WASTE AND LUXURY § 1. Accidental destruction of wealth. § 2. Intentional destruction of wealth by the owner. § 3. Intentional destruction of others' wealth.
§ 4. Careless waste. $ 5. Waste in public outlay. 8. The fallacy of waste. 7. Definitions of luxury. 8. Luxury to give employment.
13. Animal choice. § 14. Choice by primitive men. § 15. Desires and progress. § 16. Function of moderate discontent. § 17. Luxury as an incentive to progress.
§ 1. Accidental destruction of wealth. Before approach ing in the next chapter the subject of the dynamic influence of saving and the accumulation of wealth, let us look at the subject in its negative aspects, namely, waste and luxury. By waste is meant the accidental or intentional using and using up of more wealth (and services) than would suffice for the purpose of the use. In waste the potential uses in goods are applied so that they cause less desirable results to the user than they might, or even give no use at all. We are concerned here with the dynamic and social aspect of the case. The question is: What is the dynamic effect of waste as a policy ? In which way will it carry the general level of in comes, upward or downward? There is a popular opinion, long held, that waste in itself is a good thing, that it gives employment and benefits the working man.
In a simple society, without exchange, the result of waste is evidently bad for the self-sufficing families. If they destroy their food, they suffer from hunger or gratify appetite less perfectly ; if they destroy their clothing, they are cold ; if they destroy their house, they have no shelter. Waste makes 468 their economic environment less fitted for their use. In the conditions of our society, where goods are exchanged, the re sult appears to be different. The need to replace the lost goods makes a demand for special kinds of labor or goods, and this appears "to create" employment for labor. But if a part of the income of the loser must be diverted from other uses to replace the wealth destroyed, those from whom he would have bought suffer an unexpected falling off of their sales. The thought of an immediate benefit to one obscures the corresponding loss to another. The net result is a loss of wealth and gratification to the community as a whole.
There is a real exception where the accidental destruction removes some social difficulty. Such great fires as those in
London in 1665 and in Chicago in 1872 result in wonderful improvement to the city as a whole and eventually even to most of the individual owners. When an old city is built almost entirely of wood, each owner may think it to his inter est to keep the old buildings. A great fire sweeps them all away and compels the rebuilding of the city on a new and higher standard. But the usual resultant of accidental de struction is loss to the owner, rarely with benefit on the whole to others. It is a use of wealth without a fulfilling of the purpose of production, the gratifying of desires.
§ 2. Intentional destruction of wealth by the owner. Another type of case is the intentional destruction of wealth by the owner, to make trade good. The case in mind is not where the destruction is inevitable without man's action, and he merely tries to minimize it—such a case as the throwing overboard of a part of the cargo when the ship is in danger of sinking, in the hope thereby of saving the rest, or as the blowing up of buildings to prevent the spread of a fire. The case in mind is the deliberate destruction of wealth that might be kept for use. One labor leader, for example, boasted that when he drank pop he always broke the bottle "to make trade good" by helping the glass industry. The refuting of this fallacy is one of the time-honored tasks in political economy.
There is, it is true, an increase in the demand for glass and glassblowers' labor; but at the same time there is a decrease in the demand for other goods and other kinds of labor. The proverb, old in Shakespeare's time, runs, "Nothing can come of nothing." What is spent for one purpose can not be for another; "you can not eat your cake and have it, too." A given income can be spent in one of many ways, but not in all ways or even in two ways at once. It is a question of this or that, not this and that. At the same moment that the demand for pop-bottles is increased, the demand for other things is decreased. Such a form of benevolence is a futile attempt to provide labor for one man by taking it from an other. Moreover, it is an uneconomic, harmful attempt, for the breaking of one bottle to have it replaced by another adds nothing to the sum of enjoyable goods in the world ; but the same labor and other agents could and should be used to make some of the many other needed things.