THE LIMITS OF AN ECONOMIC SOCIETY

When we try to establish a standard to which wages generally tend to conform, the question arises how much of the earth we have in view. Is there a rate at which the pay of labor in Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and America tends to settle and remain? Is there a common rate of interest that is normal in all these grand divisions, and are there also general standards of value for goods which govern their prices in all the markets of the world? If there are no such standards having universal validity, are there any that are valid within single geographical divisions? On what principle can we divide the earth into sections for economic purposes? These are some of the questions which must be answered if a theory of distribution is to have any definiteness of meaning, and they arise whenever we try to establish a static standard of any kind. If we talk about natural wages, we must know in how much of the world they are natural. The questions become even more urgent when we try to solve dynamic problems. We shall have to determine the effects of an influx of labor into the economic society we are studying; but does this mean an increase of population in the world as a whole? Does an influx of capital have a similar comprehensive meaning, and does an improvement in the method of producing some commodity mean a change in the mode of making it in every part of the world where it is produced at all? We need to know how extensive the society is whose activities we are examining.

Characteristics of an Economic Society. - We have said that there are natural rates of wages, etc., within some area, which we have regarded as containing an economic society, and we have treated this social organism much as though it were as isolated and self-contained as would be an inaccessible island with its population. It has one general market where values are fixed. A farmer within the area covered by our studies produces wheat for the whole society, and in one way or another, every person within the area is a bidder for it. A shoemaker makes shoes and a weaver makes cloth to offer to everybody. Each part of the organism ministers to the whole and is ministered to by the whole. Competition is ideally free and in a sense is universal. The general system of groups made up of the A’s, the B’s, the C’s, and the H’s of our table illustrates the manner in which this complete and self-contained society is organized. In the static state there is one standard of wages for all these groups and their subdivisions and one equally general standard of interest. The price of a commodity, barring some allowance for cost of carrying it, is uniform everywhere. A reduced price for A’’’M in any part of the area where this society dwells would set men bidding for it from every quarter of that area and would thus bring the local prices to uniformity. So a high rate of pay for labor in one part would at once lure men from every other part and reduce the high pay to the standard generally prevailing. The picture is that of a social body having a large geographical extension and yet intensely sensitive at every point to economic influences. Prices, wages, and interest everywhere respond at once to an influence that originates in any part of the extended area. In technical terms this means that there is perfect mobility of labor and capital within the group system represented by the table, and that this involves equally perfect mobility as between parts of the area that the groups inhabit. Men move from one section of the country to another in response to an economic inducement as readily as they do from the group A to the group B.

Barriers which divide the World into Economic Sections. - Now it is clear that in the actual world changing one’s place of abode is difficult, and even sending capital from place to place is somewhat so. Inequalities of earning power are not leveled out by a quick migration of laborers from China to Europe or to America. In their methods of production the different regions are not brought to a uniformity, for there is machine labor here and hand labor there; and it is vain to expect that machines will quickly become universal and that the practical arts in America, Africa, and Asia will be rendered uniform by such a quick adoption of the most efficient processes as economic law, in the absence of friction, requires.

Boundaries of the Society which is here Studied. - If we take the world as a whole into the circle covered by our studies, we find that labor, compared with other economic elements, decidedly lacks fluidity and does not easily move. So far from being like water, which flows readily and finds its level quickly, it is more like tar or other viscous stuff, which flows slowly and is long in leveling out local irregularities in its surface. In the world as a whole there are regions crowded with people and other regions nearly unpeopled, and long will it be before some of these differences will be much reduced. Many centuries, indeed, must pass before they are entirely removed. If, however, we take the most active part of the world, - western Europe, most of North America, Japan, and the more fully settled parts of Australia, - labor will show a degree of mobility that makes it more like the water of the illustration, and capital within this active center of industrial operations will be more fluid still. Prices here tend toward certain general standards, and processes of production and methods of organizing the forces which do the producing work tend strongly toward uniformity. The best processes and the best forms of organization tend generally to survive. There are imperative reasons for studying the economy of this highly civilized region, the center of the economic activities of the world, apart from that of the more undeveloped regions.

