THE SATISFACTION OF ECONOMIC DEMANDS
Every economic function comes in contact
with the mental life of man, first from the fact that
the work is produced by the psyche of personalities.
This gave us the material for the first two parts of
our discussion. We asked what mind is best fitted
for the particular kind of work, and how the mind
can be led to the best output of work. But it
is evident that the real meaning of the economic process
expresses itself in an entirely different contact between
work and mind. The economic activity is separated
from all other processes in the world, not by the
fact that it involves labor and achievement by personalities,
but by the fact that this labor satisfies a certain
group of human desires which we acknowledge as economic.
The mere performance of labor, with all the psychical
traits of attention and fatigue and will-impulses
and personal qualities, does not in itself constitute
anything of economic value. For instance, the
sportsman who climbs a glacier also performs such
a fatiguing activity which demands the greatest effort
of attention and will; and yet the psychotechnics
of sport do not belong in economic psychology, because
this mountain climbing does not satisfy economic desires.
The ultimate characteristic which designates an activity
as economic is accordingly a certain effect on human
souls. The whole whirl of the economic world
is ultimately controlled by the purpose of satisfying
certain psychical desires. Hence this psychical
effect is still more fundamental for the economic
process than its psychical origin in the mental conditions
of the worker. The task of psychotechnics is
accordingly to determine by exact psychological experiments
how this mental effect, the satisfaction of economic
desires, can be secured in the quickest, in the easiest,
in the safest, in the most enduring, and in the most
satisfactory way.
But we must not deceive ourselves
as to the humiliating truth that so far not the slightest
effort has been made toward the answering of this
central scientific question. If the inquiry into
the psychical effects were really to be confined to
this problem of the ultimate satisfaction of economic
desires, scientific psychology could not contribute
any results and could not offer anything but hopes
and wishes for the future. At the first glance
it might appear as if just here a large amount of
literature exists; moreover, a literature rich in
excellent investigations and ample empirical material.
On the one side the political economists, with their
theories of economic value and their investigations
concerning the conditions of prices and the development
of luxury, the calculation of economic values from
pleasure and displeasure and many similar studies,
have connected the economic processes with mental
life; on the other side the philosophers, with their
theories of value, have not confined themselves to
the ethical and aesthetic motives, but have gone deeply
into the economic life too. While such studies
of the economists and of the philosophers are chiefly
meant to serve theoretical understanding, it might
seem easy to deduce from them technical practical
prescriptions as well. If we know that under particular
conditions certain demands will be satisfied, we draw
the conclusion that we must realize those conditions
whenever such demands are to be satisfied. The
theoretical views of the economists and of the philosophers
of value might thus be directly translated into psychotechnical
advice.
As soon as we look deeper into the
situation, we must recognize that this surface impression
is entirely misleading. Certainly whenever the
philosophers or political economists discuss the problems
of value and of the satisfaction of human demands,
they are using psychological terms, but the whole
meaning which they attach to these terms, feeling,
emotion, will, desire, pleasure, displeasure, joy,
and pain, is essentially different from that which
controls the causal explanations of scientific psychology.
We cannot enter into the real fundamental questions
here, which are too often carelessly ignored even
in scientific quarters. Too often psychology is
treated, even by psychologists, as if it covered every
possible systematic treatment of inner experience,
and correspondingly outsiders like the economists
fancy that they are on psychological ground and are
handling psychological conceptions as soon as they
make any statements concerning the inner life.
But if we examine the real purposes and presuppositions
of the various sciences, we must recognize that the
human experience can be looked on from two entirely
different points of view. Only from one of the
two does it present itself as psychological material
and as a fit object for psychological study.
From the other point of view, which is no less valuable
and no less important for the understanding of our
inner life, human experience offers itself as a reality
with which psychology as such has nothing to do, even
though it may be difficult to eliminate the usual
psychological words.
