[174] _Principles_, 1905 ed., pp. 147 _et seq._
Back to the concrete whole, then, of social-mental life. The abstract elements with which the Austrians and the pain-abstinence cost school undertook to solve the value problem, have their place in this whole. The "utility" of goods to individuals, growing out of the nature of their wants, depends very largely on social causes. Mode,[175] fashion, custom--how powerfully they mould our wants. And individual "cost," likewise: a university athlete could dig a ditch far more easily, so far as bodily pain is concerned, than could an aged negro, and yet would suffer much more in doing it than would the negro. A social standard would bring a feeling of shame to him which the negro would not share. If we abstract from the concrete forms which individual wants and "costs" take, and define them in their lowest physical terms, we might leave out a social reference. But men do not desire raw meat, and the skins of beasts, and caves in which to live. Their food they wish to eat in accordance with the conventions of their class, and of a sort that their fellows eat, their water, of late, they wish free from germs, their houses and clothing must be "in style,"--facts well enough recognized, though not in themselves enough for a theory of "social value." These individual "utilities" and "costs" have little meaning till we know the social ranking of the men who feel them, till we know how much the men who have them count for in the scale of fundamental _human_ values. And their effect on "supply price" and "demand price"--the money measures of infinitely complex social forces, to which the entrepreneur immediately looks for his "cue"--has absolutely no constant relation to their intensity. The wants of slaves may count for little. The utterly unattractive and inefficient man may starve. The gilded parasite of a prerevolutionary French monarch may command untold resources, while the useful and productive millions may barely exist. On the other hand, with a changed set of legal and moral values, we may have men of social influence and power striving constantly to increase the incomes and relieve the sufferings of the poor and helpless. Our legislatures may be busy with laws shortening the hours of all labor, laws prohibiting child labor, laws restricting the labor of women, laws for the protection of miners, laws relating to the conditions of pay for labor and to compensation for accidents--which promptly reflect themselves in the values of the goods produced in the industries affected, and in the increased values--through increased "demand"--of the goods consumed by these classes.