The Need of a Rule by which a Part of the World may be Treated as an Economic Society. - This involves finding a way by which we can treat a limited part of the world much as though it were, for our purposes, the whole of it. In essential ways the economic center that we have described does act somewhat as if it were an organism complete in itself. We must draw a boundary line about the area of active movement, of lively interchanges, and of general sensitiveness to economic influences, thus separating it from the broader zone of sluggish movement of capital and population, of slow response to economic stimuli, and of generally backward conditions.

Freedom of Movement as a Test. - In Europe, America, and the other advanced regions goods are carried from place to place so easily and quickly that there is a tendency toward uniform prices; and such local differences of price as exist in the case of any commodity do not much exceed the cost of getting it carried from one place to another, though in the cost of moving it there must often be reckoned the toll which a government takes at the customhouse. Capital moves freely, and there is a certain approach to a general level of interest, though here also local differences of course survive. The obstacle to the moving of capital from one place to another, if the owner does not go with it, is occasioned mainly by the risk it encounters and by a virtual bill for insurance. With allowance for this cost, rates of interest in the region we have described tend toward a general level. Though labor migrates more slowly than capital, it moves far more rapidly within the economic center than in the outer zones. Processes of production are not brought to a complete uniformity within the center, but they tend powerfully toward it; for while obstructions exist, they surely and not always slowly yield. With due regard for such differences of method as those existing between the European ways of making products and the American ways, we may say that the tendency toward the general survival of the best methods is too strong to allow any important differences to be permanent. Everywhere, in short, within the central area there is a strong tendency to conform to economic standards in the matter of prices, wages, interest, industrial processes, and forms of economic organization. The standards are what we have defined as the static ones. If we should stop progress and all disturbing influences and wait long enough, we should see values, wages, interest, etc., take a static level throughout the vast area. This, however, would require that migrations should go on till all inducement to move from place to place should have ceased to exist. Population would then have distributed itself over the land in the most advantageous way, and no body of people would be better off than any other by reason of the location of their abode. A long period would be needed to bring about this adjustment even within the circumscribed area where influences that make for change are very active and where obstacles are far smaller than they are in the uncivilized regions.

Essential Density of Population. - A perfectly static state requires, not a perfectly equal distribution of population, but such a distribution that there is no reason for further migrating. The power of the soil to feed its inhabitants varies with its fertility. Where the land is highly productive a dense population may live easily; whereas on a sterile soil even a sparse population may find natural resources too meager, and men may move to places which are more thickly peopled and yet may gain by the change. Moreover, such occupations as manufacturing and commerce require, of course, a far larger population on a given area than does any form of agriculture. Some regions are so undesirable as dwelling places that it takes an exceptional economic reward to induce men to live there. The static state is one in which, all these things being considered, there is no reason for changing the place of one’s abode. This implies more nearly equal density per unit of natural resources than equal density per unit of mere area. Inequality of advantage due to location is what is leveled out, and doing this does not require nor permit that population should everywhere be equally dense per square mile or per acre.

Effect of Differences of Occupation. - Regions given over to agriculture naturally sustain more people than those devoted to grazing, and those which are devoted to manufacturing sustain more than either. In countries in which, as in Great Britain, manufacturing is so disproportionately developed that products must be largely exported, while food must be largely imported, given areas sustain more inhabitants than they do in any agricultural or grazing region and more than they do in any region where grazing and tillage, on the one hand, and manufacturing, on the other, are well balanced. In mills and shops auxiliary capital so abounds as to take the place of the abundant land that is available in the other cases for making labor fruitful, and in villages and cities labor does not overtax the resources of the soil any more than it does on farms. It has area enough to live and to work on and tools and materials enough to work with. In a generally crowded country, the resort to commerce and manufacturing relieves the pressure on the land, cities abound, and an abundance of capital averts the danger of a disastrous overcrowding.

