Most kinds of enjoyable things are constantly being used up before every use dependent on them can be made. Our stocks of such things become therefore the objects of our choice. We strive to use them with some care and attention. Such goods are called economic goods, being the goods which have value and therefore must be economized. As we have already seen, a certain thing may be a free good at one time because of its abundance and at another time it may be an economic good because of its scarcity.
§ 3. Harmful objects. Beyond the boundary of economic goods and of free goods there lies an anti-economic environ ment, the harmful: destructive lightning, floods, poisons, ver min, pests of locusts, disease-breeding swamps, wild beasts, human enemies, and many other ills of earth. While some water continues to be "a good," other water may be "an ill," flooding one's cellar, or soaking one's clothes on a cold day, or breaking through the walls of a mountain reservoir and carry ing death and destruction in its path. Pure air may come as a tornado, fire may destroy our dwelling, growing woods may cover the fields needed for tillage, iron may crush the foot or cut the hand. And so, anything may become harmful, while in turn the "harmful" may become useful. Poison helps rid the house of vermin, disease germs may be made to serve as antitoxins, noxious weeds may, by the discovery of some new process, be worked into useful forms, tho they may still continue to be harmful in many a farmer's field.
§ 4. Value and true welfare. It will be noticed that the things that are valued, the things that we call economic goods, are things that have a relation to the choices or desires of men. It must not be thought, however, that they are of necessity conducive to real welfare, either generally or per manently, as the term "good" might seem to imply. In many cases they may be so, but what shall we say of the pistol which the highwayman points at his victim, or of the poison with which the lunatic kills his friend, or of the opium for which the miserable victim would give his birthright, or of the whisky which is ruining the happiness of the drinker and of his fam ily ? For the individual these things, being the objects of choice and desire, have value, and the term "economic goods" has been extended to cover things of this sort. The econo mist, however, must not overlook the injurious results of such uses, and in his final judgments on economic welfare must en deavor to see a larger good than that of the moment and of the individual desire.
The term utility properly expresses the idea of this fitness (a quality) of things to conduce to real welfare quite apart from the subject's knowledge at the time or of his choice. This is in accord with usage as well in biology (for example, in discussing the utility of certain organs) as in the moral sciences (for example, in studying the utility of certain in stitutions). We should beware of the very frequent confu sion of the terms value and utility, and throughout we shall connect the idea of value with choice and not with utility. Later, in considering the more lasting effects that wealth has, either upon the individual or upon society, utility has its place.
§ 5. Gratification of desire. We have already seen that there is in our desires for things an impulsive or an instinctive element. But with our growth through childhood into ma turity, experience accumulates, and our choices among things and our desires for things come to have in them elements of memory, calculation, imagination, and reason. We desire an article of food partially because we have already tasted it and imagination recalls the sensation which it gave us. We desire a plow because our reasoning powers tell us that the plow will assist us in growing the crop which is to serve as food. So as we develop intellectually it comes about that judgment domi nates our desires to a very considerable degree. Now if we have a desire for a thing, and succeed in securing it, a change takes place in our desire. This change we call gratification. (Or if the desire is completely met, we speak of the change as the satisfaction of the desire.) It is the sensation (feeling) which accompanies the getting of the thing § 6. The idea of income. Desire is a mental reaching out for things. The fulfilment of desire involves the securing of the objects of desire, and this brings us to the idea of income. We find the term used in a number of different senses. In come may consist of certain concrete goods which come in to a person during a given period—such as bread, butter, meat, clothing, etc., the quantity of which is expressed in physical units, such as bushels, pounds, yards, etc. A stream of goods of this sort is sometimes called "real" income in contrast with monetary (or pecuniary) income, which is a certain sum of money—or its equivalent in credit—received by a person within the period under consideration. If this terminology seems to imply that monetary income is less "real" than an income consisting of food, clothing, etc., the explanation is that a money income is but a means to an end. It is likely to 1 This is the sense in which we should regularly use the term in relation to valuation. But sometimes the word gratification is used to denote the pleasure of the senses which accompanies not the mere getting of the thing, but the using of it after it is secured—for ex ample, the sensation which accompanies the eating of food, the listen ing to a musical instrument, or the looking at a picture. The gratifica tion of desire at the moment of attaining a good reflects a provisional adjustment of choice, which is subject to correction by experience. As far as practice and judgment guide our desires, the ultimate use of a thing and the sensations which accompany that use, may be deemed to be the explanation of the desire. This does not mean that our pro cesses of valuation are a cold calculation of the sensual gratifications to be obtained from goods. But it does mean that the anticipated use of a thing enters into our desire for it. And it means also that judg ment, foresight, and calculation play their part along with instinct and impulse in our desires and our evaluations.