A BUGBEAR OF ECONOMICS 60 1 



Patten in his last book, " The Social Basis of Keligion," says, " Sin is 

 misery; misery is poverty; the antidote of poverty is income." If the 

 signs of the times meant anything, there is an increase in the world's 

 income and a potential decrease in the world's misery through better 

 distribution. Misery, then, with its accompanying vice can not be the 

 result of the law of diminishing returns, for returns are increasing. 



Since the means of production are land, labor and capital, and the 

 methods of capitalistic-mechanical production increase the possibilities 

 of the last two indefinitely, the resources of production show no more 

 signs of being exhausted than the heat of the sun. Our census returns 

 show that the population of the United States has increased 21 per cent, 

 in the last decade, that urban population has increased even more, and 

 that many of the best rural districts have lost population; and still 

 there has been a disproportionate increase in the amount and variety of 

 food. These facts make it absurd to argue that, as applied to produc- 

 tion in the large, the law of diminishing returns is a factor to be con- 

 sidered. Why then in the teaching of economics, and in business is not 

 the emphasis changed so that such a point of view as that of Mr. Eocke- 

 f eller may not be attained ? For obviously, as Patten says, our modern 

 progressive civilization has passed the line of deficit and is capturing 

 broader and broader fields of surplus. If we are going to retain a full 

 treatment of this law and Malthusianism in our text-books, could it not 

 be labeled as a historical condition of which occasional relics may still 

 be found ? In answer to the argument that it is essential that we take 

 the law as a starting point for the explanation of economic phenomena, 

 I would reply that the explanation is good only for a condition that is 

 stationary and looks to the past. May we not demand that in some way 

 economists should frame a law, in which, as in the law of the moving 

 point by which the hyperbola is traced, the prophecy of the future 

 should be as perfectly expressed as the history of the past, and thus 

 looking ahead, give us a true description of modern conditions of pro- 

 duction ? 



VOL. LXXIX. — 41. 