An approximately Static Distribution of Population. - The apportionment of population among the different sections of a country may be nearly normal, while migration may still go on from that country as a whole to remote parts of the general area which we include in our present study. There may be small reason for moving from one part of Germany to another and large reason for going from Germany to America. This larger movement occupies a long time, while certain other adjustments may be made more quickly. Within Germany and within the United States labor may be well apportioned among the different occupations. There may be in each country about the right comparative numbers of cotton spinners, iron workers, gardeners, wheat raisers, etc.; or in other words, the distribution of labor among the industrial groups may be approximately normal both within the one country and within the other. It may further be true that the division of occupations between the two countries in their entirety is about what, in the conditions now prevailing, economic law calls for. There are certain industries which now have their habitats in Germany and certain others that have their habitats in the United States, and this arrangement is partly due to the comparative density of the two populations. Because there are so many persons per square mile of land in Germany there is there a certain preponderance of manufacturing, and there are in America less manufacturing and relatively more agriculture. In that remote time when the relative density of the two populations shall become static, America will have reason to increase the comparative amount of the manufacturing and thus put herself in this particular more nearly on a plane with Germany. This occupation has its normal abode in regions of comparatively dense population, and a gain in comparative density means an increase in the amount of productive energy devoted to it. The place for the mill is where the land is crowded, and the better place for the work of tillage is where it is not so.

How an Unnatural Distribution of Population may be Treated. - So long as the slow movement of population from country to country remains incomplete, the ultimate division of occupations between the countries can never be completely static. It is therefore with a division that is only approximately static that we have first to deal, and this is realized when in view of the comparative density of population in the different regions which now exists occupations are naturally apportioned.

The base line AD of this figure stands for the part of the world in which economic law works rapidly and encounters comparatively few obstructions; and the extension of the line represents the lands outside of this region in which the laws are sluggish in their action. It is as though this base line were a section of a vast surface including both civilized and primitive states. AB represents the smallest population per unit of land of a given quality within the central area, and DC represents the largest, while the ascending line BC shows the gradations of essential density in the peopling of different parts of it. At the point A the pressure of the population on the resources of the soil is least, while at the point D it is at its greatest. At the point A a man can get much out of the soil as the return for his own bare labor, while at D he can get comparatively little; and at intervening points on the base a man gets more than he does at D and less than he does at A. His gains measured in bushels of wheat, etc., vary inversely as the density of the population and so decrease from the left of the figure toward the right till the point D is reached. The occupations of the different localities are determined by these facts.

How Occupations vary with Differences of Land Crowding. - Crowding the arable land causes labor to flow naturally to manufacturing occupations, since in these it is not so greatly handicapped in comparison with the labor of more sparsely peopled regions. In a cotton mill in Manchester a man may contribute as many yards per day toward the product of the mill as he would in a mill in Fall River; but on an English farm one man’s labor does not create as much produce as it does on an American farm. The large amount of available land per man in America has a great effect on the amount that a man can produce by tilling it, but it has very little effect on the amount of the cotton goods that his presence and labor in the mill insure. In raising crops, therefore, the Englishman is at a more serious disadvantage in comparison with the American. The fact is expressed in a practical way by saying that the English labor is cheaper and is therefore more available for making things that are exported to the distant markets of the world than is labor of the same kind in America; but the reason for this cheapness is primarily the land crowding, which reduces the productive power of a final unit of labor in the former country. Because the man cannot get for himself many bushels of wheat per annum by working on land he can afford to work in a mill at a rate corresponding with the value of the produce he could secure as a cultivator.

General Differences between the Condition of Densely Peopled Regions and that of Sparsely Peopled Ones. - In a very general way it may be said that the comparative amount of manufacturing should naturally vary directly with density of population, and that the comparative amount of agriculture should vary inversely to it. In computing density due regard must, as has been indicated, be paid to the quality of the land as well as the area, since a number of inhabitants which would unduly congest a sterile agricultural region can be well maintained on a fertile one. In the accompanying figure the line AD inclosed by the vertical lines represents the part of the earth which we have called central, and the left side of it is the part of this area which has the sparsest population, while the right side is that which has the densest. The rising line BC represents the varying density of the population in different parts of the broad area we regard as general economic society, the dotted line EF may be taken as expressing the increase in the part of the labor and capital of the country devoted to manufacturing as population becomes denser, AE measures the proportionate number of persons engaged in manufacturing in the region of sparsest population, and DF measures the comparative number in the region most densely peopled.

