They shut out the whole matter of the production and development of men, of human and social life; that is, they indicate that however important the pecuniary process may be in this field it can never be trusted to control it, not even the economic side of it. This is a sphere in which the market must be dominated by other kinds of organization.
If we take the two underlying factors, heredity and environment, as these mould the life of men, we see that we cannot look to the market to regulate the hereditary factor as regards either the total number of children to be born, or the stocks from which they are to be drawn. I know that there are men who still imagine that “natural selection,” working through economic competition, operates effectively in this field, but I doubt whether any one knows facts upon which such a view can reasonably be based. In what regards population and eugenics it is more and more apparent that rational control and selection, working largely outside the market process, are indispensable.
The same may be said of the whole action of environment in forming persons after birth, including the family, the community, the school, the state, the church, and the unorganized working of suggestion and example. None of these formative agencies is of a nature to be guided adequately by pecuniary demand. The latter, even if its requirements be high, offers no guarantee that men will be produced in accordance with these requirements, since it does not control the course of their development.
Let us observe, however, that even in this field the market may afford essential guidance to other agencies of control. If, for example, certain kinds of work do not yield a living wage, this may be because the supply of this kind of work is in excess, and the state or some other organization may proceed on this hint to adjust supply to demand by vocational training and guidance. Or the method of reform may be to put restrictions upon demand, as in the case of the minimum wage. Although the market process is inadequate alone, it will usually have some share in any plan of betterment.
Personal and social development must, in general, be sought through rational organization having a far wider scope than the market, though co-operating with that in every helpful way, and including, perhaps, radical reforms in the pecuniary system itself. It would be hard to formulate a principle more fallacious and harmful than the doctrine that the latter is an adequate regulator of human life, or that its own processes are superior to regulation. We are beginning to see that the prevalence of such ideas has given us over to an unhuman commercialism.
What I have been saying of persons and personal development applies also to natural resources and public improvements, to arts, sciences, and the finer human values in general. All these have a pecuniary aspect, of more or less importance, but a money demand alone cannot beget or control them. Love, beauty, and righteousness may come on the market under certain conditions, but they are not, in the full sense, market commodities. Our faith in money is exemplified in these days by the offer of money prizes for poetry, invention, the promotion of peace, and for heroic deeds. I would not deprecate such offers, whose aim is excellent and sometimes attains the mark. They are creditable to their authors and diffuse a good spirit even though the method is too naïve to be very effectual. If money is greatly to increase products of this kind it must be applied, fundamentally and with all possible wisdom, to the conditions that mould character.
These higher goods do not really come within the economic sphere. They touch it only incidentally, their genesis and interaction belonging mainly to a different kind of process, one in which ownership and material exchange play a secondary part. The distinctively economic commodities and values are those whose whole course of production is one in which the factors are subject to legal ownership and controlled by a money-seeking intelligence, so that the process is essentially pecuniary. Thus we may say that ordinary typewriting is economic, because it is a simple, standard service which is supplied in any quantity according to demand. The work of a newspaper reporter is not quite so clearly economic, because not so definitely standardized and affording more room for intangible merits which pay cannot insure. And when we come to magazine literature of the better sort we are in a field where the process is for the most part non-pecuniary, depending, that is, on an interplay of minds outside the market, the latter coming in only to set its very questionable appraisal on the product. As to literature in general, art, science, and religion, no one at all conversant with the history of these things will claim that important work in them has any close relation to pecuniary inducement. The question whether the great man was rich and honored, like Rubens, or worked in poverty and neglect, like Rembrandt in his later years, is of only incidental interest in tracing the history of such achievement. The ideals and disciplines which give birth to it are generated in non-pecuniary tracts of thought and intercourse, and unless genius actually starves, as it sometimes does, it fulfils its aim without much regard to pay. I need hardly add that good judges have always held that a moderate poverty was a condition favorable to intellectual and spiritual achievement.
I would assign a very large and growing sphere to pecuniary valuation, but we cannot be too clear in affirming that even at its best and largest it can never be an adequate basis for general social organization. It is an institution, like another, having important functions but requiring, like all institutions, to be brought under rational control by the aid of a comprehensive sociology, ethics, and politics. It has no charter of autonomy, no right to exemption from social control.
Thus even if market values were the best possible of their kind, we could not commit the social system to their charge, and still less can we do so when the value institution, owing to rapid and one-sided growth, is in a somewhat confused and demoralized condition. Bearing with it not only the general inheritance of human imperfection but also the special sins of a narrow and somewhat inhuman commercialism, it by no means reflects life in that broad way in which a market, with all its limitations, might reflect it. The higher values remain for the most part untranslated, even though translatable, and the material and technical aspects of the process have acquired an undue ascendancy. In general this institution, like others that might be named, is in such a condition that its estimates are no trustworthy expression of the public mind.
Having in mind these general limitations upon the sphere of pecuniary value, let us consider it more particularly as a motive to stimulate and guide the work of the individual. For this purpose we may distinguish it broadly from the need of self-expression, using the latter comprehensively to include all other influences that urge one to productive work. Among these would be emulation and ambition, the need of activity for its own sake, the love of workmanship and creation, the impulse to assert one’s individuality, and the desire to serve the social whole. Such motives enter intimately into one’s self-consciousness and may, for our present purpose, be included under the need of self-expression.