The psychologist considers human experience
as a series of objects for consciousness. All
the perceptions and memory ideas and imaginative ideas
and feelings and emotions, are taken by him as mental
objects of which consciousness becomes aware, and
his task is to describe and to explain them and to
find the laws for their succession. He studies
them as a naturalist studies the chemical elements
or the stars. It makes no difference whether
his explanation leads him to connect these mental
contents with brain processes as one theory proposes,
or with subconscious processes as another theory suggests.
The entirely different aspect of inner life is the
one which is most natural in our ordinary intercourse.
Whenever we give an account of our inner life or are
interested in the experience of our friends, we do
not consider how their mental experiences as such
objective contents of consciousness are to be described
and explained, but we take them as inner actions and
attitudes toward the world, and our aim is not to
describe and to explain them but to interpret and to
understand them. We do not seek their elements
but their meaning, we do not seek their causes and
effects but their inner relations and their inner
purposes. In short, we do not take them at all
as objects but as functions of the subject, and our
dealing with them has no similarity to the method
of the naturalist.
This method of practical life in which
we seek to express and to understand a meaning, and
relate every will-act to its aim, is not confined
to the mere popular aspect; it can lead to very systematic
scholarly treatment. It is exactly the treatment
which is fundamental in the case of all history, for
example, or of law, or of logic. That is, the
historian makes us understand the meaning of a personality
of the past and is really interested in past events
only as far as human needs are to be interpreted.
It would be pseudo-psychology, if we called such an
account in the truly historical spirit a psychological
description and explanation. The student of law
interprets the meaning of the will of the legislator;
he does not deal with the idea of the law as a psychological
content. And the logician has nothing to do with
the idea as a conscious object in the mind; he asks
as to the inner relations of it and as to the conclusions
from the premises. In short, wherever historical
interpretations or logical deductions are needed,
we move on in the sphere of human life as it presents
itself from the standpoint of immediate true experience
without artificially moulding it into the conceptions
of psychology. On the other hand, as soon as
the psychological method is applied, this immediate
life meaning of human experience is abandoned, and
instead of it is gained the possibility of considering
the whole experience as a system of causes and effects.
Mental life is then no longer what it is to us in
our daily intercourse, because it is reconstructed
for the purposes of this special treatment, just as
the water which we drink is no longer our beverage
if we consider it under the point of view of chemistry
as a combination of hydrogen and oxygen. Hence
we have not two statements one of which is true and
the other ultimately untrue; on the contrary, both
are true. We have a perfect right to give the
value of truth to our experience with water as a refreshing
drink, and also to the formula of the chemist.
With a still better right we may claim that both kinds
of mental experience are equally true. Hence not
a word of objection is raised against the discussions
of the historians and the philosophers, if we insist
that their so-called psychology stands outside of
the really descriptive and explanatory account of mental
life, and is therefore not psychology in the technical
sense of the word.
It is this historical attitude which
controls all the studies of the political economists.
They speak of the will-acts of the individuals and
of their demands and desires and satisfactions, but
they do not describe and explain them; they want to
interpret and understand them. They may analyze
the motives of the laborer or of the manufacturer,
but those motives and impulses interest them not as
contents of consciousness, but only as acts which
are directed toward a goal. The aim toward which
these point by their meaning, and not the elements
from which they are made up or their causes and effects,
is the substance of such economic studies. For
such a subjective account of the meaning of actions
the only problem is, indeed, the correct understanding
and interpretation, and the consistent psychologist
who knows that it is not his task to interpret but
to explain has no right to raise any questions here.