AG and DH represent the numbers engaged in agriculture in the two regions, and the descent of the line GH represents the predominance of agriculture in the sparsely populated part and the subordination of it in the part that is densely populated. If we assume that capital in the different types of employment varies as does labor, the descent of this line toward the right means a decline in the fraction of the whole force of labor and of the whole fund of capital devoted to cultivating the soil; while the upward trend of EF means the enlarging proportion of labor and capital devoted to manufacturing as we pass from a region of sparse population to regions more and more crowded. The wavy character of the two dotted lines is designed to express the fact that local conditions other than mere density of population favor the one type of occupation rather than the other; and moreover, nothing in the figure is intended to mean that the increase in manufacturing and the comparative decrease in tillage from the left of the diagram to the right are in any exact numerical proportion to the increase in the density of population. The figure as a whole rudely represents the fact that an approximation to the static distribution of population insures an approximation to a static apportionment of occupations within the described area and indicates the general nature of that apportionment.

How Cost of Production and Cost of Acquisition are Equalized. - The costs of moving goods from place to place - including in these costs commercial charges and duties imposed by governments - are the cause of most of the manufacturing that is done in the region represented by the left side of the diagram, except the production of such articles for immediate or local consumption as are necessarily made at or near the places where they are used. Tailoring, blacksmithing, carpentering, general repairing, etc., would always be done in that region, but many kinds of staple goods capable of being transported would, in the absence of duties on imports, be made chiefly in the region of dense population and cheap labor.

The general rule for determining whether a branch of manufacturing can survive in the area of abundant land and well-paid labor is as follows: it can do so if the cost of making the article which this branch of business is devoted to producing is as low as the cost of acquiring it by exchange. The cost may in both cases be reduced to bare labor and the rule will then stand thus: if ten days labor will make the article and if nine will make something that can be exchanged for it - i.e. if all the costs of the exchange can be covered and the thing can be brought from abroad for a total expenditure of nine days’ labor instead of ten - the manufacturing of that article will not survive. In a region of abundant land and well-paid labor it is chiefly the tolls which governments exact which make it as costly an operation to get the manufactured products by producing other things to barter for them as it is to make them directly. Density of population, overworking of land, meagerness of returns to agricultural labor - these are the conditions that primarily fix the habitat of most kinds of manufacturing. In the case of particular products these influences may be overcome by the presence in limited parts of the sparsely settled area of exceptional natural advantages for production. Natural gas, special ores, particular kinds of lumber, etc., may draw some branches of manufacturing to the region of fertile land and high wages; but as the comparison which we are making is the most general one which it is possible to make we are safe in our assertion that, in the main, manufacturing processes tend, in the absence of exceptional influences, to concentrate themselves in the region of dense population and of meager earning power of labor.

The Approximate Static Adjustment of Prices. - In the main, and with tariffs as they are, the price of raw products is somewhat lower at the left of the figure, while that of highly wrought merchandise is markedly lower at the right of it; and with the comparative density of population as it is and with no change of commercial policy on the part of governments, this condition may be expected to continue. It is an approximately static adjustment of prices. Purchasing manufactured goods in Europe will long be profitable if they can be passed duty free through the customhouse, while food will be somewhat cheaper in America.

