It is not necessarily a case of unproductive consumption when one destroys value for the sake of gratifying some desire. Probably a majority of men eat and drink simply because they desire food and drink, having no thought of any ulterior object. Yet this eating and drinking is absolutely essential to productive labor. The wealth consumed in this way reappears, to a large extent, in the products of human industry.
Still there is much really unproductive consumption; a destruction of value, in the place of which no other value ever appears. There are, for instance, men and women—
* * * “who creep
Into this world to eat and sleep,
And know no reason why they’re born,
But simply to consume the corn.”
Vast quantities of wealth are consumed in riotous living, in greedy and vulgar extravagance, and unmeaning magnificence. There is also much consumption designed to be productive, but failing of its end through misdirection. Large amounts of property are sometimes invested in enterprises which prove failures. This occurs partly from miscalculation or negligence, and partly from a disposition to trust to chances—the gambler’s calculation. In these ways much wealth is consumed with no consequent product.
4. It is not easy to draw the line between the ordinary conveniences of life and its luxuries; nor can it be stated to what extent the latter in any sense of the term are economically allowable. What to one class of persons may be a luxury to another class may be almost a necessity. So what might in one age have been a rare and expensive indulgence, is in a more advanced period among the cheaper and more ordinary commodities. I call special attention to three kinds of consumption:
(1) There is the consumption necessary to life and the performance of productive labor. The word necessary here is used in its liberal rather than its restricted sense. The absolute necessities of human life are very few. It does not even require much to keep a man in working condition. But to keep him where there is a larger kind of living, and where his energies of both body and mind, together with the moral qualities which render him most efficient, are at their best, the consumption must be more generous.
Besides subsistence there must be materials, tools, machines, and a variety of conditions involving the destruction of value. It is desirable to sustain man not as a mere savage, but to give him the largest volume of human life; and the civilized man, it will be admitted, lives a broader life than the savage. We are not to forget that Political Economy aims at the increase of the value of man, more than at the multiplication of material wealth, or the increase of commerce, except as the latter are conditions of the former.