margin available for wasteful occupations and wasteful expenditures is very great. The requiremente of the aggregate livelihood are so far short of the possible output of goods by modem methods aa to leave a very wide margin for waste and parasitic income. So that instances of such a decline, due to industrial exhaustion, dra^/'n from the history of any earlier phase of economic life, carry no well-defined lesson as to what a modem industrial community may allow itself in this respect. While it is in the nature of things unavoidable that the management of industry by modem business methods should involve a large misdirection of effort and a very large waste of goods and services, it is also true that the aims and ideals to which this manner of economic life gives effect act forcibly to offset all this incidental futility. These pecuniary aims and ideals have a very great I Aiy.. jj^j effect, for instance, in making men work hard and Ljf,*/,. ,«#» unremittingly, so that on this ground alone the|,>j,business system probably compensates for any I wastes involved in its working. There seems, therefore, to be no tenable ground for thinking that the working of the modem business system involves a curtailment of the community's liveli- 1 hood. It makes up for its wastefulness by the ' added strain which it throws upon those engaged in the productive work.
Table of Contents
Business Enterprise
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