第45章 HUMAN COSTS IN THESUPPLY OF CAPITAL(4)

§6.As, then, we have seen that a certain proportion of the various current activities, which are directly productive in the shape of skilled and unskilled labour of brain and hand, are either humanly costless or carry some positive fund of human utility, so is it also with the processes of saving and risk-taking, which go to the supply and maintenance of capital.

It is not difficult to conceive a society in which all the saving needed for the normal development of industry might be costless.In a primitive society, based chiefly on agriculture and simple handicrafts, one might find the bulk of the working population earning a secure and sufficient livelihood, but with no margin of savings for instrumental capital.The comparatively small amount of such capital as was needed might be furnished mainly or entirely from the surplus incomes of a landowning or a governing class, extracted as rent or taxes.Of course, if, as would commonly occur, such rents or taxes were extorted from the peasantry by starving them or by imposing a burden of excessive toil, the human costs of such saving would be very heavy.But where a class of feudal lords drew moderate rents and fines from their tenants, or where a governing caste, such as the Incas in ancient Peru, applied to useful public works a large share of what would be called the 'economic rent' of the country, taken in taxation, such saving need entail no human cost.Nor is such costless provision of capital necessarily confined to a society living under simple industrial conditions in which comparatively little saving can be utilised.Even in an advanced industrial society the large incessant increments of capital might be provided costlessly.

For if the national dividend were not only very large but so well or equably distributed, as income, that all classes had more than enough to satisfy their current organic needs, such a society would, by a virtually automatic economy, secrete stores of capital to meet the future needs of a growing population or a rising standard of consumption, as every animal organism naturally lays up stores of fat, muscle and physical energy, for future use.

A well-ordered socialistic state, were such possible, would certainly apply the industrial forces at its disposal, so as to secure an adequate supply of costless capital.After making proper provision out of current industry for the physical and moral health of the whole population, and for normal progress in personal efficiency of work and life, it would apply the surplus of industrial energy to improving the capital fabric of industry so as to provide for the production of increasing wealth, leisure, and other opportunities in the future.The calculation, as to what proportion of current industrial energy should be thus applied to preparing future economic goods to ripen for utility at various distances of time, would of course be a delicate operation.But so far as it were correctly carried out, it would be socially costless.For on the hypothesis that adequate provision for current needs of individual stability and progress had been a first charge on the industrial dividend, the postponement of any additional consumption involved in social saving could not rightly be regarded as involving any net human cost.For, if, instead of the surplus being saved, it had been paid out to individual members of society for current consumption, it would ex hypothesi be unproductive of organic welfare, being applied in an injurious and wasteful attempt to force the pace of advances in the current standard of living.Applying the organic metaphor, one would say that it was a natural function of an organised society to secrete capital in due quantity for its future life.

§7.But how far can it be held that an industrial society like ours is so organised as 'naturally' to secrete the 'right' quantity of capital, to provide it in a costless way, and to distribute it economically among its various uses? A full answer to these questions must be deferred until our analysis of the consumption side of the national dividend enables us to assess the human utility of the productive work to which capital is applied.At present we must assume the utility of the £300,000,000of savings applied out of the aggregate national income to the enlargement of industry, and confine ourselves to enquiring what proportion of this amount is likely to be 'costless' and how to estimate the 'human costs'

attached to the other part.It is, of course, quite evident that such answer as can be given is of a general and speculative nature, with no pretence at quantitative exactitude.

In considering savings with an eye to discovering the human costs.