HUMAN BEINGS AND THEIR ECONOMIC SERVICES 1. Man and wealth as economic agents. f 2. Labor as contributing to income. 1 3. Psychic income gained in play. i 4. Play- and labor motives mingled. 1 5. Disagreeable labor. i 8. Physical differences among men. 1 7. Comparative strength of men and women. 1 8. Dif ferences in natural intelligence. 1 9. Talent and training as factors of efficiency. 1 10. Moral qualities required in industry. ˘ 11. Necessary combination of qualities. i 12. Inequality of talents shown by biologic studies.
§ 1. Man and wealth as economic agents. The whole stock of economic agents in a community at any moment may be classified as wealth and men, objective goods and human beings. In our study thus far of value and price, we have limited our illustrations to objective commodities, and to the uses of the objective (non-human) agencies of production. Little has been said about the other great class of economic agents, human beings. Yet everything that has been said as to the fundamental principles of value and price, applies fully to the uses (services) of men. Indeed it is only by an abstract method of treatment of wealth that the services of men have appeared to be left out of consideration. In truth the presence of men is always, and must always be, implied and understood in any study of the value of wealth. This means not merely that man is the evaluates, the chooser of goods (for of course a world without mankind would be a world where value was nonexistent) ; this means also that man is the doer of acts that themselves have value and the doing of which profoundly affects the whole economic situa tion in which objective goods are valued. is a com 171 plementary agent, some portion of which is indispensable to the use of wealth. Within limits man's efforts and goods may be mutually substituted. Each act a man performs, ex pressing, as it does, a choice, implies some economic valuation in relation to his other acts and to wealth. In applying his own labor to producing goods for his own use, or in selling his goods or his labor to others, his labor is being constantly valued and, only less often, priced.
Man's labor is valued or priced because, like other agents (non-human agents), it is serving for the gratification of de sires. In the process of gratifying human desires the man is correlative with the machine. Both have within them the capacity of yielding services or uses, and the services of the man are valued in the same way as the uses of the machine. The labors of the physician, of the blacksmith, or of the day laborer are bought just as is the use of the rented house or of the hired taxicab. This parallelism is somewhat obscured by the ambiguity of the term "labor" which is used to mean not merely the service (labor), but the people (laborers) who render the service. In such phrases, for example, as "labor and capital," or "land and labor," the term "labor" is used of the persons who perform the labor.
§ 2. Labor as contributing to income. In the processes of production and of valuation man plays a dual role. He is first the economic subject—the being who has desires and makes choices—but also he is an economic agent, an instru mentality in the gratification of desires—his own as well as those of other people. This is quite simple in the case of chattel slavery. To the master, his slave is on the same eco nomic plane with his horse, his machinery, or his land—each is valued simply for the use it yields. The free man, how ever, is his own master, a person whose desires and choices are the starting point in the study of value ; and at the same time he is an agent in the gratification of his own desires, directly and indirectly. Not only do other people by their services contribute toward the gratification of our desires, but we actually render many services to ourselves in such acts as dressing, shaving, polishing shoes, cooking, making clothes, etc., which form a very considerable part of most persons' incomes.