The Economic Point of View

5 Economic Affairs, Money, and Measurement

In love or war or politics, or religion, or morals it is impossible to foretell how mankind will act, . . . But once place a man’s ear within the ring of pounds, shillings, and pence, and his conduct can be counted on to the greatest nicety.

Robert Lowe

Money may not be the root of all evil, but it is the root of economic science.

Wesley C. Mitchell

The first comprehensive system of economic theory . . . drew implicitly the borderline between what is to be considered economic and what extra-economic along the line which separates action calculated in monetary terms from other action.

Ludwig Mises

Running through the literature dealing with the problem of uniquely identifying economic affairs there has been a recurrent tendency to introduce the phenomenon of money as the distinctive feature. The present chapter outlines the different views that have at various times seen the use of money as the criterion of the economic.

Money, Wealth, and Exchanges

The most obvious form in which money presents itself as relevant to a definition of economics is in its relationship to wealth. For the most general and powerful form in which wealth appears is in that of ready cash. Money, as the medium of exchange possessing the property of being able to command goods when and where they are needed, is, in general, one of the most desirable forms in which to store wealth. And, of course, the emergence of certain metals as popularly accepted media of exchange was in part the consequence of their suitability for being stored over periods of time without loss of general appeal.

In itself there is perhaps not much significance to be attached to this identification of wealth with money. In the earlier formulations in which an objective wealth was the focus of attention, we have seen this identification to have been lacking. The stress on the monetary form of wealth appears in the writings of those who give paramount importance to an economic man, intent on the accumulation of wealth. Since in a market economy the drive for wealth is most easily fulfilled by translation into a drive for money, there is little difference whether one describes economic man by reference to a passion for wealth or to a passion for money.

No doubt this conception of economic activity involves some circularity. We must confine economic analysis to human action only in so far as it has a single object in view, the maximization of money income, and we proceed to postulate an “economic” area of “business” defined in terms of such a single object of desire. The justification for such a procedure is the sharp distinction made possible, as we have seen, by the existence of a monetary bridge that both accentuates and spans the gulf between earning income and buying goods. There is, in fact, a twofold aspect to men’s lives. Men do mark off part of their time for the earning of income and part for the enjoyment of income, however hazy the line of demarcation may be. And it is a fact that economic analysis has historically dealt predominantly with the first of these areas. Definitions of economics in terms of money are thus different from definitions of it in terms of wealth. The criterion of money fences off the area of income-earning and makes it a field fruitful for economic analysis.

Money as the Measuring Rod

But Marshall was well aware of the misleading character of such a definition, in so far as the essence of economic activity is concerned. In his inaugural lecture he said:

Marshall is at pains to explain that it is in the measurability of motives that the homogeneity of economic activity is to be found. That it is money which in real life lends itself to such measurement is merely a convenient accident. In the course of developing this point, Marshall uses the arguments of Cliffe Leslie.

Money as a Universal Measuring Rod

Both Marshall and Tarde, it will be observed, look upon money as significant primarily on account of its suitability to serve as a measuring rod of human motives. But in postulating the suitability of money as a measure of human motives, Marshall had by the same token held these motives to be economically relevant. Tarde, on the other hand, working unwaveringly on the assumption that only the phenomena of wealth are economic, and confronted with his own conception of money as measuring human desires, is forced to the triumphant conclusion that money itself pertains to noneconomic phenomena.

Clearly the conception of money as a measuring rod is something also of a two-edged sword, capable, perhaps, of replacing wealth as the criterion of the economic, but capable too of forcing itself outside the scope of economics altogether if the latter is defined as the science of wealth.

Measurement and Economics

Several points of criticism present themselves in the consideration of the Marshall-Pigou view of economics. The description of the subject in terms of the possibility of measuring human motives could conceivably be interpreted as stressing the comparison of motives with one another. Economic activities would be those in which the relative strength of human desires would be expressed, through the allocation of resources, in the visible phenomena of the market. But this is not the sense in which Marshall wrote that money measures human motives.

Marshall’s was not the only attempt to see economic science as essentially a consequence of measurability. An interesting point of view in this regard was presented in an essay in 1893 by an eminent American contemporary of Marshall, Simon Patten. In the classical economic system, Patten explained, economics was unfortunately divorced from utilitarianism.

