Search

The general function of values, whether pecuniary or other, is to direct the energies of men and of the social wholes in which men co-operate. In this paper I mean to inquire what part pecuniary values have in this function, how far they serve, or ought to serve, as the motive force of social organization and progress, what they can and cannot do. The discussion, I may add, is based on the view maintained in a previous paper,' that the activities of the pecuniary market, taken as a whole, constitute a social institution of much the same general character as other great institutions, such as the church or the state. It seems clear that the distinctive function of money valuation is to generalize or assimilate values through a common measure. In this way it gives them reach and flexibility, so that many sorts of value are enabled to work freely together throughout the social system, instead of being confined to a small province. And since values represent the powers of society, the result is that these powers are organized in a large way and enabled to co-operate in a vital whole. Any market value that I, for instance, may control ceases to be merely local in its application and becomes a generalized force that I can apply anywhere. If I can earn a thousand dollars teaching bacteriology, I can take the money and go to Europe, exchanging my recondite knowledge for the services, say, of guides in the Alps, who never heard of bacteriology. Other values are similarly generalized and the result is a mobility that enables many sorts of value, reduced to a common measure, to be applied anywhere and anyhow that the holder may think desirable. We have, then, to do with a value institution or process, far transcending in reach any special sort of value, and participating in the most diverse phases of our life. Its function resembles that of language, and its ideal may be said to be to do for value what

Pecuniary valuation is a phase of the general process of social thought, having its special methods and significance but not essentially different in nature: the pecuniary estimates people set upon things are determined in a movement of suggestion and discussion, varying with the group and the time like other phases of the public mind. This is apparent afortiori if we take what appear to be the simplest and most essential commodities. The estimation of wheaten bread as a necessity of life that prevails with us is a matter of opinion and custom; whether grounded in sound hygiene or not is irrelevant. Other countries and times have thought differently, and we know that foods may be regarded as necessary whose hygienic value is doubtful or negative, like beer in Germany or coffee with us. Consider in this connection the prepared foods known as cereals, for which vast sums are spent by all classes of our people; their vogue and value is clearly a matter of current, possibly transient, opinion, largely created by the psychological process of advertising. I need hardly go farther into this. It is plain that even among the most necessitous an existing scale of pecuniary values can be explained only as a product of the same social forces which create other phases of tradition and sentiment; and no one will expect anything different in values prevailing among a richer class. I do not mean, of course, that these forces work wholly in the air, but that whatever physiological or mechanical factors there may be in demand and supply, these become active only through the mediation of a psychological process.

n/a