The function of economic values is the motivation of the economic activities of society. Value as treated by the cost theories, or value as a sum of money costs, is a blind thing, a product rather than an end, and fails utterly as a guiding, motivating principle for economic activity. It is the merit of the Austrian School to have pointed this out. But the abstract individual factors which the Austrians have substituted are just as helpless in explaining the motivation of social activity. Every man's course is made for him far more by outside forces than by his own individual motives. Economic activity in society is an intricate, complex thing, for the motivation of which no individual's motives can suffice. If motivated at all its guidance comes from something superindividual, and that something is social value. Ends, aims, purposes, desires, of many men, mutually interacting and mutually determining each other, modifying, stimulating, creating each other, take tangible, determinate shape, as economic values, and the technique of the social economic organization responds and carries them out. THE END FOOTNOTES: [215] _Principles of Economics_, New York, 1905, pp. 415 _et seq._ [216] "On the Concept of Social Value," _Quar. Jour. Econ._, 1909, pp. 222-23. [217] _Nat. Val._, p. 52, n. Quoted _supra_, chap. I. [218] "Social Productivity _vs._ Private Acquisition," _Quar. Jour. Econ._, Nov., 1910, pp. 112-13. "Economic productivity is not a matter of piety or merit or deserving, but only of commanding a price. Actors, teachers, preachers, lawyers, prostitutes, all do things that men are content to pay for. So wages may be earned by inditing libels against a rival candidate, or by setting fire to a competitor's refinery, or by sinking spices. The test of economic activity in a competitive society is the fact of private gain, irrespective of any ethical criteria, and unconcerned with any social accountancy.... If whiskey is wealth, distilleries are capital items. If Peruna is wealth, the kettle in which it is brewed must be accepted as capital. Then so is the house rented as a dive; and if the house is productive, and is therefore capital, so, also, must the inmates be producers according to their kind. The test of social welfare is invalid to stamp as unproductive any form of wealth, or any kind of labor. If jimmies are capital, being productive for their purpose, so also is burglary productive; if sandbags, so highway robbery.... Always and everywhere, in the competitive _regime_, the test of productivity is competitive gain."