A BUGBEAR OF REFORMERS 499 



A BUGBEAE OF EEFOEMEES 



By Peofessor T. N. CARVER 



HARVARD UNIVEKSITX 



TO the commonly accepted belief that water tends to flow down 

 hill, a certain type of visionary would object that though such 

 a statement might be true as an abstract principle, dissociated from the 

 real world of human achievement, yet it is not true as a matter of 

 actual economic fact because men have invented pumps and pipes which 

 make water flow up hill. His position would then be precisely like that 

 of Professor Miller in his recent attack upon the law of diminishing 

 returns.' His argument is, briefly, that improvements in productive 

 processes, combined with increasing accumulations of capital, may and 

 do enable us to get larger products than formerly, in spite of what is 

 generally called the law of diminishing returns. If our supposed vison- 

 ary were asked why pumps and pipes were necessary, he could only 

 answer: because water tends to flow down hill. Similarly, if Professor 

 Miller were asked why inventions and improvements in production were 

 necessary in order to enable increasing populations to maintain their 

 standard of living, his only reply, did he not dodge the question, would 

 be : because of the law of diminishing returns. 



Professor Miller further suggests that the law of diminishing re- 

 turns " closes the door of hope " because " hopelessness is inherent in 

 a world of diminishing returns." Now the law of diminishing returns 

 closes the door of hope only in the sense that gravitation closes it, and 

 hopelessness is no more inherent in a world of diminishing returns than 

 it is in a world of gravitation. Gravitation has closed the door of hope 

 to many a visionary inventor who could not get his device to work be- 

 cause of the stubbornness of this law, but it has not closed the door to 

 those who took it into account and adjusted their plans to it. Gravita- 

 tion doubtless closed the door of hope to Darius Green, but not to the 

 "Wright brothers. Similarly, the law of diminishing returns, and its 

 companion, the law of population, most effectually close the door of 

 hope to the Darius Greens of economic reform, but not to those re- 

 formers who take these laws into account and plan in conformity with 

 them. 



Even though, as Professor Miller remarks, capital may take the place 

 of land in a growing population, he overlooks one rather important 

 fact, namely, that this substitution of capital for land on a large scale is 

 the accompaniment of a change from agriculture to manufacturing and 



* See The Popular Science Monthly, for December, 1911. 



