IV. There is a question which naturally rises out of all that has preceded. The value of goods is measured by the lowest, or least, or last use economically made of them:—What determines that this or that particular use is the last? In other words: What determines the _level_ of the marginal utility? The answer is;—the relation existing between a man’s wants and the resources or provision he has to meet them. If his wants are few and his resources abundant, the marginal utility will be low, for here all the more urgent wants will be satisfied, and the only wants left to satisfy will be insignificant ones. The value of an additional sovereign to a rich man, for instance, is very small, simply because he has few wants that remain unsatisfied. The same is the case if wants are what we might call “weak”; to the plain liver, the value of the additional sovereign is perhaps as small as to the rich man. If, conversely, a man’s wants are many and strong, and his means scanty, the marginal utility will be high, and the sovereign will find wants, and urgent wants, waiting to welcome it. “It comes nearly to the same thing,” to quote Böhm-Bawerk, “to say that Usefulness and Scarcity are the ultimate determinants of the value of goods. In so far as the degree of usefulness indicates whether, in its way, the good is capable of more or less important services to human wellbeing, so far does it indicate the height to which the marginal utility, in the most extreme case, _may_ rise. But it is the scarcity that decides to what point the marginal utility actually does rise in the concrete case.” CHAPTER VII COMPLEMENTARY GOODS As the ultimate goal of economic effort is not the obtaining of goods but the satisfaction of human want, we are not finished with our subject till we have traced the finished good to its end and _raison d’être_ in affording this satisfaction. In the present chapter, we have to consider cases where several goods contribute to one satisfaction, and to find what influence this satisfaction has upon their separate values. In such cases the “good” we have to value is, properly speaking, a group, and in the various forms taken by these groups, we meet with some puzzling and far-reaching peculiarities.