In saying this, I do not mean to impeach that more abstract procedure which speaks of abstract units of value, and uses arithmetical numbers which designate no particular commodities, or algebraic symbols, or even ordinary speech, to indicate quantitative relations among different sums of these abstract units. Such procedure is thoroughly correct, and often highly convenient, if one be dealing with highly general laws, or if one wish to avoid any complications from changes in the value of any concrete commodity which might be chosen as the standard of value. Only, I would insist, such procedure is simply an abstraction from the price concept, and so presupposes it. A unit of value, in the concrete, must be the value of some particular concrete good, which is chosen as the standard. _What_ good is chosen is a purely arbitrary matter, determined by convenience. Abstract value, apart from valuable things, is an utter impossibility--only a Platonic idealism or mediæval realism could hold the contrary view. And, in order to show how many units of value there are in a good, we must compare it with another good, whose value is the unit, unless, indeed, we arbitrarily choose as our unit the good in question, and say that its value is one unit, or several units, in case we arbitrarily define the unit as a fraction of its value. But clearly this latter procedure would tell us nothing after all as to the amount of the value in the good. It would be a purely formal process--like renaming a "hocus-pocus" and calling it two "Abracadabras." Any real measuring--and real measuring is essential for any quantitative manipulation--implies _two_ things, one of which shall serve as the measure of the other. The conception of abstract _units_ of value, therefore, is an abstraction from the price conception, and presupposes it.[208]
A valid price procedure, in my view, is essentially this: we take our quantitative value concept, summing up the multitudinous social forces which determine values: then we assume a given set of ethical, legal, and social values of a non-economic sort,[209] as a sort of frozen framework within which our economic values are to operate, and which shall remain constant during the investigation: then, measuring the economic values in terms of a common unit, we let them exert their influence on the situation, and see what results follow. We vary first one and then the other, and see what readjustments any change involves. Since the situation is so infinitely complex, we bring about this artificial simplicity in thought, that we may study the tendencies one by one. But a given economic change will work out its consequences fully only on the assumption that other economic changes are not occurring. We can in thought let them vary one by one, but they do in fact all vary at once. And further--and for this fact price theory has made no allowance--the "frozen framework" of legal, moral, and other non-economic social values, is not "frozen." Changes in economic values lead to readjustments, not only in the other economic values, but also in the legal, ethical, and other values of the framework. These last are fluid, psychic forces, just as truly as are the economic values. They change because of changes in the economic values; they initiate changes in the economic values; and they initiate changes which deflect the tendencies of changes in the economic values. So that, even though we premise a thoroughly organic theory of social value, in which the influence of the non-economic social values, working _through_ the economic values, is carefully provided for, we still have to correct the results of our price analysis, before applying it to practice, to account for changes in the non-economic values working to deflect the tendencies which the economic values would lead to if the other values had remained constant.