THE SPECIAL FUNCTION OF MONEY VALUATION—PECUNIARY VALUES NOT NECESSARILY OF A LOWER SORT—THEY ARE FORMED, HOWEVER, BY A SPECIAL INSTITUTION—AND PERPETUATE HISTORIC WRONG—THEY HAVE ONLY A LIMITED CONTROL OF SOCIAL LIFE—MONEY REWARD VERSUS SELF-EXPRESSION—WE NEED TO EXTEND THE SPHERE OF MONEY VALUES
It seems that the distinctive function of money valuation is to generalize or assimilate values through a common measure. In this way it gives them reach and flexibility, so that many sorts of value are enabled to work freely together throughout the social system, instead of being confined to a small province. And since values represent the powers of society, the result is that these powers are organized in a large way and enabled to co-operate in a vital whole. Any market value that I, for instance, may control ceases to be merely local in its application and becomes a generalized force that I can apply anywhere. If I can earn a thousand dollars teaching bacteriology, I can take the money and go to Europe, exchanging my recondite knowledge for the services, say, of guides in the Alps, who never heard of bacteriology. Other values are similarly generalized and the result is a mobility that enables many sorts of value, reduced to a common measure, to be applied anywhere and anyhow that the holder may think desirable.
We have, then, to do with a value institution or process, far transcending in reach any special sort of value, and participating in the most diverse phases of our life. Its function resembles that of language, and its ideal may be said to be to do for value what language does for thought—furnish a universal medium of communicative growth. And just as language and the social organization based upon it are extended in their scope by the modern devices of cheap printing, mails, telegraphy, telephones, and the like, so the function of pecuniary valuation is extended by uniform money and by devices for credit and transfer, until the natural obstacles of distance, lack of knowledge, and lack of homogeneity are largely overcome.
This mobilization of values through the pecuniary measure tends to make the latter an expression of the total life of society, so far as the values that stand for this life have actually become mobilized or translated into pecuniary terms. Although this translation is in fact only partial and, as I have tried to show, institutional, still the wide scope of pecuniary value, along with its precision, gives it a certain title to its popular acceptance as value in a sense that no other kind of value can claim.
This also gives it that place as a regulator of social activity which economists have always claimed for it. Pecuniary value provides a motive to serve the pecuniary organism, a motive that penetrates everywhere, acts automatically, and adjusts itself delicately to the conditions of demand and supply. If more oranges are wanted in New York, a higher price is offered for them in California and Sicily; if more dentists are needed, the rewards of the profession increase and young men are attracted into it. Thus there is everywhere an inducement to supply those goods and services which the buying power in society thinks it wants, and this inducement largely guides production. At each point of deficient supply a sort of suction is set up to draw available persons and materials to that point and set them to work.
Thus our life, in one of its main aspects, is organized through this central value institution or market, very much as in other aspects it is organized through language, the state, the church, or the family.
It will be well to consider here the view that the sphere of pecuniary value, however wide, is yet distinctly circumscribed and confined to a special and, on the whole, inferior province of life. According to this view only the coarser and more material values can be measured in money, while the finer sorts, as of beauty, friendship, righteousness, and so on, are in their nature private and untranslatable, and so out of the reach of any generalizing process.
It seems doubtful whether we can admit that there is any such clear circumscription of the pecuniary field. All values are interrelated, and it may reasonably be held that none can stand apart and be wholly incommensurable with the others. The idea of a common measure which, for certain purposes at least, may be applied to all values is by no means absurd. The argument that such a measure is possible may be stated somewhat as follows.
Since the function of values is to guide conduct, they are in their nature comparable. Conduct is a matter of the total or synthetic behavior of a living whole in view of a situation: it implies the integration of all the motives bearing on the situation. Accordingly when a crisis in conduct arises the values relating to it, no matter how incommensurable they may seem, are in some way brought to a common measure, weighed against one another, in order to determine which way the scale inclines. This commensuration is psychical, not numerical, and we are far from understanding its exact nature, but unless each pertinent kind of value has a part in it of some sort it would seem that the mind is not acting as a vital whole. If there were absolute values that cannot be impaired or in any way influenced by the opposing action of other values, they must apparently exist in separate compartments and not in organic relation to the rest of the mind. It does not follow that what we regard as a high motive, such as the sense of honor, must necessarily be overcome by a sufficient accumulation of lower motives, such as sensuous desires, but we may be prepared to find that if the two are opposed the latter will, in one way or another, modify the conduct required by the former, and this I believe is usually the fact. Thus suppose a lower value, in the shape of temptation, is warring against a higher in the shape of an ideal. Even if we concede nothing to the former, even if we react far away from it, none the less it has entered into our life and helped to mould it—as sensuality, for example, helps to mould the ascetic.
And this weighing of one kind of value against another will take place largely in terms of money, which exists for the very purpose of facilitating such transactions. Thus honor is one of those values which many would place outside the pecuniary sphere, and yet honor may call for the saving of money to pay a debt, while sensuality would spend it for a hearty dinner. In this case, then, we buy our honor with money, or we sell it, through money, for something lower. In much the same way are the larger choices of society, as, for example, between power devoted to education and power devoted to warships, expressed in pecuniary terms. In general we do, in fact, individually and collectively, weigh such things as friendship, righteousness, and beauty against other matters, and in terms of money. Beauty is on the market, however undervalued, in the form, for example, of music, art, literature, flowers, and dwelling-sites. A friendly personality has a market value in salesmen, doctors, writers, and teachers; indeed in all occupations where ability to influence persons is important—and there are few in which it is not. I notice that if there is anything attractive about a man he soon learns to collect pay for it. And not less is it true that the need for righteousness finds expression in a willingness to pay a (reasonable) price for it in the market-place. Convincing preachers and competent social workers command salaries, and great sums go to beneficent institutions.