582 EVENING DISCOURSES 
race might be stopped to be given a new magic cordial which, after allowing 
for the two minutes stoppage, would enable him to finish a minute earlier. 
But if he is stopped at frequent intervals for other magic cordials, each 
advantageous by itself, the total period of stoppages would at some point 
exceed the possible gains of speed during the short undisturbed running 
periods, and he would finish later at the post, instead of earlier. This is 
a parallel to the current effects of too rapid disturbance on progress. 
Under an individualistic form of society it is difficult to alter the social 
technique of change, and to make its credits really pay for the debits, and 
make all the people who gain by the profits on new capital pay also for the 
losses on prematurely displaced capital, or the gainers by cheapness and 
variety pay the human costs of unemployment and no-longer-wanted skill. 
The basic economic reason for social unemployment relief is not the humani- 
tarian argument of social obligation against distress, or the argument against 
revolution, but the plain argument that the social gainers by innovation 
should bear the losses of innovation. At the same time much can be done 
to shorten the hitherto natural time span and make society ready to absorb 
the quickened tempo of science. No prices ought to be charged except 
on the basis of costs fully loaded with short-period obsolescence—this 
would prevent over-rapid substitution, economic only to a narrow range of 
people. We have no adequate technique of change: we treat life as mainly 
static, with occasional and exceptional periods of change, whereas we must 
learn to look upon it as continuously changing, with occasional and abnormal 
periods of rest, and we have to secure all the changes of social outlook implied 
by that reversal of view. 
The next field in which scientific advance alters the economic problem 
faster than we can solve it, is in the duration of human life. We have to 
provide social dividend adequate to maintain a much larger proportion 
beyond the age to contribute to it. Combined with the altered birth-rate, 
a profound change is taking place in age densities, and the turnover from 
an increasing to a stationary and then a declining population, in sight in this 
country, Belgium, Germany and even the United States, is bound to affect 
the tempo of economic life. A larger and more immediate problem of 
adjustment is, of course, the absorption of the results of science not in 
increased masses of new kinds of commodities made by the released labour 
of labour-saving devices on old kinds, but in generalised leisure. The 
transition from a state of affairs in which we have an uneconomically high 
commodity wage paid to a part of the population, and the rest with a 
mere pittance and enforced idleness, to a state where a part of the reward is 
taken all round in larger leisure, and where economic satisfaction from leisure 
is deliberately equated to that from commodities in the standard of life, 
may need a surgical operation, or a catalyst, such as the United States 
experiment can show. 
In the past, the absorption of innovation has been achieved, according 
to contemporary explanation, by four agencies : 
(x) Great elasticity of demand for the old commodities at reduced prices— 
food and staple household necessities. 
(2) Rapid introduction of new things. 
(3) The rise in population created by the increase in produce. 
(4) Overseas outlets in more backward industrial countries. 
In the first the elasticity completely alters as the standard rises, and generally 
there is not now the scope for lower price in food or clothing increasing the 
demand pro tanto; for the third, a rising standard no longer stimulates 
population but tends the opposite way ; for the fourth, the external outlets 
