Public domain Public business Utilizing public income Expenditure { Expenditure Production Exchange Distribution {Consumption Getting social income al social well-being) Utilizing social income CALB CHAPTER L ECONOMY. What it means to economize. To economize is to choose among several different things which one would like to have, giving up the things for. which one cares less in order to have the thing for which one cares more. Necessity forces this kind of choosing not only upon individuals but also upon communities and nations. Economics is the name given to a body of principles, which govern the practice of economy in its broadest sense. This choosing of what one will have takes on many and various forms. It may be a question as between play and work or between different kinds of work, different kinds of play, or different objects which one might purchase with one's limited money or purchasing power. The problem is always how to use one's time, one's working power, or one's money in such a way as to accomplish the most in the promotion of one's interest or the fulfillment of one's hopes and purposes. This is a problem, however, not for the individual alone but for the community, the nation, and the world at large. The community and the nation, like the individual, have common interests which can be promoted only by common effort. How to use the energy of the community and of the nation economically, that is, in such a way as to accomplish the largest and best possible results, is a problem of the greatest possible importance. In a democracy especially it is fully as important that the citizen should understand how the community and the nation may economize their energies and achieve the utmost in the way of civilization and well-being 10 VIMU as it is that he should understand how he may economize his ówn individual energy and accomplish the utmost in the promotion of his own interest and the fulfillment of his hopes. Moreover, the former is a vastly greater and more difficult problem than the latter. It will require a broad, careful, and systematic study of economic principles instead of a narrow, piecemeal, haphazard study of individual problems in economy When you are asked to do a certain thing and you reply that you have not time, you are sometimes merely trying to be polite. You may really mean that there is something else which you would rather be doing with your time, or which you feel that it is more important that you should do, than the thing you are asked to do. In other words, you have not time and energy enough to do everything you would like to do or that others would like to haveu do. You must leave many things undone, and you must, therefore, choose rather carefully the few things that you think most important or that would cause you the most inconvenience or pain if you left them undone. In order that you may do these few and important things, you must refuse to do anything else that would interfere. That is what it means to economize time and energy. It is choosing to do the more important things, leaving the less important things undone. Economizing in the use of money is only one special form of economizing time and energy, since money represents the products of time and energy. Why we have to economize. In saying that you do not have time to do a certain thing, you are stating one of the most fundamental facts of life; namely, the great and ever-present fact of scarcity. It is this fact which compels us to economize, which compels us to make our limited fund of energy and our limited time go as far as they will. To waste time or energy is to fail to supply ourselves with some of the things we want. To waste things that have already been produced is no worse than to waste the time and energy that might have produced more of the same things. Wasting time and energy is not necessarily remaining idle, though it may mean that. It may also mean the doing of less important things when there are more important things to be done. If one had unlimited time and energy, or if one had the time and energy necessary to do everything one would like to do, so that the doing of one thing never prevented the doing of anything else that was worth doing, economy would be unnecessary. If that were true, human life and human history would be very different from anything we now know, and this world would be so unlike the present world that none of us would recognize it. But time and energy are in a sense convertible into goods and commodities; that is, into the products of industry which are the means of satisfying our desires. Therefore, when we say that we cannot afford a certain article, we mean very much the same thing, fundamentally, as when we say that we have not time to do a certain thing. In both cases we are merely stating the great fact that it is necessary to economize, to choose what we will do with our limited energy or our limitedmoney to the exclusion of other things. The fact that time and energy are insufficient to enable us to do everything that we might like to do makes it certain that we cannot produce everything that we should like to have, and that, if we could, we should not have time to do something else. If we were to work all the time, we should have no time to play; and everybody likes to play — that is, everybody worth mentioning. We must therefore choose whether to deprive ourselves of the opportunity to play in order to get certain goods thať we want, or to reduce somewhat the number of goods we consume in order to have more time to play. Again, if one works too long on one kind of goods, one has less time and energy left to produce others. At every step in the life of every normal human being, therefore, he is confronted with some problem in economy. As already stated, the necessity for economy grows out of the scarcity of something or other, either time |