The Principles of Economics, with Applications to Practical Problems. Frank A. Fetter
times were gold and silver mines, while the mines of useful metals were touched but lightly. Within the last century the earth's crust has been exploited with startling rapidity. Scientific knowledge and mechanical improvement have combined to unlock the storehouses of the geologic ages. At the ever-increasing rate of their use, many important materials must be exhausted in the not far distant future. While it is probable that substitutes will be discovered for many of them, the outlook in some directions has little promise. To treat terminable incomes, exhaustible sources of supply, as permanent sources of income, leads alike to unsound theory and to reckless practice.
CHAPTER 12
INCREASE OF RENT-BEARERS AND OF RENTS
§ I. EFFORTS OF MEN TO INCREASE PRODUCTS AND RENT-BEARERS
Desire for better agents impels men to improvements
1. While man destroys some agents of production he multiplies many others. We have noted many kinds of depreciation, destruction, and wearing out of wealth; but the normal thing in a healthy society is an increase, on the whole, of rent-bearers. The increase of rents is due to two causes: changes in the agents by which they become more efficient technically, or more numerous; and changes taking place outside of the agents, affecting the utility of the products. The first of these will be considered in this section.
The increase of the efficiency of agents is usually the aim of the individual producer, and thus is brought about an increase of the stock of wealth. In some cases, however, improvements such as the dredging of harbors or as the protecting of forests, are made by men collectively through the agency of governments. Somewhere, however, the desire for these changes must arise in the minds of individuals. Increase of most things involves "cost" or sacrifice, in the psychological sense; that is, man must strive, perhaps suffer, to get a certain result. This end, therefore, must be in itself desirable, and social organization must be such as to present a motive to the men to make the needed effort.
Improvements by adaptation of natural resources
2. Rent-bearers may be increased in quantity and improved in quality by the adaptation of natural resources to man's purposes. To get food, men use the tracts of land that under the conditions give the largest product. Other tracts less fertile, or for some reason less available, are ditched, tiled, and diked, and fertilizers are carried up steep hillsides to make a soil upon the very crags. In commerce and transportation, new ways are opened by canals, railroads, and tunnels. An isthmian canal will raise the efficiency of ships plying between New York and San Francisco, enabling them to carry a greater amount of freight within a year. The tolls will represent to the users an expenditure only partially offsetting the increased efficiency of the agents of transportation. By the building of wharves, the dredging of harbors, and by many other methods, indirect agents are constantly growing in number and efficiency.
Machinery is an adaptation of natural resources
3. Rent-bearers may be increased by inventions and improvements that make machines stronger, quicker, and better. This proposition is not logically different from the preceding. A machine is an arrangement of material things through which force may be indirectly applied to move matter. No fast line divides machinery as regards form, purpose, or cause of value, from the artificially improved natural agents that we have been discussing. Just as a field is drained, plowed, and cultivated to fit it better to yield a crop, so is the iron ore shaped into a form called a machine, better fitted to cut, carve, and weave as man wills. Machines are merely adaptations of natural resources.
Bettering quality of agents
Increase in machinery may be either in quality or quantity. The two causes have in most cases the same result. If the quality or efficiency of looms is doubled, it is as if their number had grown in like proportion. In its economic function the beast of burden may not illogically be classed with inanimate machines. The horses in America have been remarkably improved of recent years by the importation of thoroughbred stock from Europe. Ten or fifteen years ago the number of horses in the United States was found to have decreased, and there was much comment on this evidence of a declining industry. It was not at once recognized that there was embodied in horse-flesh more horse-power than ever before, as a single Norman horse has the strength of several Mexican mustangs. Numbers alone are not the measure of efficiency.
Increasing number and better grouping of agents
4. The increase of wealth and the betterment of environment go on as well through the increase in the number of appliances and through their improved arrangement, as through changes in their kind. A machine is an adjustment of various natural agents to each other so as to make a more efficient agent, and machines in turn may be adjusted as parts of a larger system of production. The ideal of the modern factory system is so to arrange the machinery that no bit of material will make an unnecessary motion. The log, once started through the mill, is carried automatically from one machine to another until it emerges as a roll of paper or as a box of tooth-picks, ready for use. In an American watch-factory one man tends twelve or fifteen automatic machines. A small brass rod is fed automatically to the machine; a piece is cut off, is picked up by a human-like metal hand; is put into a lathe, and shifted or held firmly while it goes through fifteen or twenty processes; and then is dropped into a box where it is ready for the "assembling" of the watch. As the machinery improves, factories making allied products are grouped to make a system still more efficient.
As the number of agents increases they are distributed so as to be where most useful to the owner. A man having two umbrellas keeps one at his office and the other at home; a student having two books of the same kind keeps one at his room and the other at the university; a farmer having two hoes keeps one at the barn and the other in a distant field, and by this distribution the agents are increased in efficiency.
A larger and better environment
The aim of a progressive society is to enlarge the environment, and constantly to adapt it better to the service of wants. This is done largely by mechanical agents, which capture the natural forces of the world, put them into the right place at the right time, and make them do the right thing, or which group and relate the materials of the world in the right ways. Some of the groupings in the chemical and physical world that do not fit man's purposes may be made to do so. The world in this way becomes more and more a great workshop, better and better adjusted to man's wants.
Increasing some rent-bearers reduces the rents of others
5. The betterment of the environment of society in some directions reduces the rent of other parts. The wish of the individual is to raise his own rent-bearers in efficiency, but in doing that he affects the agents owned and controlled by others. The ideal from a social standpoint is to increase not rent but the welfare of society, and this is not always the ideal of individuals seeking their own interest. However, as the efficiency of some agents rises, it becomes unnecessary and unprofitable to use the less fertile fields; they cease to be rent-bearers, and the rent of the richer fields falls under the influence of the new supply of products. Some inventions suddenly increase the efficiency of free goods to such a degree that the less efficient rented agents are thrown out of use, and the margin of utilization is moved to a higher plane than it was on before. Improved types of machinery more or less rapidly displace the older, less efficient types, which, therefore, more or less completely lose their rent-bearing power long before they are physically worn out. When improvements in agriculture that are applicable to a considerable area of land take place, and the product thus is increased and cheapened, the poorer land is abandoned. Inventions and improvements thus gradually becoming common property, increase the free goods and free uses not bearing rent and open to every one. One who improves the quality of a machine or the economy of a process may thus unintentionally injure some of the owners of low-rent agents, while unintentionally