Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/104

 any subsequent investigator who claims that time is a vital factor, with his expressed suspicion that the dynamic interpretation of economics may be worth looking into; with his admitted long bewilderment, which he finally claims to have solved, that the factor of time is not involved in all his calculations; and with this sweeping statement, “Following out this course of thought we shall arrive at the conclusion that time enters into all economic questions. We live in time and think and act in time: we are in fact altogether the creatures of time”; but, with Gide, he grimly pulls down his hat over his eyes, at this conception of eternity without horizon, but much more impressed than Gide by his vision, goes on without pause to state soundly, “accordingly it is rate of supply, rate of production, rate of consumption per unit of time that we shall be really treating.”

It is difficult to regard this in conjunction with his “elements” after all his intimations and pain of labor, as anything but a still-born climax. As with a few other economists, his momentum fails just as it seemed about to sweep him into the clearing which Jevons himself, more perhaps than any of them, even Charles Gide, felt strongly lay close ahead. He is halted and held by the last interwoven brambles of the economic jungle, and in exhaustion goes wearily back to telling his beads—“Utility, Wealth, Value, Commodity, Labor, Land and Capital.”

Time measures the duration of human effort, and while it seems also to measure contributions of lower forms of energy that require no remuneration—such as growth, carbonization, oxidation, aëration, erosion, the fixation of nitrogen, the induration and preservation of phosphates, the crystallization and storing of potash and the annual renewal of our mountain reservoirs—these, however, without human effort, are incapable of producing value for they can only be utilized by the expenditure of current effort, and, in the end, are better measured by the distribution of population than by time.