America, where all the elements which determine the direction of consumption have been already so much modified that the habits, instincts and feelings we have inherited from our forefathers are no longer safe guides for us to follow. Our climate and our food supply are so different from that of Europe that we must learn to eat and drink new articles, and clothe ourselves in a new way, before we can make the best use of our resources with the least pain and suffering on our part. The extreme cold of our winters and the great heat of our summers will necessitate a much greater change in the food and clothing from summer to winter than is needed in the more even climate of Europe. Pork and corn will not be too warm as foods for winter, nor will rice and fruit be too cool for summer. Drinking habits which are harmless, or at least not very injurious in the damp or cool climate of Europe, become destructive of health and honor in the dry, parching heat of an American summer. The German who sleeps at home all the year through between two feather ticks, soon changes his habit of sleeping when he arrives in America. He thinks, however, that he can still drink a quart of beer with as little harm as in his old home. It will take a much longer time to break up his drinking than his sleeping habits ; yet the same causes are working in both cases, and will force him, or at least his descendants, to become American in the one respect as in the other. In order to bring out clearly the laws of consumption, it will be necessary to view the field of economic phenomena from a new standpoint. Just as the point of view giving the best analysis of production is different from that needed for good results in distribution, so in consumption, yet another analysis vii of the same phenomena must be made before its laws can be clearly seen. The distinctions which must be emphasized to show the workings of primary laws of consumption are very different from those which are decisive in establishing the best known laws of production and distribution. The effects of primary laws become prominent only in exceptional cases, and the search for such cases takes the student into a very different quarter of the economic world from that into which other investigations have taken him. There is also another way in which the study of consumption seems likely to differ from that of the better known departments of economics, and especially from that of production. In the progress of a science, the inductive truths are more easily recognized and are those which are first discovered and emphasized. The more deductive laws are obscured by the effects of transient causes which hide them from view until the more apparent truths of the science have been seen and developed. Production as a department was worked out before distribution, because more of its laws are inductive. If Adam Smith had not previously developed the doctrines of production, the work of Ricardo would have been impossible. In consumption, we have a department which is of necessity much more deductive than either of the other departments of economics. It has its basis on facts in human nature and in society, which are of the most primary character, and hence are most easily hidden beneath a mass of obscuring facts that have their origin in a multitude of secondary causes. The theory of consumption rests upon the laws of pleasure and pain, modified by the social environment in which men live. There must therefore be an air of unreality in a discussion carried on in terms so far removed from the concrete world. So many secondary facts are for the time overlooked, in order to show the working of primary laws, that the conclusions reached often seem to conflict with well-established inductions. The ultimate laws of science, however, cannot be investigated in any other way. They are so far from the surface that their effects come into view mingled with a multitude of effects of more apparent causes, from which they must be artificially separated before they can be studied with care. There is no likelihood that the influence of these secondary causes will be overlooked. When the effects of the primary laws are fully recognized, it will be an easy task to show how they are modified in society by disturbing causes. Until that time comes, it is better to fix the attention solely upon the fundamental laws and their influence upon society, even though there is some danger that for a time the counter forces may be neglected.
Author: Dorothy Ross
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521428361
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 544
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Book Description
Examines how American social science modelled itself on natural science and liberal politics.
