Cities and towns; Social psychology; Sociology; Sociology, Urban
Money is the cardinal device by which values have become rationalized
and sentiments have been replaced by interests. It is just because we
feel no personal and no sentimental attitude toward our money, such as
we do toward, for example, our home, that money becomes a valuable means
of exchange. We will be interested in acquiring a certain amount of
money in order to achieve a certain purpose, but provided that purpose
may be achieved in any other way we are likely to be just as well
satisfied. It is only the miser who becomes sentimental about money, and
in that case he is likely to prefer one sort of money, say gold, to
another, irrespective of its value. In this case the value of gold is
determined by personal sentiment rather than by reason.
An organization which is composed of competing individuals and of
competing groups of individuals is in a state of unstable equilibrium,
and this equilibrium can be maintained only by a process of continuous
readjustment. This aspect of social life and this type of social
organization are best represented in the world of business which is the
special object of investigation of political economy.
The extension of industrial organization, which is based on the
impersonal relations defined by money, has gone forward hand in hand
with an increasing mobility of the population. The laboring man and the
artisan fitted to perform a specific task are compelled, under the
conditions created by city life, to move from one region to another in
search of the particular kind of employment which they are fitted to
perform. The tide of immigration which moves back and forth between
Europe and America is to some extent a measure of this same mobility.[8]
On the other hand, the tradesman, the manufacturer, the professional
man, the specialist in every vocation, seeks his clients as the
difficulties of travel and communication decrease over an ever widening
area of territory. This is another way in which the mobility of the
population may be measured. However, mobility in an individual or in a
population is measured, not merely by change of location, but rather by
the number and variety of the stimulations to which the individual or
the population responds. Mobility depends, not merely upon
transportation, but upon communication. Education and the ability to
read, the extension of the money economy to an ever increasing number of
the interests of life, in so far as it has tended to depersonalize
social relations, has at the same time vastly increased the mobility of
modern peoples.
The term “mobility,” like its correlative, “isolation,” covers a wide
range of phenomena. It may represent at the same time a character and
a condition. As isolation may be due to the existence of purely
physical barriers to communication, or to a peculiarity of temperament
and a lack of education, so mobility may be a consequence of the
natural means of communication or of an agreeable manner and a college
education.
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