Static Wages and Interest. - As has been said, the wages of labor are comparatively low at the right and high at the left of the figure, while interest varies in the two regions in the same way. It is lower in the crowded area. This is not because of the presence of many men, for this influence alone would tend to sustain the productive power of capital and the consequent rate of interest, and in fact the interest on capital in Europe would be lower than it is if the population there were sparser. The rate which prevails is fixed by the productive power of a very large fund of artificial capital utilized by a large population meagerly supplied with land. This last item is decisive in the case and is a primary cause of low interest. The full statement of these facts, made in graphic form, shows an ascending line of density of population, as we proceed from left to right, an ascending line of price for raw produce, a descending line of price for highly wrought merchandise, and descending lines for wages and interest. All these lines represent the facts in a broadly general way. They deal with averages and not with particular rates. The labor whose earning power descends along the line numbered 5 is of many kinds, and the produce of which the average values vary along the lines numbered 2 and 4 is of many varieties. The rate of ascent or descent of the lines has no especial quantitative significance, and it is therefore not implied in the figure that wages decline more rapidly than the other factors. Moreover, it is such large areas as those of England, Germany, France, or the Mississippi Valley, including both cities and rural lands, that we have in mind when we speak of the density of population as ascending along the line numbered 1. Anywhere we expect to find cities containing more persons to the acre than rural districts. The purpose of the figure is to enable us to take in at a glance five different adjustments that in the main are to be regarded as approximately static within the great region described as the economic center of the world.

Slow Change of the Foregoing Adjustments. - The line which represents the comparative density of population is of course slowly changing position as migration goes on from the older centers of population to more newly occupied regions. If the present distribution of population be represented by the line numbered 1, the distribution a hundred years hence may be represented by the dotted line numbered 2, and that which will exist after five hundred years shall have passed may be represented by the dotted line numbered 3. Even within the economic center the comparative density of population in different divisions is therefore not to be treated as strictly permanent, and it is not to be treated as in any sense permanent when we are forecasting effects that will be realized several centuries hence. For a problem involving a score or two of years the general conditions we have described may be treated as, in the main, abiding.

This, however, is only one reason for this limitation of the scope of our immediate study. A serious fact is that, if we include the entire world, we cannot establish, in the way we have proposed, the natural standards toward which values, wages, and interest are tending. It will be recalled that in the static division of this treatise we have attained a “natural” standard of wages by assuming that all dynamic changes were to cease and that labor and capital were to move to and fro in the system of industrial groups till each of these agents produced as much in one subgroup as in another. A computation of this kind might, within a limited area, be made periodically, say once in ten years, and if this were done it would give a series of static standards of wages. Now these standards become higher as time advances. The static rate of pay for labor is, as a rule, higher at any one date than was the standard for a date ten years earlier, and lower than will be that for a date ten years later. The normal rate of pay about which actual wages fluctuate is a rising one.

Now, if we introduce in imagination an absolutely static state for the world at large, we shall have to assume that growth of the general population and increase of the aggregate capital both cease, and that inventions and new cooerdinations are no longer made. We must then wait long enough to allow static distribution of industries to be made over the whole world and to let each industry find its absolute habitat. This would involve causing methods of producing any commodity to be unified the world over. Hand labor in the Orient would have to give way to machine production, as it has done in Western lands. For a strictly static adjustment indeed even the density of population in the different sections would have to be brought to a virtual equality. While this nearly interminable process was going on, it would be needful that such dynamic changes as inventions and discoveries bring in their train should be absolutely precluded. Stop making new kinds of machinery and wait for centuries to allow a static adjustment to be made over the whole earth - such would be the order.

Now, such a test as this would show falling wages in the more favored parts of the earth, whereas the facts show rising wages. The influx of population from the East, unrelieved by a corresponding influx of new capital and by more fruitful methods of production, would cause the earnings of an American laborer to fall, and we should, on the basis of such a test, conclude that his wages in the long run are destined to become lower in consequence of the movement of the vast populations that now congest great Asiatic countries. We should have vitiated the problem by holding the growth of capital and the progress of invention in abeyance. This may be done within a limited area without giving a false result, because there adjustments are more rapid, and waiting for them does not involve the long-continued paralysis of the powers that make for greater wealth for laboring humanity. Apply the test of the static state to the economic center, and it will give a generally true result; but it will give a false one if it be applied to the world as a whole. The merely static adjustment of the world would take more centuries than we care to reckon, and no truth that we are seeking is revealed by assuming that for such a period the forces of progress are brought to a standstill.