pig iron in New York. Its price might fall for any one or more of the following reasons: I. A rise in the marginal desirability of money due either to— A. A rise in the purchasing power of money through 1. A decrease in money or deposit currency, or 2. A decrease in their velocities, or 3. An increase in the volume of trade; or to B. An impoverishment or reduction of incomes. II. A fall in the marginal desirability of pig iron due either to— 1. Importation of pig iron from other places where its price is 2. Short sales of pig iron for future delivery in expectation of a fall of price, thus releasing to present use such stocks as would otherwise be held over for the future, or 3. A decrease in its cost by a) A saving of waste, b) A saving of labor, c) A decrease in the price of iron ore or other prices entering into its cost, d) An increase in the price of by-products, or 4. A trade war; or to B. A fall in the marginal desirability of a given quantity of pig iron, through 1. A decrease in the price of iron products through decrease in marginal desirability of the satisfactions they yield, because of a) An increase in their amount, b) A change in fashion, etc., or 2. An increase in substitutes for pig iron, or 3. A decrease in complementary articles, or 4. An increase in the rate of interest whereby the value of pig (1) By decreasing foresight, (2) By decreasing self-control, (4) By decreasing regard for posterity, or b) From a change in incomes (1) By shifting their distribution in time toward the future, (2) By reducing their size, (3) By increasing their uncertainties. Back of these causes lie other causes, multiplying endlessly as we proceed backward. But if we trace back all of these causes to their utmost limits, they will all resolve themselves into changes in the marginal desirability or undesirability of satisfactions and of efforts, respectively, at different points of time, and in the marginal rate of impatience as between any one year and the next. See also 153. Interdependence of Prices. We all employ the word "chance" and imagine we mean something by it. The most ardent naturalist, insisting most stoutly on the reign of law, cannot altogether cleanse his mouth of the word. It and its compeers play an important part in life. Chance, luck, casualty, happenings, accident-take these and kindred words from our speech, and we should not easily communicate with one another. Since these words maintain a persistent life through all the advance of science, they must have some use and point to something about which we often need to speak. What that something is, is plain enough, it may be said. "Chance" means uncertainty; not uncertainty in the frame of things, but uncertainty in the beholding mind. That is all. "Chance" is a negative term. It announces the absence of knowledge and is a way of stating ignorance. When we cannot trace the causative connections which have brought an event about, we say it was due to chance. Such a word furnishes a convenient label for marking occurrences as still dark. Not detecting the tie between A and B, we say B follows A by chance, meaning merely that there is uncertainty there. This uncertainty it would be ridiculous to suppose exists in the order of things, but it is far from ridiculous to say that I can discover no bond. By chance then I indicate nothing of a positive kind, but merely state that as yet I have no full acquaintance with A, B, and their connections. 'Adapted by permission from G. H. Palmer, The Problem of Freedom, pp. 131-39. (Houghton Mifflin Co., 1911.) A few instances will set forth this frequent meaning of chance. I shake my dice-box, and say it is all chance how the dice will fall. Nobody understands that in the brief space between box and table causal agency is suspended, nothing obliging one of the dice to turn up the number six. I certainly never intended such a notion, rather this: it is impossible so precisely to reckon the forces which steer that bit of ivory that we can forecast the number which will finally appear. Such minuteness of knowledge implies a delicacy in observing the complex play of forces about those little objects which nobody today possesses; and though I can make a fairly accurate guess as to the frequency with which the number six will turn up, this will not at all hinder my attributing the result to chance; for I still wish to mark the fact that I know nothing of the way in which laws of gravitation have been attacking the different sides of the cube. Is this the only meaning of chance, or is chance also objective? I believe it is objective. This world is not altogether an orderly affair. I hold that, apart from our defective knowledge, there are uncertainties in the nature of things. In offering a doctrine so unfashionable I had probably better state at once a case where chance can be seen to be present and then examine critically how far such chance conflicts with the reign of law. Suppose I am throwing stones at a mark. Each stone I hurl as vigorously as possible and all in the same direction. As I throw the last one a bird flies across; and the stone, instead of moving unimpeded to its mark, collides with him. He is killed. What killed him? Chance; his death was due to accident. Of course this does not mean that there was no causal sequence attending the death and that his existence ceased of itself. Everybody knows it was the stone's blow that killed him and that it would kill any similar bird in similar circumstances. On that point there is no dispute. Sequential causes were at work and without them the bird would not have died. Where then is the chance? It is found in the concurrence of the flight of the bird and the flight of the stone. What induced that? The bird was propelled to