In friendship, for example, there is undoubtedly strongly operative a desire for the mere recurrence, in our further friendly intercourse, of certain values that have become habitual and familiar. We may have long known and become attached to a friend's tones of voice, peculiarities of manner and external appearance, turns of speech and thought and the like, which we miss in absence and which give us pleasure when we meet the friend again. But if the friendship is not one of "pleasure" or "utility" simply, but of "virtue"[47] as well, there is also present on both sides a constructive or progressive or creative interest. And this interest, stated on its self-regarding and introspective side, is more than a desire for the mere grateful recurrence of the old looks and words "recoined at the old mint." It is an interest looking into the "undone vast," an interest in an indefinite prolongation, an infinite series, of joint experiences the end of which cannot and need not be foreseen and the nature of which neither can nor need be forecasted. And there is the same characteristic in all the other instances mentioned in this connection. It is not a desire for recurrent satisfactions of a determinate type, but an interest in the active development of unexperienced and indeterminate possibilities. If finally the question be pressed, how there can be an interest of this seemingly self-contradictory type in human nature, the answer can only be that we must take the facts as we find them. Is such a conception inherently more difficult than the view that all ramifications and developments of human interest are concretely predetermined and implicit a priori? To ignore or deny palpable fact because it eludes the reach of a current type of conceptual analysis is to part company with both science and philosophy. We are in fact here dealing with the essential mark and trait of what is called self-conscious process. If there are ultimates and indefinables in this world of ours, self-consciousness may as fairly claim the dignity or avow the discredit as any other of the list.
§ 7. Does our interest in economic goods on occasion exhibit the trait of which we are here speaking? Precisely this is our present contention. And yet it seems not too much to say that virtually all economic theory, whether the classical or the present dominant type that has drawn its terminology and working concepts from the ostensible psychology of the Austrian School, is founded upon the contradictory assumption. The economic interest, our desire and esteem for solid and matter-of-fact things like market commodities and standardized market services, has been conceived as nothing visionary and speculative, as no peering into the infinite or outreaching of an inexpressible discontent, but an intelligent, clear-eyed grasping and holding of known satisfactions for measured and acknowledged desires. Art and religion, friendship and love, sport and adventure, morality and legislation, these all may be fields for the free play and constructive experimentation of human faculty, but in our economic efforts and relations we are supposed to tread the solid ground of fact. Business is business. Waste not, want not. First a living, then (perhaps) a "good life."[48] And we are assured one need not recoil from the hard logic of such maxims, for they do not dispute the existence of spacious (and well-shaded) suburban regions fringing the busy areas of industry and commerce.
Such is the assumption. We have said that it precludes the admission of speculation as an economic factor. Speculation for economic theory is a purely commercial phenomenon, a hazarding of capital on the supposition that desires will be found ready and waiting for the commodity produced—with a sufficient offering of purchasing power to afford a profit. And the "creation of demand," where this is part of the program of speculative enterprise, means the arousal of a "dormant" or implicit desire, in the sense above discussed—there is nothing, at all events, in other parts of current theory to indicate a different conception. The economist will probably contend that what the process of the creation of demand may be is not his but the psychologist's affair; that his professional concern is only whether or not the economic demand, as an objective market fact, be actually forthcoming. But what we here contend for as a fact of economic experience is a speculation that is in the nature of personal adventure and not simply an "adventuring of stock."
