Social Value: A Study in Economic Theory, Critical and Constructive

Social Value concept recently become important, chiefly in America, and primarily through the influence of Professor J. B. Clark--Value and "social marginal utility"--Relation o...

Value as ideal, and value as market fact--Value as absolute, and value as relative--Value as quantity--Relation between quantity and quality--Relative conception of value involv...

Individualistic method of Jevons and the Austrians--Such a method, applied to value problem in concrete social life, yields, not quantities of value, but rather, particular rati...

When individualistic methods and assumptions are pushed to the extreme, the problem of a quantitative value becomes still more hopeless--Jevons' psychological and epistemologica...

Constant confusion of demand curves and utility curves in current economic literature has made necessary much of the foregoing criticism--Confusions in the writings of Jevons, B...

Extreme abstractness of the Austrian theory--Abstraction legitimate and necessary, but must not be carried so far that the explanation phenomena are obliged to include the probl...

All attempts to explain value in terms of the highly abstract factors of individual utility and individual cost, or any combination of them, must become similarly entangled--Aus...

Connection between social philosophy and metaphysics and epistemology always close--Three stages in history of philosophy: dogmatic, skeptical, critical--Ancient and modern phil...

Conceptions of the social unity: mechanical, biological, psychological--DeGreef's criticism of mechanical and biological analogies--Hierarchy of sciences: Comte and Baldwin--Bal...

Economic value a species, coördinate with ethical, legal, æsthetic, and other values--Psychology of value, as manifested in individual experience--Values as "tertiary qualities"...

Conclusions reached both in economic analysis and in sociological analysis point to values which correspond to no individual values, great social forces of motivation--To indivi...

Neither Urban nor Tarde primarily concerned with economic value--Urban's important contributions--Insists on conscious feeling as essential for social value--But feeling may var...

How get out of Austrian circle?--Temporal _regressus_ _vs._ logical analysis of the concrete whole of the Social Mind--Even in Wieser's "natural" community, psychic elements oth...

Abstract elements of the Austrian and English schools, individual "utilities" and "costs," have their place in the concrete whole of social intermental life--Social causes large...

Mechanical analogies of limited use in revealing full complexity of social control, but of use for certain purposes--Our argument can be put, in part, in terms of mechanical ana...

Professor Seligman's contributions to value theory--Points of difference between his views and those here maintained--His psychological doctrine of relativity--Different from do...

Price and _Preis_--Price broadened to include all relations between values, whether money be involved or not--History of price-concept in English economics--Distinction between...

Great work of Austrians really done in field of price theory--They have, without logical right, but with excellent results, assumed and used a quantitative, objective value conc...

Belief that social optimism and social pessimism are connected with theory of value--Views of Fetter, Schumpeter, Wieser, and Davenport--No such implications, either optimistic...

Recent economic literature has had much to say about "social value." The conception, while not entirely new,[1] has become important only of late years, chiefly through the infl...

The study of wealth is meaningless, unless there be a unit for measuring it. The questions to be answered are quantitative.... Reciprocal comparisons give no sums.... Ratios of...

[41] _Ibid._, p. 18. It is interesting to note that Professor Irving Fisher so defines wealth and value as to divorce the two concepts. Wealth includes free human beings, who ca...

The method of Jevons and the Austrians, and, for that matter, of the great majority of value theorists, including even the social value school, in seeking the determinants of va...

In the foregoing analysis, the assumption of the homogeneity and communicability of human wants was made. Only on this assumption could value as a quantity of utility appear eve...

Much of the foregoing would be needless were it not for the fact that there has been, and is, in the writings of the Austrians and those who have followed them, a confusion of t...

The great and permanent service of the Austrian analysis is in the fact that it looks for the explanation of value--a psychical fact--in human minds. Its essential defect is tha...

And all attempts to explain value in terms of these abstract factors must become similarly entangled. The Austrians themselves have pointed out that the explanation of value fro...

The connection between social philosophy, on the one hand, and metaphysics and epistemology on the other hand, has always been a close one,--a fact not always adequately recogni...

It is evident, and admitted, that there can be no balance, and no commensurability, between the laborer's disutility (pain) in producing the goods and the consumer's utility (pl...

Conceptions of the social unity fall, in the main, into three classes: the mechanical, the biological, and the psychological. Each of these conceptions recognizes, of course, th...

We return, then, to the problem of the nature of value. Value is more than the total utility of a good, or the marginal utility of a good, to an individual, and it is more than...

Our conclusions reached in previous chapters, from the standpoint of economic theory, and from the standpoint of sociological theory, alike forbid us to stop with the results so...

Our point of view will be more adequately defined if we consider briefly the theories of social value, set forth from the angle of a general (as opposed to a specifically econom...

How are we to get out of our circle:[163] The value of a good, A, depends, in part, upon the value embodied in the goods, B, C, and D, possessed by the persons for whom good A h...

Back to the concrete whole, then, of social-mental life. The abstract elements with which the Austrians and the pain-abstinence cost school undertook to solve the value problem,...

It may help the exposition if we throw the argument, briefly, into terms of the more familiar mechanical analogies, and speak of the equilibria and transformations of social for...

Professor Seligman's discussion of value theory has been extremely fertile in suggestions for me, and I find the spirit of the positive theory outlined in this book much closer...

[187] It might be possible to put the argument into terms which would give an analogical meaning to "social utility" and "social cost." The diagram representing the intersection...

In most English treatises on economics, a price means a sum of money given in exchange for a commodity, or the ratio between the money and the commodity, or the ratio between th...

My strictures upon the Austrian, or "utility" theory of value in what has gone before seem to call for further qualification here. As a theory of _value_, as a theory to explain...

The belief that social optimism and social pessimism are in an essential way linked with the theory of value is one that finds expression in a good many writers. The socialist t...