Certain points in this later portion of the volume, however, where the argument is at variance with specific articles of theory professed by Mr. Clark, may be taken up, mainly to elucidate the weakness of his theoretical position at the points in question. He recognises with more than the current degree of freedom that the growth and practicability of monopolies under modern conditions is chiefly due to the negotiability of securities representing capital, coupled with the joint-stock character of modern business concerns.[32] These features of the modern (capitalistic) business situation enable a sufficiently few men to control a section of the community sufficiently large to make an effective monopoly. The most effective known form of organisation for purposes of monopoly, according to Mr. Clark, is that of the holding company, and the ordinary corporation follows it closely in effectiveness in this respect. The monopolistic control is effected by means of the vendible securities covering the capital engaged. To meet the specifications of Mr. Clark's theory of capital, these vendible securities—as e.g., the securities (common stock) of a holding company—should be simply the formal evidence of the ownership of certain productive goods and the like. Yet, by his own showing, the ownership of a share of productive goods proportionate to the face value, or the market value, of the securities is by no means the chief consequence of such an issue of securities.[33] One of the consequences, and for the purposes of Mr. Clark's argument the gravest consequence, of the employment of such securities, is the dissociation of ownership from the control of the industrial equipment, whereby the owners of certain securities, which stand in certain immaterial, technical relations to certain other securities, are enabled arbitrarily to control the use of the industrial equipment covered by the latter. These are facts of the modern organisation of capital, affecting the productivity of the industrial equipment and its serviceability both to its owners and to the community. They are facts, though not physically tangible objects; and they have an effect on the serviceability of industry no less decisive than the effect which any group of physically tangible objects of equal market value have. They are, moreover, facts which are bought and sold in the purchase and sale of these securities, as, e.g., the common stock of a holding company. They have a value, and therefore they have a "total effective utility."
In short, these facts are intangible assets, which are the most consequential element in modern capital, but which have no existence in the theory of capital by which Mr. Clark aims to deal with "modern problems of industry." Yet, when he comes to deal with these problems, it is, of necessity, these intangible assets that immediately engage his attention. These intangible assets are an outgrowth of the freedom of contract under the conditions imposed by the machine industry; yet Mr. Clark proposes to suppress this category of intangible assets without prejudice to freedom of contract or to the machine industry, apparently without having taken thought of the lesson which he rehearses (pp. 390-391) from the introduction of the holding company, with its "sinister perfection," to take the place of the (less efficient) "trust" when the latter was dealt with somewhat as it is now proposed to deal with the holding company. One is tempted to remark that a more naïve apprehension of the facts of modern capital would have afforded a more competent realisation of the problems of monopoly.
It appears from what has just been said of Mr. Clark's "natural" distribution and of his dealing with the problems of modern industry that the logic of hedonism is of no avail for the theory of business affairs. Yet it is held, perhaps justly, that the hedonistic interpretation may be of great avail in analysing the industrial functions of the community, in their broad, generic character, even if it should not serve so well for the intricate details of the modern business situation. It may be at least a serviceable hypothesis for the outlines of economic theory, for the first approximations to the "economic laws" sought by taxonomists. To be serviceable for this purpose, the hypothesis need perhaps not be true to fact, at least not in the final details of the community's life or without material qualification;[34] but it must at least have that ghost of actuality that is implied in consistency with its own corollaries and ramifications.
As has been suggested in an earlier paragraph, it is characteristic of hedonistic economics that the large and central element in its theoretical structure is the doctrine of distribution. Consumption being taken for granted as a quantitive matter simply,—essentially a matter of an insatiable appetite,—economics becomes a theory of acquisition; production is, theoretically, a process of acquisition, and distribution a process of distributive acquisition. The theory of production is drawn in terms of the gains to be acquired by production; and under competitive conditions this means necessarily the acquisition of a distributive share of what is available. The rest of what the facts of productive industry include, as, e.g., the facts of workmanship or the "state of the industrial arts," gets but a scant and perfunctory attention. Those matters are not of the theoretical essence of the scheme. Mr. Clark's general theory of production does not differ substantially from that commonly professed by the marginal-utility school. It is a theory of competitive acquisition. An inquiry into the principles of his doctrine, therefore, as they appear, e.g., in the early chapters of the Essentials, is, in effect, an inquiry into the competence of the main theorems of modern hedonistic economics.
"All men seek to get as much net service from material wealth as they can." "Some of the benefit received is neutralised by the sacrifice incurred; but there is a net surplus of gains not thus canceled by sacrifices, and the generic motive which may properly be called economic is the desire to make this surplus large."[35] It is of the essence of the scheme that the acquisitive activities of mankind afford a net balance of pleasure. It is out of this net balance, presumably, that "the consumer's surpluses" arise, or it is in this that they merge. This optimistic conviction is a matter of presumption, of course; but it is universally held to be true by hedonistic economists, particularly by those who cultivate the doctrines of marginal utility. It is not questioned and not proven. It seems to be a surviving remnant of the eighteenth-century faith in a benevolent Order of Nature; that is to say, it is a rationalistic metaphysical postulate. It may be true or not, as matter of fact; but it is a postulate of the school, and its optimistic bias runs like a red thread through all the web of argument that envelops the "normal" competitive system. A surplus of gain is normal to the theoretical scheme.