§ 8. For what is the nature of the economic "experience" or situation, considered as a certain type of juncture in the life of an individual? It may be shortly described as the process of determining how much of one's time, strength, or external resources of any sort shall be expended for whatever one is thinking of doing or acquiring. Two general motives enter here to govern the estimate and each may show the routine or the innovative phase. In any work there is possible, first, more or less of the workman's interest—an interest not merely in a conventional standard of excellence in the finished result but also in betterment of the standard and in a corresponding heightened excellence of technique and spirit in the execution.[49] These interests, without reference to the useful result and "for their own sake" (i.e., for the workman's sake, in ways not specifiable in advance), may command a share of one's available time, strength, and resources. In the second place, any work or effort or offer to give in exchange has a nameable result of some kind in view—a crop of wheat, a coat, a musical rendition, or the education of a child. Why are such things "produced" or sought for? Verbally and platitudinously one may answer: For the sake of the "satisfactions" they are expected to afford. But such an answer ignores the contrast of attitudes that both workmanship and productive or acquisitive effort in the ordinary sense display. As the workman may conform to his standard or may be ambitious to surpass it, so the intending consumer may be counting on known satisfactions or hoping for satisfactions of a kind that he has never known before. Both sorts of effort may be of either the routine or the innovative type. In neither workmanship nor acquisition can one fix upon routine as the "normal" type, hoping to derive or to explain away the inevitable residue of "outstanding cases." For as a matter of fact the outstanding cases prove to be our only clue to a knowledge of how routine is made.[50]
The above formula will apply, with the appropriate changes of emphasis, to buyers and sellers in an organized market, as well as to the parties to a simple transaction of barter. Two main empirical characteristics of the economic situation are suggested in putting the statement in just these terms. In the first place, the primary problem in such a situation is that of "exchange valuation," the fixation of a "subjective" (or better, a "personal") price ratio between what the agent wishes to acquire and whatever it is that he offers in exchange. The agent thus is engaged in determining what shall be the relative importance for himself of two commodities or exchangeable goods. And in the second place these goods get their values determined together and in relation to each other, never singly and with a view to subsequent comparison. These values when they have been determined will be measured in terms of marginal utility in accordance with familiar principles, but the marginal utilities that are to express the attained and accepted ratio at which exchange eventually takes place are not known quantities at all in the inception of the process of comparison. If these dogmatic statements seem to issue in hopeless paradox or worse, then let us not fear to face the paradox and fix its lines with all possible distinctness. Can a man decide to offer so much of one commodity for so much of another unless he first has settled what each is worth to him in some intelligible terms or other? And is not this latter in point of fact the real decision—at all events clearly more than half the battle? Does not the exchange ratio to which one can agree "leap to the eyes," in fact, as soon as the absolute values in the case have been once isolated and given numerical expression?
In a single word we here join issue. For the comparison in such a case is constructive comparison, not a mechanical measuring of fixed magnitudes, as the above objection tacitly assumes. And constructive comparison is essentially a transitive or inductive operation whereby the agent moves from one level to another, altering his standard of living in some more or less important way, embarking upon a new interest, entering upon the formation of a new habit or upon a new accession of power or effectiveness—making or seeking to make, in short, some transformation in his environment and in himself that shall give his life as an entire system a changed tenor and perspective. The term "constructive comparison" is thus intended, among other things, to suggest that the process is in the nature of adventure, not calculation, and, on the other hand, that though adventurous it is not sheer hazard uncontrolled. And the motive dominant throughout the process—the economic motive in its constructive phase—is neither more nor less than a supposition, on the agent's part, that there may be forthcoming for him in the given case in hand just such an "epigenetic" development of new significance and value as we have found actual history to disclose as a normal result of economic innovation. It is the gist of hedonism, in economic theory as in its other expressions, that inevitably the agent's interests and motives are restricted in every case to the precise range and scope of his existing tendencies and desires; he can be provoked to act only by the hope of just those particular future pleasures or means of pleasure which the present constitution of his nature enables him to enjoy. Idealism assumes that the emergent new interest of the present was wrapped up or "implied," in some sense, in the interests of the remote and immediate past—interests of which the agent at the time could of course be but "imperfectly" aware. Such differences as one can discern between the two interpretations seem small indeed—like many others to which idealism has been wont to point in disparagement of the hedonistic world view. For in both philosophies the agent is without initiative and effect; he is in principle but the convergence of impersonal motive powers which it is, in the one view, absurdly futile, in the other misguidedly presumptuous, to try to alter or control.
§ 9. A commodity sought or encountered may then be of interest to us for reasons of the following three general sorts. In the first place it may simply be the normal and appropriate object of some established desire of ours. We may be seeking the commodity because this desire has first become active, or encountering the commodity in the market may have suddenly awakened the desire. Illustration seems superfluous; tobacco for the habitual smoker, clothing of most sorts for the ordinary person, regular supplies of the household staples—these will suffice. This is the province within which a hedonistic account of the economic motive holds good with a cogency that anti-hedonistic criticism has not been able to dissolve. Our outlays for such things as these may as a rule be held in their due and proper relation to each other—at all events in their established or "normal" relation—simply by recalling at critical times our relative marginal likes and dislikes for them. That these likes and dislikes are not self-explanatory, that they are concrete expectations and not abstract affective elements, does not seem greatly to matter where the issue lies between maintaining or renouncing an existing schedule of consumption. And in this same classification belong also industrial and commercial expenditures of a similarly routine sort. Even where the scale of operations is being enlarged, expenditures for machines, fuel, raw materials, and labor may have been so carefully planned in advance with reference to the desired increase of output or pecuniary profit that no special problem of motivation attaches directly to them. And these outlays are so important in industry and commerce that the impression comes easily to prevail that all business undertaking, and then all consumption of finished goods, fall under the simple hedonistic type.
