Business & Economics Collection: Thorstein Veblen Edition (30+ Works in One Volume). Thorstein Veblen
Читать онлайн книгу.
material gain, to draw in his debtor's property at such a reduced valuation as comes in a period of abrupt liquidation, yet he does not ordinarily see the matter in that light; because the liquidation involves a shrinkage of the money value of the property concerned, and the business man, creditor or debtor, is not in the habit of looking beyond the money rating of the property in question or beyond the most immediate future. The conventional base line of business traffic, of course, is the money value, and a recognition of the patent fact that this base line wavers incontinently, and that it may on occasion shift very abruptly, apparently exceeds the business man's practical powers of comprehension. Money value is his habitual bench-mark, and he holds to the conviction that this bench-mark is stable, in spite of the facts.121
It is true, cases occur, from time to time, of transactions of some appreciable magnitude in which some degree of recognition of this fact is met with. Some large business man may yet rise to the requisite level of intelligence, and may comprehend and unreservedly act upon the fact that the money base line of business traffic at large is thoroughly unstable and may readily be manipulated, and it will be worth going out of one's way to see the phenomenal gains and the picturesque accompaniments of such a man's work. Parenthetically it may be remarked that if such a degree of insight should become the common property of the business community, business traffic as now carried on might conceivably collapse through loss of its base line. What is yet lacking in order to such a consummation is perhaps nothing more serious than that business capital be reduced to a somewhat more thorough state of intangibility than it has yet attained, and that does not seem a remote contingency.122
There is, however, another and more constraining circumstance which hinders the large creditors from wilfully pushing the debtors to a reckoning when things are ripe for liquidation. As was indicated above, the sequence of credit relations in an era of prosperity is endlessly ramified through the business community; whereby it happens that very few creditors are not also debtors, or stand in such relation to debtors as would involve them in some loss, even if this loss should not be commensurate with their eventual gain at the cost of other debtors. This circumstance by itself has a strong deterrent effect, and when taken in connection with what was said above of the habitual inability of the men in business to appreciate the instability of money values, it is probably sufficient to explain the apparently shortsighted conduct of those large creditors to seek to mitigate the severity of liquidation when the liquidation has come due.
The account here offered of the "method" of crises and eras of prosperity does not differ greatly from accounts usually met with, except in explaining these phenomena as primarily phenomena of business rather than of industry. The disturbances of the mechanical processes of industry, which are a conspicuous feature of any period of crisis, follow from the disturbance set up in the pecuniary traffic instead of leading up to the latter. While industry and business stand in a relation of mutual cause and effect, in this as in other cases, the initiative in such a movement belongs with the business traffic rather than with the industrial processes.
Industry is controlled by business exigencies and is carried on for business ends. The effects of a wide disturbance in business, therefore, reach the industrial processes pretty directly, and the consequences, in the way of an expansion or curtailment of industrial activity and an enlarged or shortened output of product, are, of course, both immediate and important. As a primary effect, on the industrial side, of an era of prosperity, the community gains greatly in aggregate material wealth. The gain in material wealth, of course, is not equably distributed; most of it goes to the larger business men, eventually in great part to those who come out of the subsequent liquidation on the credit side. To some extent this aggregate material gain is offset by the unavoidable waste incident to the stagnation that attends upon an era of prosperity. It is further offset by the fact that good times carry with them an exceptionally wasteful expenditure in current consumption. Also, the usual and more effectual impetus to an era of prosperity, when it is not an inflation of the currency, is some form of wasteful expenditure, as, e.g., a sustained war demand or the demand due to the increase of armaments, naval and military, or again, such an interference with the course of business as is wrought by a differentially protective tariff. The later history of America and Germany illustrates both these methods of procuring an era of prosperity. These methods, it will be noticed, are, in their primary incidence, of the nature of a waste of industrial output or energy; but the prosperity achieved is, none the less, to be recognized as a beneficial outcome in point of heightened industrial activity as well as in point of increased comfort for the industrial classes.
To the workmen engaged in industry, particularly, substantial benefits accrue from an era of prosperity. These benefits come, not in the way of larger returns for a given amount of work, but more work, fuller employment, at about the earlier rate of pay. To the workmen it often means a very substantial gain if they can get a fuller livelihood by working harder or longer, and an era of prosperity gives them a chance of this kind. Gradually, however, as prosperity - that is to say, the advancing price level rises and spreads, the increased cost of living neutralizes the gain due to fuller employment, and after the era of prosperity has been under way for some time the gain in the amount of work obtainable is likely to be fairly offset by the increased cost of living. As noted above, much of the business advantage gained in an era of prosperity is due to the fact that wages advance more tardily than the prices of goods. An era of prosperity does not commonly bring an increase of wages until the era is about to close. The advance of wages in such a case is not only a symptom indicating. that the season of prosperity is passing, but it is a business factor which must by its own proper effect close the season of prosperity as soon as the advance in wages becomes somewhat general. Increasing wages cut away the securest ground of that differential price advantage on which an era of prosperity runs.
Periods of crisis or of prosperity are, after all, relatively simple phenomena with strongly marked features, and a passable explanation of them is correspondingly easy. They have also the ad vantage of having received much attention at the hands of the students of economic history. On the other hand, protracted depression, not traceable to widespread hardship or calamity arising from circumstances outside the range of business transactions, is a relatively new and untried subject for economic theory. Newer, more obscure. with less pronounced features and less definite limits than movements of speculative advance or speculative crises, this phenomenon has to a less extent engaged the steady attention of students. An inquiry into the life history and the causes and effects of depression, from the point of view of a theory of business, may therefore scarcely be expected to yield concise or secure conclusions.
Since industry waits upon business, it is a matter of course that industrial depression is primarily a depression in business. It is in business that depression is felt, since it is on the business side of economic activity that the seat of economic sensibility may be said to lie; it is also in business (pecuniary) terms that the depression is measured whenever a measure or estimate of the matter is attempted. In so far as there is an attendant derangement of the mechanical processes and of the mechanical articulation of processes in industry, the derangement follows from the pecuniary exigencies of business. Depression and industrial stagnation follow only in case the pecuniary exigencies of the situation are of such a character as to affect the traffic of the business community in an inhibitory way. But business is the quest of profits, and an inhibition of this quest must touch the seat of its vital motives. Industrial depression means that the business men engaged do not see their way to derive a satisfactory gain from letting the industrial process go forward on the lines and in the volume for which the material equipment of industry is designed. It is not worth their while, and it might even work them pecuniary harm. Commonly their apprehension of the discrepancy which forbids an aggressive pursuit of industrial business is expressed by the phrase "overproduction." An alternative phrase, intended to cover the same concept, but less frequently employed, is "underconsumption."123
The controversial question as to the tenability of any given "overproduction" doctrine may, for the present purpose, be left on one side; it lies outside the theory of business and it has no merits or demerits for the purposes of a theory of business. The point of interest here is rather the ground of its acceptation among business men and the meaning which this notion has for them; that is to say, it is chiefly of interest here to inquire into the habits of thought which give cogency and effect to the dogma of "overproduction" as practically