Social Value
Chapter 15: Some Mechanical Analogies
Benjamin McAlester Anderson Jr.
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IT may help the exposition if we throw the argument, briefly, into terms of the more familiar mechanical analogies, and speak of the equilibria and transformations of social forces. Of course, mechanical analogies have been used from time to time already in our discussion psychologists themselves often find it useful to conceive of their phenomena in mechanical terms. And while, in the exposition, we shall find frequent reason to prefer our plan of conceiving society as a psychical organism, and the social forces as phases in an organic process, still certain relations may be clearer for being put into the other form.
Social values may be transformed into other forms of social value - as heat may be transformed into electricity, or into motion, or motion into heat, etc. Professor Clark, with his distinction between "capital" and "capital goods," has shown how economic value may undergo constant transformation, as to its physical embodiment, and yet remain generically the same. But the possibilities of transformation are not confined to the economic sphere. We may generalize the notion. A man may use economic value to attain political power; having the political power, he may use it to get economic value
(157) back again, by direct barter and sale, if he wishes to take bribes, or by subtler, but still all too familiar means. Or, the political power may be transformed into personal prestige, if used in ways that please those whose good will means prestige. And personal influence - "live human power" (in Professor Cooley's phrase),[1] may be transformed into values of numerous sorts, into political power, into moral values if he who has it wishes to make a propaganda into prestige for other men, into economic value - for cannot an inspiring man command the purses of others in behalf of his plans and purposes? And may not popular confidence in a great statesman or financier in times of panic cause fears to be allayed, and values to return to goods that had lost their value? A man who has goods for which no demand exists, and which have, hence, little value, may, employing those who possess the art of creating demand to make public opinion for him by advertising, find his investment, transformed into public belief and interest, return to him a golden harvest. A religious value may flow into the economic value of religious books. A moral or religious value may be transformed into a law. A legal value - as a franchise right [2]-- has often a definitely recognized economic value as well. Economic value, spent in an educational campaign, may
(158) result in the establishment of a new moral or legal value. And so on indefinitely. Enough has been said to show that there is some sort of analogy between social and physical forces, in that both can be transformed into other forms of force. The analogy might be pushed further. It is often difficult to make the transformation in both cases - there's lots of "friction" if a man starts out publicly and brazenly to buy a political office, and a great deal of waste in the process. But enough has also been said to show the weakness of such an analogy: in creating personal prestige through the wise use of his political power, an officer may actually increase, instead of exhausting, his political power. Or, in the moment of attempting certain transformations, the original power may be suddenly wiped out - as if a great political leader should undertake to popularize some form of immorality. There is no law of equivalence, of conservation of energy, in social forces. Their nature and their relations are organic, and not mechanical.
Or, we may speak of equilibria among social forces. Economists have for a long time been used to this, speaking of equilibria between supply and demand, between labor and capital, between enterprise and the other factors of production, between intensive and extensive margins, etc. But we may also have equilibria between, say, demand and moral values, as when moral forces oppose the consumption Of liquor, or between supply and law, as in the case where regulation, rather than total suppression, of
(159) certain vicious businesses is the practice, or where the effort at total suppression falls short. And equilibria between enterprise and law and morals are being constantly worked out - entrepreneurs seeking to produce at the minimum expense, even at the cost of the lives and health of their employees, and law and morals [3] drawing limits beyond which they must not go, with a struggle between them at the margin - and the money prices of the products reflect the marginal equilibrium attained. Supply may be in equilibrium with a protective tariff, or an internal revenue excise - legal values which the economists have long been accustomed to treat quantitatively by the laws of incidence, and whose strength they measure in terms of money prices.[4] Not "utility and cost," but an infinite complex of social forces are in equilibrium in the economic situation.
And the social forces in equilibrium at focal points are themselves composites of many forces, cooperating and reinforcing each other, each of
(160) these forces having its own equilibria with other minor forces - a net resultant sending the unneutralized energy of both in a common direction, to form part of a bigger stream of energy. "Demand" is a stream of energy fed by many springs, among which, no doubt, individual wants for the good in question are to be found, but which include the legal and moral values of men, also, and an infinite host of other forces.
And, just as one form of physical energy may be substituted for another, under different systems of technique, electricity taking the place of steam power, steam doing the work formerly done by horse or human power, so, in particular forms of social organization, one form of social force may do the work that is better done by some other form of social force under a different form of social organization. Thus the regulation of the details of conduct, a matter of iron law (or of custom with the force of law) in certain stages, we now leave to the control of subtler social forces. At one stage we depend on religious values, the curse and the benediction of the church, as a tremendously vital power in social control; now we find other modes of social energy frequently more efficacious. Now we depend primarily on economic social values, under a competitive system, to motivate the economic activities of society, to determine whether this piece of land shall be planted in wheat, or in some other crop, or fertilized in this or that manner; in the mediaeval English manor, many questions like these were settled by vote of the manor court.
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But whatever the form in which the social energy of control and motivation manifests itself, its functional character is the same. It has its origin in, and receives its vitality from, the social will -or better is a phase of the social will - as steam power, electric power, and the energy in human muscles, are species of the same generic force.
The effort has not been made to put the whole of our argument into these obviously uncongenial terms. The mechanical analogies, often useful for particular purposes, fail to bring out the rich complexity, the organic nature, of the social processes, and, by their very simplicity, often lead to the ignoring of essential factors. For the purposes of the practical economist, however, concerned with price analysis in a situation which is so complex that he can give attention to only one set of forces, or tendencies, at a time, and where quantitative measurement is essential, it is often highly necessary to abstract from the organic complexity, to assume that other forces than those he is measuring are constant, and to put his argument into mechanical terms. My conception involves no radical revision of economic methodology in this matter. It is primarily concerned with the interpretation and validation of this methodology. To this topic I shall return in the chapters on the relation between the theory of value and the theory of prices.