But if we keep to the plane of final consumption, there appears a second sort of situation. Our interest in the commodity before us may be due to a suggestion of some sort that prompts us to take a step beyond the limits that our present formed desires mark out. The suggestion may be given by adroit advertising, by fashion, by the habits of another class to which one may aspire or by a person to whom one may look as guide, philosopher, and friend. An authority of one sort or another invites or constrains us to take the merits of the article on trust. Actual trial and use may show, not so much that it can minister to a latent desire as that we have been able through its use to form a habit that constitutes a settled need.
And, finally, in the third place, there is a more spontaneous and intrinsically personal type of interest which is very largely independent of suggestion or authority. A thing of beauty, a new author, a new acquaintance, a new sport or game, a new convenience or mechanical device may challenge one's curiosity and powers of appreciation, may seem to offer a new facility in action or some unimagined release from labor or restriction. The adventure of marriage and parenthood, the intimate attraction of great music, the mystery of an unknown language or a forbidden country, the disdainful aloofness of a mountain peak dominating a landscape are conspicuous instances inviting a more spontaneous type of constructive interest that finds abundant expression also in the more commonplace situations and emergencies of everyday life. It is sheer play upon words to speak in such cases of a pleasure of adventurousness, a pleasure of discovery, a pleasure of conquest and mastery, assigning this as the motive in order to bring these interests to the type that fits addiction to one's particular old coat or easy-chair. The specific "pleasure" alleged could not exist were the tendency not active beforehand. While the same is true in a sense for habitual concrete pleasures in relation to their corresponding habits, the irreducible difference in constructive interest as a type lies in the transition which this type of interest purposes and effects from one level of concrete or substantive desire and pleasure to another. Here one consciously looks to a result that he cannot foresee or foretell; in the other type his interest as interest goes straight to its mark, sustained by a confident forecast.[51]
§ 10. But constructive interests, whether provoked by suggestion or of the more freely imaginative type, may, as has been said, be held to lie outside the scope of economic theory. How a desire for a certain thing has come to get expression may seem quite immaterial—economically speaking. Economics has no concern with human folly as such or human imitativeness, or human aspiration high or low or any other of the multitude of motives that have to do with secular changes in the "standard of living" and in the ideals of life at large. It has no concern with anything that lies behind the fact that I am in the market with my mind made up to buy or sell a thing at a certain price. And the answer to this contention must be that it first reverses and then distorts the true perspective of our economic experience. Let it be admitted freely—indeed, let it be insisted on—that the definition of a science must be determined by the pragmatic test. If an economist elects to concern himself with the problems of what has been called the "loose mechanics of trade" there can be no question of his right to do so or of the importance of the services he may render thereby, both to theory and to practice. But on the other hand economic theory cannot be therefore, once and for all, made a matter of accounting—to the effacement of all problems and aspects of problems of which the accountant has no professional cognizance. Just this, apparently, is what it means to level down all types of interest to the hedonistic, leaving aside as "extra-economic" those that too palpably resist the operation. It is acknowledged that freshly suggested modes of consumption and ends of effort require expenditure and sacrifice no less than the habitual, that the exploration of Tibet or of the Polar Seas affects the market for supplies not less certainly than the scheduled voyages of oceanic liners. Moreover, behind these scheduled voyages there are all the varied motives that induce people to travel and the desires that lead to the shipment of goods. Shall it be said that all of these motives and desires must be traceable back to settled habits of behavior and consumption? And if this cannot be maintained is it not hazardous to assume that such general problems of economic theory as the determination of market values or of the shares in distribution require no recognition of the other empirical types of interest? These types, if they are genuine, are surely important; they may well prove to be, in many ways, fundamentally important. For a commodity that has become habitual must once have been new and untried.