Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/608

 592 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

from the beginning concede rarity as a merely relative element, since it means exclusively the quantitative relation in which the object in question stands to the existing aggregate of its kind ; the qualitative nature of the object is not touched by its rarity. The availability, however, seems to exist before all economic action, all comparison, all relation with other objects, and as the substantial factor of economic activity, whose movements are dependent upon itself.

The circumstance whose efficacy is herewith outlined is not correctly designated by the notion of utility or serviceableness. What we mean in reality is the fact that the object is desired. All availability is, therefore, not in a situation to occasion eco- nomic operations with the object possessing the quality, if the availability does not at the same time have as a consequence that the objects are desired. As a matter of fact, this does not always occur. Any wish whatever may accord with any conception of things useful to us ; actual desire, however, which has economic significance and which sets our acts in motion, is not present in such wishes in case long poverty, constitutional laziness, diver- sion into other regions of interest, indifference of feeling toward the theoretically recognized utility, perceived impossibility of attaining the desired object, and other positive and negative elements work in the contrary direction. On the other hand, many sorts of things are desired by us, and also economically valued, which we cannot designate as useful or available without arbitrary distortion of verbal usage. Since, however, not every- thing that is available is also desired, if we decide to subsume everything that is economically desired under the concept of "availability," it is logically demanded that we shall make the fact of being desired the definitively decisive element for eco- nomic movement. Even with this correction the criterion is not absolute, totally separable from the relativity of valuation. In the first place, as we saw above, the desire itself does not come to conscious definiteness unless obstacles, difficulties, interpose themselves between the object and the subject. We do not desire actually until enjoyment of the object measures itself upon intermediaries, where at least the price of patience, of