Principles of Political Economy: Abridged with Critical, Bibliographical, and Explanatory Notes, and a Sketch of the History of Political Economy — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
Principles of Political Economy: Abridged with Critical, Bibliographical, and Explanatory Notes, and a Sketch of the History of Political Economy
John Stuart Mill · en
The distinction of Productive and Unproductive is applicable to
Consumption as well as to Labor. All the members of the community are not
laborers, but all are consumers, and consume either unproductively or
productively. Whoever contributes nothing directly or indirectly to
production is an unproductive consumer. The only productive consumers are
productive laborers; the labor of direction being of course included, as
well as that of execution. But the consumption even of productive laborers
is not all of it Productive Consumption. There is unproductive consumption
by productive consumers. What they consume in keeping up or improving
their health, strength, and capacities of work, or in rearing other
productive laborers to succeed them, is Productive Consumption. But
consumption on pleasures or luxuries, whether by the idle or by the
industrious, since production is neither its object nor is in any way
advanced by it, must be reckoned Unproductive: with a reservation,
perhaps, of a certain quantum of enjoyment which may be classed among
necessaries, since anything short of it would not be consistent with the
greatest efficiency of labor. That alone is productive consumption which
goes to maintain and increase the productive powers of the community;
either those residing in its soil, in its materials, in the number and
efficiency of its instruments of production, or in its people.
I grant that no labor really tends to the enrichment of society, which is
employed in producing things for the use of unproductive consumers. The
tailor who makes a coat for a man who produces nothing is a productive
laborer; but in a few weeks or months the coat is worn out, while the
wearer has not produced anything to replace it, and the community is then
no richer by the labor of the tailor than if the same sum had been paid
for a stall at the opera. Nevertheless, society has been richer by the
labor while the coat lasted. These things also [such as lace and
pine-apples] are wealth until they have been consumed.
§ 3. Distinction Between Labor for the Supply of Productive Consumption
and Labor for the Supply of Unproductive Consumption.