Author: Simon Nelson Patten
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Sociology
Languages : en
Pages : 242
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Author: Simon Nelson Patten
Publisher: Legare Street Press
ISBN: 9781019966877
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Challenge your assumptions about wealth and its role in society with this penetrating analysis of the nature of consumption. Simon Nelson Patten argues that traditional economic models fail to account for the true value of leisure time, human relationships, and ecological well-being, and offers a bold new vision for a sustainable and equitable future. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Author: Eldon J. Eisenach
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700611045
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 308
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Long before the current calls for national service, civic reponsibility, and the restoration of community values, the Progressives initiated a remarkably similar challenge. Eldon Eisenach traces the evolution of this powerful national movement from its theoretical origins through its dramatic rise and sudden demise, and shows why their philosophy still speaks to us with such eloquence. Eisenach analyzes how and why, between 1885 and World War I, progressive political ideas conquered almost every cultural and intellectual bastion except constitutional law and dominated every major national institution except the courts and party system. Progressives, he demonstrates, were especially influential as a force in American politics, higher education, and the media. They created wideranging professional networks that functioned like a "hidden national government" to counter a federal government they deeply distrusted. They viewed the university as their national "Church"-the main repository and disseminator of values they espoused. They established truly national journals for a national audience. And they drew much support from women's rights advocates and other highly vocal movements of their time. Permeated with an evangelical Protestant vision of the future, progressive thought was an integral part of the national discourse for nearly three decades. But, as Eisenach reveals, at the very moment of its triumph it disintegrated as both a coherent theory and a viable public doctrine. With the election in 1912 of Woodrow Wilson, the movement reached its peak, but thereafter lost its momentum and force. Its precipitous decline was accelerated by world war and by the rise of New Deal liberalism. By the end of the Depression it had disappeared as an influential player in American public life. In the decades that followed, the Progressive mantle went unclaimed. Conservatives blamed the Progressives for the rise of the welfare state and many liberals cringed at their theological and imperialist rhetoric. Eisenach, however, argues that we still have much to learn about and from the Progressives. By enlarging our understanding of their thought, we greatly increase our understanding of an America whose national institutions-political, cultural, educational, religious, professional, economic, and journalistic-are all largely the product of this thinking. In other words, their ideas are still very much with us.
Author: Peter Sloman
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030757064
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 308
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This new edited collection brings together historians and social scientists to engage with the global history of Universal Basic Income (UBI) and offer historically-rich perspectives on contemporary debates about the future of work. In particular, the book goes beyond a genealogy of a seemingly utopian idea to explore how the meaning and reception of basic income proposals has changed over time. The study of UBI provides a prism through which we can understand how different intellectual traditions, political agents, and policy problems have opened up space for new thinking about work and welfare at critical moments. Contributions range broadly across time and space, from Milton Friedman and the debate over guaranteed income in the post-war United States to the emergence of the European basic income movement in the 1980s and the politics of cash transfers in contemporary South Africa. Taken together, these chapters address comparative questions: why do proposals for a guaranteed minimum income emerge at some times and recede into the background in others? What kinds of problems is basic income designed to solve, and how have policy proposals been shaped by changing attitudes to gender roles and the boundaries of social citizenship? What role have transnational networks played in carrying UBI proposals between the global north and the global south, and how does the politics of basic income vary between these contexts? In short, the book builds on a growing body of scholarship on UBI and lays the groundwork for a much richer understanding of the history of this radical proposal. Chapter 3 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
Author: Isabel Chapin Barrows
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Manual training
Languages : en
Pages : 214
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Author: Lydia Langer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317007778
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 269
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After World War II, structures, practices and the culture of retailing in most West European countries went through a period of rapid change. The post-war economic boom, the emergence of a mass consumer society, and the adaptation of innovations which already had been implemented in the USA during the interwar period, revolutionized the world of getting and spending. But the implementation of self-service and the supermarket, the spread of the department store and the mail order business were not only elements of a transatlantic catch up process of 'Americanization' of retailing. National patterns of the retail trade and specific cultures of consumption remained crucial, and long term processes of change, starting in the 1920s or 1930s, also had an impact on the transformation of retailing in post-war Europe. This volume presents a series of case-studies looking at transformations of retailing in several European countries, offering new insights into the structural preconditions of the emerging mass consumer societies and also into the consequences consumerism had on the practices of retailing.
Author: Herbert Hovenkamp
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199331308
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 473
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Book Description
Two late Victorian ideas disrupted American legal thought: the Darwinian theory of evolution and marginalist economics. The legal thought that emerged can be called 'neoclassical', because it embodied ideas that were radically new while retaining many elements of what had gone before. Although Darwinian social science was developed earlier, in most legal disciplines outside of criminal law and race theory marginalist approaches came to dominate. This book carries these themes through a variety of legal subjects in both public and private law.
Author: John Bates Clark
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Wages, prices and productivity
Languages : en
Pages : 490
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