82 AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS 



At this juncture Professor Carver's distinction between an efficient 

 standard of consumption and one that is merely expensive is worthy 

 of serious attention. Purveyors of goods are alert to exploit the new- 

 found purchasing power of the countryman. If spending follows the 

 line of least resistance, it will doubtless be copied from the consumptive 

 standards of the city. But many writers have deplored such an 

 event, and maintain that the country must evolve for itself different 

 canons of consumption derived from a shrewd examination of its own 

 peculiar needs. City folk have outdistanced their country cousins in 

 the matter of home comforts and sanitation ; they have larger resources 

 of education, music, art, and social life. But they have also a stimulus 

 to feverish competition in the matter of stylishly unserviceable and 

 unbecoming clothes; and a monstrous machinery for making light 

 and noise, endlessly to tease the nerves of urban dwellers and dull 

 their taste for quieter enjoyments. Among these rival allurements 

 the countryman needs to keep a steady head if he is to enrich his life 

 V most fully and avoid the dissipation of his resources in unreflective 

 imitation of others' standards, or through limply yielding to any form 

 of vigorous soli citation. 



The new consumption standards of the country may well hope 

 to achieve a self-reliant eclecticism amid the wide variety of choices 

 open to it. 



NOTE TO ECONOMISTS. While conscious of the shortcomings of 

 this chapter, the editor yet hopes that it may serve to show some 

 significant bearings of this part of our subject upon the others. If, 

 hi addition to this, it should serve to start constructive thinking 

 along these lines, its purpose would be fully served. It has seemed 

 wiser to offer even an inadequate chapter than none at all. We can 

 at least hold down the claim that the earlier economists staked out, 

 against the day when someone shall come to cultivate it more produc- 

 tively. 



A. General Principles 



19. ECONOMIC LAWS OF CONSUMPTION 1 

 BY HENRY R. SEAGER 



As one of the main divisions of economics, consumption treats of 

 the relations between wants and the means to their gratification, 

 goods. The characteristics of wants first demand attention. 



1 Adapted from Principles of Economics, pp. 70-87. (Copyright by Henry 

 Holt & Co.) 



