Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/137

 REVIEWS 125

of substitution, says Dr. Patten. If beef goes up, he can use more mutton. But the price of mutton will then go up, unless more mutton is produced. Dr. Patten fails to see that his new theory of price move- ment involves alertness and mobility of producer as well as consumer. Yet he has shown that the freedom of the consumer is as important in low prices as the freedom of the producer. Advocates of the old theory of competition among producers as regulating prices, however, probably will not give up all claims to competition as a factor in the operation, as Dr. Patten seems to demand.

His analysis of monopoly rests on the same potent factor of sub- stitution :

If he [the consumer] had a complete power of substitution, that is, if several commodities could supply each want, or if several groups of producers could supply all his wants, there would be no monopoly. If he had no power of substitution, there being only one commodity that could supply each want, each commodity would be an independent monopoly (p. 86).

A new and certainly very broad view of the subject is taken when Dr. Patten declares that "the growth of one monopoly is always at the expense of other monopolies, never at the expense of the public " (p. 92). According to this view, farmers as owners of land are monopo- lists and the trades union is a monopoly, for he says "the rent of land held by small farmers and the gains of trades unions .... are not different in kind from those of other monopolies " (p. 94). In fact, every group or class of which " the public " is composed constitutes a monopoly from a certain point of view; hence the living units of a certain monopoly suffer at the growth of some other monopoly, not as members of "the public," but as "monopolists." The distinction seems verbal rather than essential.

In chap, iii a most interesting discussion of the subject of "Invest- ments" is given. Dr. Patten's treatment of labor and capital is also original and suggestive :

The true contrast with capital is labor force, using the latter term in so broad a sense that it will include every natural or human agency making capital productive (p. 120).

Labor force is made up of a number of concrete days' work and of a group of substitutes for labor. Wherever a natural force is utilized as a sub- stitute for labor, or a new utilization of laborers is made not involving an increase in their number, the additions to the productivity of capital made in this way go to the persons controlling these forces. This increased pro- ductivity of capital is valued at the price of the labor for which they are sub-