The economic structure of the future, to be sound, must be built of effective working units. It is as impossible to build a live social system with dead component elements as it is to build a live body with dead cells.
At least for the time being, an intricate and complicated structure is needed to handle the problem of livelihood. As time goes on, the nature of the economic system may be greatly modified, and its structure simplified correspondingly. While the complicated economic structure remains, however, the problem will be one of co-relating the activities of vast numbers of economic units, and of prevailing on them to function with less friction and greater harmony.
Like every social structure, the economic system will be built up of lesser social groups, beginning with the simplest local body of farmers, miners or mill workers, and continuing on, by successive stages of organization to the largest and most highly complex groups in the community.
The nature of each of the units that enters into the economic structure must vary with the locality, with the industry, and so on, hence it will prove to be impossible to lay down any arbitrary rules concerning their organization. It is possible, however, to suggest certain characteristics that must be present in effective working units:
1. The economic unit, which is to be built into the new society as stones are built into a wall, must bear a very close relation to the present working forms of economic life.
Ultimately, the economic units of which society is composed will differ completely from those now existing. It is quite out of the question, however, to build a new economic structure and new economic units at the same time. Habit and convention are too strong. Innovation is too terrifying and too problematical. The life of local economic units will be carried on to-morrow very much as it is carried on to-day by the masses of the people. The most workable economic superstructure, for a new society, will be built upon an answer to the question: "How is work done now?" This method of approach takes the basic economic activities of the masses of the people for granted and seeks to build them into a sounder type of super-organization than that now existing.
2. The economic unit, whatever its size and function, must be sufficiently homogeneous and coherent so that it will retain its unity even in the face of severe stresses and strains. That is, it must be in a state of relatively stable equilibrium.
3. The economic unit must be autonomous—self-governing, self-motivating, and in a sense, self-sufficing.
4. The organization and management of the unit must make possible an efficiency in production that will supply human needs and furnish the means of providing some comforts for the population.
5. Units must be so organized that they will work effectively with other units in the same industry and in related industries.