F.— ECONOMIC SCIENCE AND STATISTICS. l-tS 



(c) that compulsory family diffusion would do something to mitigate 

 concentration in Britain and the United States. 



I have referred above to effects upon accumulation of savings which 

 I regard as of enormous importance in economic advance. 



One may learn something from the proved effects of remission of 

 taxation and social expenditure, that direct additions to individual 

 resources soon exhaust their effects as direct additions to that kind of 

 contentment which makes for incentive to greater or better output. The 

 addition becomes the ex^^ected and the normal, and there is no evidence 

 that an improved standard of life in fifty years has made, through incentive 

 alone, for harder work. It has made a physically better worker, and 

 improved output has proceeded from this cause. In fact, even short- 

 period effects are often disappointing, and a betterment of conditions 

 through improved rate of wage has been partially offset by claims to 

 shorter hours by regulation or absenteeism. Here psychological effects 

 are not identical in different countries, and by no means all the workers 

 aim at working long enough or short enough, as the case may be, to bring 

 in a normal wage. If this is the case for additional direct rewards, it is 

 pretty clear that indirect additions to income through parks, libraries, 

 roads, &c., are much more removed as a direct stimulus to increased 

 economic effort. A small minority of workers will respond to the social 

 idea in which their additional effort will not enrich the few and carry 

 down the unearned property of those few to the select heirs. As regards 

 those whose incentive is being considered from the point of view of depriva- 

 tion of the privilege of bequest, we may study these later. A more even 

 family diffusion presents a difficult problem, which the example of France 

 does little to elucidate. Those who base their views as to the effects of 

 inheritance not so much upon the facts of inequality as of its extent, its 

 ' grossness,' do not indicate at what point inequality ceases to be defensible 

 and becomes mischievous. We are entirely without guidance upon this 

 subject, nor does it appear that there will be a consensus of view upon it 

 sufficiently stable for common action. One cannot be dogmatic upon this, 

 because a similar lack of standard exists for fixing proper rates of progres- 

 sion in taxation ; but the problem is roughly, though only temporarily, 

 solved in practice, and progressions tend to increase in steepness, the 

 instances to the contrary being very few. Just as ideas about a fair 

 standard of life are relative, so ideas about the weight of taxation are 

 relative too. If anyone doubts this, let him read the Parliamentary 

 Debates on the subject of the income-tax at Is. 3d. in the £, which was 

 ' gross ' and ' indefensible ' and ' disastrous.' I think, therefore, that it 

 would be exceedingly hard to say at what precise point between 1"3 and 

 rS in the oc slope of the Pareto line the line becomes either economically 

 indefensible or an offence against social justice. I am impressed with the 

 importance of a general popular sense of social injustice as a basis for 

 political ideas, in the absence of exact standards, but I distrust its finality 

 as an economic conception. 



At the same time, men are moved in economic action by motive, and 

 the motive is no less potent because it is incorrectly or inadequately 

 informed. 



It is my conclusion, after much study of men's attitudes, that they are 



