The Ultimate Standard of Value [11]
other conditions) tend to give rise to differences in the rate of wages. Those which involve less than the average laboriousness or unpleasantness, or which have associated with them certain advantage or perquisite will yield a less than normal wages. Occupations of more than the average laboriousness or unpleasantness will, on the other hand, yield a more than normal wages. I must, however, expressly declare, that in these cases the absolute amount of the pain of labor does not determine the absolute amount of the wages. Difference in the disutility or pain of labor can only give rise to variations from a normal wage, and as we shall take occasion to show, this normal wages is determined by an entirely different set of conditions. The influence of the laboriousness or disagreeableness of the labor is often greatly modified and in some instances is entirely offset by opposite tendencies. In Professor Marshall's "evil paradox"(19*) we have one of the earliest recognized facts of our economic experience. This is the fact that unpleasant occupations, unless they demand some rare quality, usually bring in a wages that is not only no higher, but is ofttimes lower, than that paid in more pleasant occupations. (e) Under normal wages I include the wages in all those occupations that do not require any rare or exceptional qualities. This, of course, include the great mass of all occupations. With this understood, it become clear that the disutility of labor has but an indirect, and in one sense crude influence upon the absolute height of the normal wages. It undoubtedly prevents the introduction of an eighteen-hour labor day or even of a fifteen-hour day, but it has not been able to prevent the introduction of a thirteen or fourteen-hour day, as is shown by the history of the condition of the laboring classes. No one would claim that the progress of humanity from a thirteen to an eight-hour labor day has corresponded step for step with a similar progressive movement in the subjective feelings of the laborer. Nor will any one claim that the laborer will find in his wages an exact equivalent or recompense for the pain or disutility of his labor when he works thirteen hours per day. Again, when he works twelve hours per day, and so on for eleven, ten, nine and finally for eight hours per day. It is no nice variation in the point of equilibrium between utility and disutility that determines the length of the working day. It is the changing of the relative strengths of the various social factors that plays the principal part in this determination. This, within certain limits, which we cannot here stop to discuss, it will probably continue to do in the future. (f) Finally the absolute height of the wages of skilled labor is manifestly still more independent of the disutility or pain of such labor. I take it that no economist would urge that this is the element which finally determine the salary of the higher officials, great actors or singers, specially skilled workmen, managers of factories, lawyers, doctors, etc. These various points taken together certainly justify the assertion made above, viz., that the actual conditions which make possible an equilibrium of wages and pain, or of value and pain (so far as the value of the product is dependent upon the height of the wage), do not obtain in our industrial life. On the contrary, these conditions are only found in a relatively limited number of unimportant and exceptional cases. This alone would be sufficient to show that in tracing the influence of disutility upon the value of goods, we have quite a different and indeed much narrower trail to follow, than that which leads to the great empirical law of cost. This may be shown in the clearest and most convincing way from several different standpoints, and with this we are brought to the second proposition advanced at the end of the preceding section. First, it may be shown that in many instance the correspondence of the value of goods with their cost, in the sense of the great empirical law of cost, not only does