that particular spot through a long series of sequential agencies. He is an instinctive creature, operated, we will suppose, entirely by reflex action, which inevitably brought him to this place. In a similar fashion the stone was projected from me sequentially. It is true I was conscious of the process, even had in mind the ideal of reaching a certain mark. But, after all, I was obliged to use causal agencies, sequential agencies, to effect my purpose, and there stretched behind my action a long series of such agencies, inducing me at just that moment to think of throwing the stone. I threw, and it reached a certain point in the air at just the moment the bird also reached that point. But what, I repeat, caused that "also"? What brought about that co-ordination of the one sequential series with the other? The two lines of sequence intersect. For each of the two the causa tion is complete and evident; it is sequential causation, fixed, invariable, each line secured by its past and capable of only a single issue in the future. We do not inquire therefore what induced these lines of sequence. But there is a something more. What induced their intersection? Can any sequential cause explain that? For such coincidences we do well, I believe, to say there is no proper cause, that they are affairs of chance, luck, or accident; for these terms by no means exclude sequential causation moving in straight lines. They merely note the absence of those antesequential terms by which combinations are effected. Chance might be defined as planless concurrence; and when it is so defined, we discover it all around us, in great things and in small. It was an accident that the winter was exceptionally severe after the landing on our shore of the Pilgrim Fathers; that the tower of Siloam fell on those particular persons; that the partridge flew past me when I did not have my gun. The liberties of England are largely due to chance in the storm which arose soon after the sailing of the Spanish Armada. For however minutely we might become acquainted with the sequence of conditions which led up to the storm, or to that other sequence which led up to the sailing, we should never discover the wreck among them. That was an accident, the coming together of two independent lines of causation which until that coinciding moment had no reference to one another. A piece of chance shaped my life. As a young man I sought a place at a western university. I was appointed, but the letter informing me was lost in the mail. After waiting through several disconsolate weeks, I accepted a position at Harvard. Every man's experience will furnish similar instances; for no day goes by, no hour, in which we are not met by some accident or other. 185. THE DELICATE MECHANISM OF INDUSTRY' Under the old order, when those in whose hands lay the discretion in economic affairs looked to a livelihood as the end of their endeavors, Adapted by permission from Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of Business Enterprise, pp. 179-82. (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1912.) the welfare of the community was regulated "by the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which its labor was generally applied." What would mar this common welfare was the occasional disastrous act of God in the way of unpropitious seasons and the like, or the act of man in the way of war and untoward governmental exactions. Price variations, except as conditioned by these untoward intrusive agencies, had commonly neither a wide nor a profound effect upon the even course of the community's welfare. This holds true, in a general way, even after resort to the market had come to be a fact of great importance in the life of large classes, both as an outlet for their products and as a base of supplies of consumable goods or of raw materialsas in the better days of the handicraft system. Until the machine industry came forward, commerce (with its handmaiden, banking) was the only branch of economic activity. was in any sensible degree organized in a close and comprehensive system of business relations. "Business" would then mean "commerce," and little else. This was the only field in which men habitually took account of their own economic circumstances in terms of price rather than in terms of livelihood. Price disturbances, even when they were of considerable magnitude, seem to have had grave consequences only in commerce, and to have passed over without being transmitted much beyond the commercial houses and the fringe of occupations immediately subsidiary to commercial business. Crises, depressions, hard times, dull times, brisk times, periods of speculative advance, "eras of prosperity," are primarily phenomena of business; they are, in their origin and primary incidence, phenomena of price disturbance, either of decline or advance. It is only secondarily, through the mediation of business traffic, that these matters involve the industrial process or the livelihood of the community. They affect industry because industry is managed on a business footing, in terms of price and for the sake of profits. So long as business enterprise habitually ran its course within commercial traffic proper, apart from the industrial process as such, so long these recurring periods of depression and exaltation began and ended. within the domain of commerce. The greatest field for business profit is now afforded, not by commercial traffic in the stricter sense, but by the industries engaged in producing goods and services for the market. And the close-knit, far-reaching articulation of the industrial processes in a balanced system, in which the interstitial adjustments are made and kept in terms of price, enables price disturbances to be trans |