Quotation of the Day…

Tweet

… is from page 38 of Edwin Cannan’s 1917 paper, “The Influence of the War on Commercial Policy,” which is Chapter 2 of the 1917 volume, Some Economic Aspects of International Relations:

Much of [the dislike for reductions of particular kinds of employment] comes simply from a fundamental misconception which leads people to suppose that labour itself is wanted instead of merely the things which labour produces, and which are not wanted because labour produces them, but are produced by labour because they are wanted. The habit of talking of each particular industry leads people insensibly into the belief that the industry directly supports or maintains those who follow it in such wise that a diminution in its amount would diminish the whole society’s means of maintaining its numbers. If we say that bootmaking supports bootmakers, we are apt to fall into thinking that if we grew boots with as little trouble as fingernails and with no more nourishment than at present, society, to be as well off as it is, would have to be less numerous by the whole number of persons employed in bootmaking. With some muddle of this kind in our minds we become inclined to regard every “expansion of industry” (in the sense of more labour being devoted to any particular kind of production) as a good, and every contraction as an evil. We are prone to rejoice indiscriminately over every increase of numbers employed in any trade, and to mourn indiscriminately over every decrease. We even sometimes go further, and rejoice not only over an absolute increase of numbers but over an increasing percentage of the whole number being employed in a trade, while at the same time, in defiance of elementary arithmetic, we mourn over a decreasing percentage employed in another trade!

DBx: Sadly, pundits and politicians continue in 2025 to spread the myth that labor is an end in itself rather than a means to the end of consumption. Sufficient proof that labor is not an end in itself is the fact that individuals must be paid to work. Yet mysteriously, this universal reality – namely, that individuals must be paid to work – nevertheless fails to be noticed by many pundits and politicians as proof positive against the proposition that working is a end in itself.