enrichments which defy calculation, and normally are resultants of labor.
Labor, emphasized first by Adam Smith, and glorified out of all proportion by Karl Marx, was in its turn regarded as the only clue to sound economic reasoning. In due course other incalculable phases of effort such as invention, risk, organization and uncertainty-bearing, had their excited discoverers, though all these phases of labor are quite impossible to measure.
At intervals, the factor of Time came under examination, largely due to consideration of the ethics of interest. Böhm-Bawerk, W. Stanley Jevons and Irving Fisher have all properly emphasized the claims of this primary factor, as will be shown more fully. Time must be taken into any basic calculations, and immediately interests the engineer, as we have the means of measuring it.
The list of “economic factors” put forward is much more lengthy than this and it would be entertaining to examine in detail; but in spite of the tendency to respectfully modify the conventional trinity of Land-value, Labor and Capital, many of these schisms do not make for clarity, nor do they command anything but scattered attention from the more orthodox economists. To the engineer very few of them seem to comprehend the essential importance of exactness or what for emphasis might be called “measurability” as a qualification for a valid factor. To paraphrase the elementary logic of the nursery rhyme—
- “How shall he marry without any wife?”
- “How shall he cut it without any knife?
we might well say,
- “How is time tallied without any dates?
- “How shall we weigh things without any weights?”
Some of these departures from ritual, however, are exceptionally interesting and have the same significance as the first protests against the rudimentary and semi-mystic conceptions of chemical reactions.
