CONSUMPTION 87 



suits. Though perfectly valid so far as it goes, this aspect of con- 

 sumption must not be exaggerated. The other way of looking at it 

 is as a means of restoring energy. The consumption of goods neces- 

 sary to efficiency is not merely an end ; it is a means to further pro- 

 duction. Human beings are not mere goods-consuming automatons. 

 They enjoy activity for its own sake, and the more highly developed 

 they are the more they are likely to look upon goods as means to the 

 forms of activity they prefer rather than as ends in themselves. It 

 follows that desire for goods is only one, if the most important, of the 

 motives which control the economic man. Desire for activity is 

 another motive, which in individual instances quite outweighs the 

 desire for goods. 



20. THE DYNAMICS OF WEALTH 1 

 BY F. A. WALKER 



Many, indeed most, economists have declined to recognize con- 

 sumption as a department of political economy; but I cannot but 

 deem it a subject of much regret that the fascinations of the math- 

 ematical treatment of economic questions, and the ambition to make 

 political economy an exact science, should have led to the practical 

 excision of the whole department of consumption from so many recent 

 works. For, after all, the chief interest of political economy to the 

 ordinary reader, its chief value to the student of history, must be in 

 the explanation it affords of the advance or the decline in the produc- 

 tive power of nations and communities. It is in the use made of the 

 existing body of wealth that the wealth of the next generation is deter- 

 mined. It matters far less for the future greatness of a nation what 

 is the sum of its wealth today than what are the habits of its people 

 in the daily consumption of that wealth to what uses those means 

 are devoted. 



Malthus has shown us that population will go on increasing as fast 

 and as far as food is provided to support it, all increase of wealth 

 surely taking the form of an increase of numbers unless other and 

 more imperative demands are made upon the income of the family. 

 But let us suppose that, at the point where a competent subsistence 

 is provided to maintain the whole population in health and strength 

 to labor, and in freedom from all discomfort, resulting from privation 



1 Adapted from Political Economy, pp. 293-317. (Copyright by Henry Holt 

 &Co.) 