The next great theorem of this theory of acquisition is at cross-purposes with this one. Men get useful goods only at the cost of producing them, and production is irksome, painful, as has been recounted above. They go on producing utilities until, at the margin, the last increment of utility in the product is balanced by the concomitant increment of disutility in the way of irksome productive effort,—labor or abstinence. At the margin, pleasure-gain is balanced by pain-cost. But the "effective utility" of the total product is measured by that of the final unit; the effective utility of the whole is given by the number of units of product multiplied by the effective utility of the final unit; while the effective disutility (pain-cost) of the whole is similarly measured by the pain-cost of the final unit. The "total effective utility" of the producer's product equals the "total effective disutility" of his pains of acquisition. Hence there is no net surplus of utility in the outcome.
The corrective objection is ready to hand,[36] that, while the balance of utility and disutility holds at the margin, it does not hold for the earlier units of the product, these earlier units having a larger utility and a lower cost, and so leaving a large net surplus of utility, which gradually declines as the margin is approached. But this attempted correction evades the hedonistic test. It shifts the ground from the calculus to the objects which provoke the calculation. Utility is a psychological matter, a matter of pleasurable appreciation, just as disutility, conversely, is a matter of painful appreciation. The individual who is held to count the costs and the gain in this hedonistic calculus is, by supposition, a highly reasonable person. He counts the cost to him as an individual against the gain to him as an individual. He looks before and after, and sizes the whole thing up in a reasonable course of conduct. The "absolute utility" would exceed the "effective utility" only on the supposition that the "producer" is an unreflecting sensory apparatus, such as the beasts of the field are supposed to be, devoid of that gift of appraisement and calculation which is the hypothetical hedonist's only human trait. There might on such a supposition—if the producer were an intelligent sensitive organism simply—emerge an excess of total pleasure over total pain, but there could then be no talk of utility or of disutility, since these terms imply intelligent reflection, and they are employed because they do so. The hedonistic producer looks to his own cost and gain, as an intelligent pleasure-seeker whose consciousness compasses the contrasted elements as wholes. He does not contrast the balance of pain and pleasure in the morning with the balance of pain and pleasure in the afternoon, and say that there is so much to the good because he was not so tired in the morning. Indeed, by hypothesis, the pleasure to be derived from the consumption of the product is a future, or expected, pleasure, and can be said to be present, at the point of time at which a given unit of pain-cost is incurred, only in anticipation; and it cannot be said that the anticipated pleasure attaching to a unit of product which emerges from the effort of the producer during the relatively painless first hour's work exceeds the anticipated pleasure attaching to a similar unit emerging from the second hour's work. Mr. Clark has, in effect, explained this matter in substantially the same way in another connection (e.g., p. 42), where he shows that the magnitude on which the question of utility and cost hinges is the "total effective utility," and that the "total absolute utility" is a matter not of what hedonistically is, in respect of utility as an outcome of production, but of what might have been under different circumstances.
An equally unprofitable result may be reached from the same point of departure along a different line of argument. Granting that increments of product should be measured, in respect of utility, by comparison with the disutility of the concomitant increment of cost, then the diagrammatic arguments commonly employed are inadequate, in that the diagrams are necessarily drawn in two dimensions only,—length and breadth: whereas they should be drawn in three dimensions, so as to take account of the intensity of application as well as of its duration.[37] Apparently, the exigencies of graphic representation, fortified by the presumption that there always emerges a surplus of utility, have led marginal-utility theorists, in effect, to overlook this matter of intensity of application.
When this element is brought in with the same freedom as the other two dimensions engaged, the argument will, in hedonistic consistency, run somewhat as follows,—the run of the facts being what it may. The producer, setting out on this irksome business, and beginning with the production of the exorbitantly useful initial unit of product, will, by hedonistic necessity, apply himself to the task with a correspondingly extravagant intensity, the irksomeness (disutility) of which necessarily rises to such a pitch as to leave no excess of utility in this initial unit of product above the concomitant disutility of the initial unit of productive effort.[38] As the utility of subsequent units of product progressively declines, so will the producer's intensity of irksome application concomitantly decline, maintaining a nice balance between utility and disutility throughout. There is, therefore, no excess of "absolute utility" above "effective utility" at any point on the curve, and no excess of "total absolute utility" above "total effective utility" of the product as a whole, nor above the "total absolute disutility" or the "total effective disutility" of the pain-cost.
A transient evasion of this outcome may perhaps be sought by saying that the producer will act wisely, as a good hedonist should, and save his energies during the earlier moments of the productive period in order to get the best aggregate result from his day's labor, instead of spending himself in ill-advised excesses at the outset. Such seems to be the fact of the matter, so far as the facts wear a hedonistic complexion; but this correction simply throws the argument back on the previous position and concedes the force of what was there claimed. It amounts to saying that, instead of appreciating each successive unit of product in isolated contrast with its concomitant unit of irksome productive effort, the producer, being human, wisely looks forward to his total product and rates it by contrast with his total pain-cost. Whereupon, as before, no net surplus of utility emerges, under the rule which says that irksome production of utilities goes on until utility and disutility balance.