Publisher's Synopsis
An excerpt from the beginning of:
PART I - WELFARE AND THE NATIONAL DIVIDEND
CHAPTER I - WELFARE AND ECONOMIC WELFARE
1. "If I am asked 'What is good?' my answer is that good is good, and that is the end of the matter. Or, if I am asked 'How is good to be defined?' my answer is that it cannot be defined, and that is all I have to say about it." Welfare means the same thing as good. It, too, cannot be defined, in the sense of being analysed. At the same time we can say, and, indeed, it is the chief task of ethics to say, whether, and in what way, particular things belong to welfare. For the purpose of this volume it is sufficient to lay down on this subject two propositions: first, that welfare includes states of consciousness only, and not material things or conditions: secondly, that welfare can be brought under the category of greater and less. This is all that need be said here concerning welfare in general.
2. Of welfare in general economic welfare is one part. It is welfare arising in connection with the earning and spending of the national dividend, or, in other words, of those parts of the community's net income that enter easily into relation with the measuring rod of money. Economic welfare, however, does not contain all welfare arising in this connection. Various good and bad qualities indirectly associated with income-getting and income-spending are excluded from it. It does not include the whole psychic return, which emerges when the objective services constituting the national dividend have passed through the factory of the body; it includes only the psychic return of satis/action. Thus, economic welfare is, as it were, a part of a part of welfare.
3. This being so, it is plain that welfare may change while economic welfare remains the same; and that a given change in economic welfare will seldom synchronise with an equal change in welfare as a whole. This circumstance might seem, at first sight, to render the study of economic welfare unimportant. To conclude thus, however, would be to misconceive the whole purpose of economic investigation. That purpose is not primarily scientific, if by science we intend the single-eyed search after knowledge for its own sake. It is rather practical and utilitarian, concerned chiefly to lay bare such parts of knowledge as may serve, directly or indirectly, to help forward the betterment of social life. Hence, the failure of economic welfare to act as a barometer of total welfare is of but slight importance. For, what we wish to learn is, not how large welfare is, or has been, but how its magnitude would be affected by the introduction of causes, which it is in the power of statesmen or private persons to call into being. The failure of economic welfare to serve as an index of total welfare is no evidence that the study of it will fail to afford this latter information: for, though a whole may consist of many varying parts, so that a change in one part never measures the change in the whole, yet the change in the part may always affect the change in the whole by its full amount. If this is the case, the practical importance of economic study is fully established. It will not, indeed, tell us how total welfare, after the introduction of an economic cause, will differ from what it was before; but it will tell us how total welfare will differ from what it would have been if the cause had not been introduced. That economic science may provide this important information is a possibility. Is the possibility realised in fact? To the view that it is so realised two serious objections may be urged, and must be studied.
4. The first objection is an obvious one. It is that causes influencing the satisfactions and dissatisfactions, which arise in connection with income, are not confined in their effect to these things, but modify also other parts of welfare....
