ultimate services (so far as they are dependent on labor) and the value of these services would sink to zero. Some existing limitation of labor, therefore, is essential to its value.
§ 3. The direction of labor guided by the value of its results. The labor available at any time and place can be turned to securing, improving, and multiplying the amount of any one, or of many different kinds of goods, or it may be distributed among them in any chosen proportion. Thus in a very real sense labor is a potential supply of goods. Within the limits set by materials to work upon and by the indirect agents to work with, the direction of the labor of one period determines the kinds and amounts of the goods of the next period—moment, month, or year. A savage tribe finds game plentiful and kills it; then turns to dressing skins to making canoes or gathering and making flint arrow-heads. At a time of famine the whole tribe gives all its energies to the search for food. In civilized lands men desire in turn the services of the baker, the blacksmith, the paper hanger, the piano tuner, and the dentist. Some of the services yield directly psychic income, and some are embodied in material goods which yield a psychic income. These various ultimate serv ices and incomes have different values from period to period. These values serve as a guide in the application of each kind of labor, which is turned now in this direction, now in that, to render the most valuable ultimate service for which it is fitted. Particular kinds of labor-services therefore dif fer in desirability at any moment, and tho in a general way these differences persist in large measure, yet they vary con stantly in some measure with changing circumstances. These facts explain the constant shifting, and attempts at shifting, of laborers from one occupation to another (as discussed more fully below in section 9 and in Chapter 19, section 3 and sec tion 8).
consider the problem of labor-valuation as it might present itself to an isolated laborer, such as Robinson Crusoe on his • island. He would have at his disposal a limited fund of material resources, tools, weapons, metal, etc., and a limited fund (let us call it) of labor-services, viz., his own. If he had much more wealth (canoes, house, stock of food, etc.) and were able to work many times harder, he would from the out set be able to gratify his desires much more abundantly. As it is, he is under the necessity of choosing the particular way in which his efforts should be expended. A day's labor spent in one direction may give a much more valuable result than if spent in another. Crusoe's first task was to secure the valuable supplies on the wrecked vessel. (See Chapter 2.) Until this was done it would have been folly to begin to build a but or to till the soil. In this work of salvage the various tasks were performed in a certain order determined by this principle: each hour's labor is to be applied where its result promises to have the most value. Next he turns his efforts toward his garden, or his domestic animals, or toward build ing a house or a canoe. At a certain season of the year a day's labor would be worth far more in the garden than at carpentry.
We perceive that, even in the case of the isolated laborer, his labor has no predetermined value which can be transferred to, or put into, its material products; rather the various products have an anticipated, expected value, which serves as a guide in apportioning the labor. Labor has value attributed to it according to the value of its products, now higher and again lower than usual. An hour's labor even of the same man does not of necessity have the same value in different tasks at the same moment, or in the same task at different times and under different conditions. Much less should we expect the labor of different men to be of equal value when numbers of men meet and trade in a market.