must take place.But, outside this limit, the particular requirements and conditions, not of the earner alone, but of the family as a whole, must determine the expenditure that makes for efficiency.This discrepancy, however, is not really so great as it appears at first sight.The direct interest of society in the productive and consumptive life of its individual members lies in their performance of this proper share of 'costly' or social service and their use of a proper portion of their income for consumption adjusted to maintain their efficiency for this social service.The rest of their productive energy, the rest of their consumptive wealth, lie under their own control for their personal life.The fact that this personal life may be more narrowly personal on the productive side, more of a family life on the consumptive side, does not seriously affect the issue.Indeed, the discrepancy almost wholly disappears when we look a little closer at the liberties which a better social economy of production secures for the worker.The better life which a slackening of the industrial strain will bring to the producer will consist in the cultivation of interests and activities which, precisely because they are voluntary and in themselves desired, cannot rightly be classified as either production or consumption but unite the qualities of both.We have seen that this is the characteristic of all art, or all work which is good and pleasant in itself.Any activity that carries a surplus of human utility over human cost is at once function and nutrition, production and consumption.In a word, it is an increase of life.So it comes about that the 'human distribution' feeds personal efficiency equally on its productive and consumptive sides.A healthy application of productive activities will contribute as much to individual progress as a healthy standard of consumption.
§3.It remains to recognise that the organic treatment of our problem does not permit society to adopt a separatist view of the distribution of work and its product.A distribution of work 'according to the powers'
of workers is conceivable on terms which would cause heavy damage to society through ignoring the reactions of work upon consumption.It might appear superficially a sound human economy to place all the burden of the heaviest and most repellent muscular toil upon classes or races of men whose powerful bodies and insensitive minds seemed to indicate that they were best fitted by nature for such work.1 But if the effect of such an economy were, as it would be, to keep considerable bodies of population in a low grade of animalism, as represented in coarse modes of living and brutal recreations, this one-sided view, by neglecting these organic reactions, would injure the personality of these lower grades of citizens, and through them damage the efficiency of the society of which they were members.Or, taking an opposite instance, a Society which enabled classes of artistic or literary folk to escape all share of 'costly' social labour, so as to cultivate exclusively their individual activities and tastes, would incur a similar social danger through the presence of highly stimulating personalities, unchecked by any adequate sense of social responsibilities, who by their example and influence might undermine the routine activities which are the feeders of social life.
So far, then, as economic reforms are aiming at personal efficiency, they must take simultaneously into consideration the effects which each reform will have upon the production and the consumption of wealth.For example, a shortening of the workday ought to be accompanied by improved opportunities of education and of recreation as an integral part of the reform.
§4.Our setting of the problem, which brings into contrast the routine social production that is 'costly' to individuals and the creative or individual production which is 'costless,' might seem to involve the view that social progress, as distinct from individual, would involve an increasing total burden of routine work under direct social control.Thus an antagonism between the conscious interests of the individual and the social interests might appear to remain.For, though a better social will, operating upon the individual, might dispose him to accept his duty of serving society in the performance of his share of routine work, it would still be true that such service was less desirable to him and less nourished his personal life than the free personal activities upon which it encroached.
