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19 Patten: a study in intellectual dishonesty - Part III: nineteenth-century Americas critics
American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, Nov, 2003 by Charles F. Collier
Moreover, Patten argued that as these developments occurred, people would discover more and more desires that could not be gratified by the natural food supply. As a result, they would tend to devote more and more of their labor to the production of commodities to satisfy these desires. In a statement using the ideas, if not the exact terminology, of marginal utility theory, Patten argued that people will continue to work to produce these goods up to the point at which the marginal pleasure gained from the consumption of one more unit of a good equaled the marginal pain of producing it. (7) Patten argued that during some phases of economic development the general wage rate would tend to fall, if everything else were held equal. He claimed that in any society the wants first satisfied will be those for which gratification provides the highest level of utility to the consumers. Patten argued that since the highest level of utility was derived from gratification of these desires, consumers would pay, and laborers would earn, a great deal from production. But after these desires were gratified, "less important" desires would be gratified. Gratification of these less important desires would provide less utility to consumers, and consumers would, accordingly, pay less to have them gratified. This sequence would continue, with the "importance" of the desires steadily diminishing, hence the amount producers would earn would also diminish accordingly. But, Patten felt that actually observed wages probably would not fall because technological advance and improvements in the arts of production would more than offset the above-mentioned developments. And if it should occur that the population of any community exceeded the limits of the food supply, some individuals would leave that community to settle a new one. But, he argued, the new settlement would represent a higher level of civilization and a higher phase in the evolutionary process of humanity. (8) Patten's economics was, therefore, a dynamic evolutionary economics in which progress led to better, not worse, things for most people.
George, in contrast, approached political economy in both its static and dynamic aspects. Readers of this essay are presumably familiar enough with Progress and Poverty so that a detailed explication of it is not needed. But to summarize a few salient points, book 3, chapter 1 is devoted to the (quite correct) proposition that the static laws of income distribution theory ought to have more unity than the classical theory gave them. And chapters 2 through 6 do attempt to provide a discussion of the several factor payments in turn. That George intended all of book 3 to be static analysis is probably best shown by the fact that the title of the final and summary chapter is "The Statics of the Problem Thus Explained." Then, in book 4, George attempted to consider the same topics dynamically. He titled the relevant chapter "The Dynamics of the Problem Yet to Seek," and proceeded to analyze the effects of increasing population, improvements in the arts of production, and the effect of expectations raised by progress. Later chapters and other books attempt to explain the business cycle, the dynamic aspects of poverty amid increasing wealth, and "The Law of Human Progress." Clearly these are attempts to dynamize the earlier discussion. (9)
