IV 



HUMAN EFFORT AS A FACTOR IN AGRI- 

 CULTURAL PRODUCTION 



Introduction 



It goes without saying that man himself is the center of our con- 

 sideration in economics. In agricultural economics it is the farmer 

 who is, in all cases, the ultimate subject of our concern. We have 

 already examined his position as a consumer of wealth; in a later 

 chapter we shall view him as a claimant for income; here we propose 

 to see what part he plays as a factor in the productive process. 



Evidently it is a large part: the socialist goes so far as to say that 

 the laborer is the only productive agent. Such is, however, an arro- 

 gant account of the process by which man exploits the bounty of 

 nature, and it makes scant acknowledgment to those who, in the past, 

 have abstained from consuming all the products that came to their 

 hand, in order that tools and machines and other forms of capital 

 might be accumulated to equip our efforts. Still, we realize that some 

 measure of human participation and direction is essential before these 

 natural forces and these inert goods can be made to yield a maximum 

 product of the kind most suited to man's needs and at the times and 

 places of that need. 



Not quite so clear, perhaps, is the method by which we shall 

 gauge and measure this productive element called labor. Just what 

 are the conditions which cause the human factor to make its largest 

 and most valuable contribution? If each human being meant, 

 always and everywhere, one labor unit, the matter would be simple 

 enough. But, even aside from the obvious fact that nature has given 

 widely various physical endowments to the different members of our 

 human family, labor in the economic sense means mental as well as 

 physical effort, and the intellectual and spiritual qualities of indi- 

 viduals vary even more widely than their stature or their strength. 

 Most significant of all is the fact that human powers are to be valued 

 in terms of their timeliness, their suitability to a given productive 

 situation and equipment, rather than by any absolute standard. 

 One hundred Chinese coolies are not the labor equivalent of one 



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