It is, therefore, only a confusing disturbance, if
a really psychological, causal explanation is mixed
into the interpretation of such a system of will-acts
and purposes. It is true we find this confusion
in many modern works on economics. Economists
know that a scientific explanatory study of the human
mind exists, and they have a vague feeling that they
have no right to ignore this real psychology, instead
of recognizing that the psychology really has nothing
to do with their particular problem. The result
is that they constantly try to discuss the impulses
and instincts, the hunger and thirst and sexual desire,
and the higher demands for fighting and playing and
acquiring, for seeking power and social influence,
as a psychologist would discuss them, referring them
to biological and physiological conditions and explaining
them causally. Yet as soon as they come to their
real problems and enter into the interpretation and
meaning of these economic energies, they naturally
slide back into the historical, economic point of view
and discuss the economic relations of men without
any reference to their psychologizing preambles.
The application of the psychological, scientific method
to the true economic experience is therefore not secured
at all in this way. The demands and volitions
which they disentangle are not the ones which the
psychophysiologist studies, because they are left
in their immediate form of life reality. They
are accordingly inaccessible to the point of view of
experimental psychology, and nothing can be expected
from such interpretative discussions of the economists
for the psychotechnics at which the psychologist is
aiming. Even where the political economists deal
with the problems of value in exact language, nothing
is gained for the kind of insight for which the psychologist
hopes, and the psychologists must therefore go on
with their own methods, if they are ever to reach
a causal understanding of the means by which a satisfaction
of the economic demands may be effected.
So far the psychologists have not
even started to examine these economic feelings, demands,
and satisfactions with the means of laboratory psychology.
Hence no one can say beforehand how it ought to be
done and how to gain access to the important problems,
inasmuch as the right formulation of the problem and
the selection of the right method would here as everywhere
be more than half of the solution. It must be
left to the development of science for the right starting-point
and the right methods to be discovered. Sometimes,
to be sure, the experiment has at least approached
this group of economic questions. For instance,
the investigations of the so-called psychophysical
law have often been brought into contact with the
experiences of ownership and acquirement. The
law, well known to every student of psychology, is
that the differences of intensity in two pairs of
sensations are felt as equal, when the two pairs of
stimuli are standing in the same relation. The
difference between the intensities of the light sensations
from 10 candles and 11 candles is equal to that from
50 candles and 55 candles, from 100 candles and 110,
from 500 candles and 550: that is, the difference
of one additional candle between 10 and 11 appears
just as great as the difference of 50 candles between
500 and 550. The psychologists have claimed that
in a corresponding way the same feeling of difference
arises when the amounts of possessions stand in the
same relation. That is, the man who owns $100
feels the gain or loss of $1 as much as one who owns
$100,000 feels the gain or loss of $1000. Not
the absolute amount of the difference, but the relative
value of the increase or decrease is the decisive
influence on the psychological effect. Some experimental
investigations concerning feelings have also come
near to the economic boundaries. The study of
the contrast feelings and of the relativity of feelings,
for instance, has points of contact with the economic
problem of how far economic progress, with its stirring
up and satisfying of continually new demands, really
adds to the quantity of human enjoyment. In other
words, how far are those sociologists right who are
convinced that by the technical complexity of modern
life, with all its comforts and mechanizations, the
level of individual life is raised, but that the oscillations
about this average level remain the same and produce
the same amount of pleasure and pain? The technical
advance would therefore bring no increase of human
pleasure.
We might also put into this class
the meagre experimental investigations concerning
the mutual influence of feelings. When sound,
light, and touch impressions, each of which, isolated,
produces a feeling of a certain degree, are combined
with one another, the experiment can show very characteristic
changes in the intensity of pleasure and displeasure.
From such routine experiments of the laboratory it
might not be difficult to come to more complex experiments
on the mutual relations of feeling values and especially
of the combinations of pleasure with displeasure.
This would lead to an insight into the processes which
are involved in the fixing of prices, as they are
always dependent upon the pleasure in the acquisition
and the displeasure in the outlay. The exact psychology
of the future may thus very well determine the conditions
under which the best effects for the satisfaction
of economic demands may be secured, but our present-day
science is still far from such an achievement:
and it seems hardly justifiable to propose methods
to-day, as it would be like drawing a map with detailed
paths for a primeval forest which is still inaccessible.