FACTORS OF AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION 185 



toward the impoverishment rather than toward the enrichment 

 of the country as a whole. 



Of waste labor there are four principal kinds, the unem- 

 ployed, the improperly employed, the imperfectly employed, 

 and the voluntarily idle. In the elimination of these four 

 forms of waste lie greater opportunities for the constructive 

 economist than in any other direction. 



The unemployed. Of these four the least important is the 

 unemployed, and yet it is almost the only form which has re- 

 ceived any attention. It is the least important because, first, it 

 is normally and on the average the least efficient labor which 

 remains unemployed ; second, because the utilization of the 

 labor power which is now going to waste at the upper end of 

 the social scale will go a long way toward solving the problem 

 of unemployment at the lower end of the scale. 



The improperly employed. By improperly employed labor is 

 meant that which is engaged in acquiring rather than producing 

 wealth ; that is, labor power which is used up in what are called 

 uneconomic as opposed to economic ways of getting a living 

 (see Chapter I). Enterprises whose sole purpose is to cause 

 two dollars to emerge from the pockets of other men where one 

 had emerged before, absorb a considerable fund of energy which 

 ought to be concerned with making two blades of grass and 

 similar things to grow where one had grown before. A really 

 productive enterprise, carried on by purely productive methods', 

 increases the wealth in the hands of other people in proportion 

 as it is successful ; and in proportion as a man grows rich in such 

 an enterprise by such methods, he makes the country richer in- 

 stead of poorer. The lawgiver who can turn our labor power, 

 mental and physical, into such channels, will make the country so 

 productive that nothing short of a foreign invasion or a geological 

 cataclysm could prevent us from becoming rich, even if our mate- 

 rial resources were all as meager as those of New England. 



