The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation, and Other EssaysVeblen, Thorstein
Philosophy
The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation, and Other Essays
Veblen, Thorstein
Economics; Science
constitute the substantial value of goods, and then construe market
value to be an approximate and uncertain expression of this substantial
fact. The direction in which the argument runs is rather the reverse of
this. The point of departure is taken from the range of market values
and the process of bargaining by which these values are determined. This
latter is taken to be a process of discrimination between various kinds
and degrees of discomfort, and the average or consistent outcome of such
a process of bargaining constitutes normal value. It is only by virtue
of a presumed equivalence between the discomfort undergone and the
concomitant expenditure, whether of labor or of wealth, that the normal
value so determined is conceived to be an expression of the productive
force that goes into the creation of the valuable goods. Cost being only
in uncertain equivalence with sacrifice or discomfort, as between
different persons, the factor of cost falls into the background; and the
process of bargaining, which is in the foreground, being a process of
valuation, a balancing of individual demand and supply, it follows that
a law of reciprocal demand comes in to supplant the law of cost. In all
this the proximate causes at work in the determination of values are
plainly taken account of more adequately than in earlier
cost-of-production doctrines; but they are taken account of with a view
to explaining the mutual adjustment and interrelation of elements in a
system rather than to explain either a developmental sequence or the
working out of a foreordained end.
This revision of the cost-of-production doctrine, whereby it takes the
form of a law of reciprocal demand, is in good part effected by a
consistent reduction of cost to terms of sacrifice,--a reduction more
consistently carried through by Cairnes than it had been by earlier
hedonists, and extended by Cairnes's successors with even more
far-reaching results. By this step the doctrine of cost is not only
brought into closer accord with the neo-hedonistic premises, in that it
in a greater degree throws the stress upon the factor of personal
discrimination, but it also gives the doctrine a more general bearing
upon economic conduct and increases its serviceability as a
comprehensive principle for the classification of economic phenomena. In
the further elaboration of the hedonistic theory of value at the hands
of Jevons and the Austrians the same principle of sacrifice comes to
serve as the chief ground of procedure.
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