then released. We call it so many foot-pound-seconds. In reality it is the value of effort expressed as freedom in terms of the total density and volume of the earth and its rate of rotation—the ultimate measurable limits of such value.
The really appalling abstraction—if it is fair to call sheer delusion by this name—is our belief that the value of human effort is in any way related to an unmeasurable store of gold, held in individual and alien ownership.
Abstract as the economic equivalent of dynamic value may appear, we have at least under such a conception, available within democracy, as a definite “measure of value,” as a “medium of exchange,” as a “basis for deferred payment” and as a “store of value”—the redundant moral obligations imposed upon their unit by the economists—a certified lien on area, as enriched by the normal effort of a measurable population, with the cost of order guaranteed by the owner. This is not only far more tangible than our distressing volume of watered stock, of a par value of $1.00, in a relatively small and unmeasurable accumulation of internationally-owned gold; but scientifically is just as valid an agent of measurement as the head-gate of an irrigation system, where there is an adequate supply of water and a demand in proportion to the population served. If the area, in inches, of the aperture controlled by a head-gate should seem a remote clew to hydraulic value, it may be worth while pointing out that the Venturi meter, installed on the Catskill aqueduct for the New York water supply, is based simply on the local diminishment of a 14-foot pipe to a smaller diameter, and the measurement of the relative pressure and velocity due to this difference in area. As Professor Finch of the Department of Civil Engineering of Columbia University states simply, without any conception that he is taunting the adjoining Department of Economics: “There is no obstruction to the flow, and no moving parts.”[1]
The desire of the economist to measure economic value in terms of one dimension, such as an ounce of gold, is what misleads him. This rudimentary conception of value results
- ↑ “Mining Engineers’ Handbook,” edited by Robert Peele. “Elements of Hydraulics,” by J. K. Finch. Sec. 38, page 2018. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, 1918.