The achievement of subjective economics and the development of the theory of consumption makes possible their unification.

The term “positive utility” is used by Patten in contradistinction to “absolute utility.” By “absolute utilities” Patten understands those which cannot be measured and hence cannot enter into the utilitarian calculus. As instances of such absolute utilities, Patten cites “water in a desert,” “honesty,” and the like. “Positive utilities” are those which, by their susceptibility to measurement, enter into the utilitarian calculus.

Money and Price-Economics

What is of relevance to the present chapter is the degree to which the presence of a general medium of exchange and the identification of economic activities with those involving such a medium may have contributed to the price-economics line of thought. Prices are the corollaries of acts of exchange. Every act of exchange, by definition, is associated with a definite ratio according to which the goods are exchanged against each other. The phenomenon of price is one with a peculiar fascination of its own, especially when the whole structure of prices—the interrelationships between different prices in the same market and between prices at different times—is grasped. It is not difficult to understand the temptation to treat these ratios as “things” in themselves, moving in accordance with their own “laws of motion,” rather than as the manifestations of acts of human choice. The part played by money in the market has only heightened this temptation.

Money prices make possible a system of rational calculation in which any economic decision is influenced by all the relevant factors. The producer and the consumer are alike guided by money prices to adjust their actions in the most advantageous way to the real conditions of the market. In the discussion over the possibility of rational economic calculation of gain and cost in a socialist economy, one fact has emerged with overwhelming unanimity. It is almost universally conceded that in an economy without prices, real or “quasi,” there is no means of judging the economic wisdom or folly of any action. Every prospective buyer or seller, if he is to act in a rational way, must be able to compare his prospective situation at the completion of the transaction with his present situation. This involves the comparison of innumerable “economic quantities” with one another: those actually under his control initially, those to be brought under his control through the transaction, and those possibilities of control which his initial position enables him to command through alternative transactions. The expression of market prices in terms of money is an inestimable boon to the solution of this complex problem. As a common medium of exchange for all marketable goods, money fuses all the alternatives confronting the marketer into an immeasurably simpler chain of decisions. The money price paid for one good expresses succinctly, and more convincingly than is ever conceivable in a barter transaction, a preference for this good over a definite set of alternative goods.

The implications of these well-recognized considerations for the construction of a theoretical “price system” in which the relative movements of different prices are to be reduced to all-embracing “laws” are obvious enough. A conception of a price structure ultimately depends on the sensitivity of each part of the structure to changes in other parts. When changes in prices in one area do not generate related price movements throughout the economy because of undefined “frictional” forces clogging the system, then the concept of “laws” of price movements becomes less and less realistic. The introduction of a monetary numeraire to describe the relationships among the prices in such a system is more than a matter of convenience. The assumption of rational behavior, guided by prices, which the concept of a system of prices postulates would be almost wholly untrue in a barter economy. Besides the extraordinary difficulty that would be entailed in the exposition of a system of barter prices, there would be the more serious objection that the loosely knit relationships that would perforce exist between barter “prices” would make the recognition of any “system” of such prices of negligible significance.

Money as an Economic Institution

Closely associated with the considerations of the previous section is the stress that has been laid on the essentiality of money for economic activity because of its unique role as an institution. Economic affairs, on this view, are monetary affairs, not because money is a passive sign of the presence of economic activity, but because it plays an active role in shaping the character of such activity. According to Marshall, as has been seen, money characterized economic activity by serving as a measure of certain motives. The presence of money was not seen in any way as influencing these motives themselves, or at least it was not because of any such influence that money was taken to be the criterion of the economic. Money was seen as merely expressing the real motives operative in the phenomena of the market. The fact that it served at the same time as a measuring rod was the reason why economics came to be defined in monetary terms.

Writing within the framework established by Veblen, Mitchell contrasts his “institutional” view of the economic significance of money with Marshall’s concept. The latter sees money as “an indispensable tool for measuring the force of opposing motives; but it remains merely a tool . . .” To predict what men will do “one needs to know the motive force of the satisfactions and sacrifices promised by alternative lines of action. That force can best be expressed in terms of money; but the use of money does not alter the substantial character of economic behavior.” But, Mitchell continues, on Veblen’s view of the matter, the whole picture changes.