Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/78

 surge of mud-clouds impinging on the matted surface of the stagnant pool, a few bubbles, and a faint ripple that reaches the bibliographic shores. The public loses sight of the two struggling victims till some poaching economic heretic with his dynamite gets past the academic gamekeepers and brings up the two melancholy corpses locked together in their death grip. It may appear very rude to choke the unfortunate economist you are trying to bring ashore; but the gentle methods of the academicians in dealing with each other have not been effective; and it is all rather uninteresting to the spectator, who would have liked to see one or the other of them reach firm ground.

In unwritten faculty records there is a legend of a brilliant mathematician whose constant war-cry was “You must not measure power with potatoes!” And in worthy exasperation he has been seen to hurl a full two-pound box of blackboard chalk at an embryo political-economist who tried it.

Here is the danger: we can approximate the effective energy of any system by its product, provided we know accurately all the factors of friction and leakage. By this method we could measure the horse-power of a tractor in terms of a commodity unit made up of the number of pounds of baked potatoes remaining unconsumed by a farm-crew—if everything else were constant—but we would not expect anyone but a political economist to tackle the problem by this method. The proper procedure is to measure the normal resistance, the density and velocity of our expanding gases in grams and seconds, and the area of our cylinder in cubic centimeters,—and then start an enquiry into the reasons for the shortage of baked potatoes. The answer may be in terms of friction, faulty ignition, lack of lubrication, potato-bugs, eelworms, drought, sabotage, or a thieving or wasteful cook; but all this is simply an analysis of lost effort. Above all else in economics it is the tragic delay in devising a unit of value and in subsequently tracing lost effort that brings it under impeachment by the engineer. If economics is a science, let us get down to fundamentals as in any other science whose object is knowledge and measurement. If we are going to employ factors, let us at least employ factors