but that its main prosperity came from agriculture, where the main surplus, namely rent, accrued. Like the mercantilists, they overlooked the fact that this surplus might be the result, in part at least, of the poverty of the farm laborers. With a given efficiency, the cheaper they would work the lower the cost of growing crops and the higher the rent of the land.
It was not until Adam Smith's epoch-making work, the "Wealth of Nations,"[1] was given to the world that students began to take a really broad and comprehensive view of the problems of national welfare. Different students naturally have different special interests, but they generally realize the bearing of their specialties upon the larger problem. It has seemed at times that too many were focusing their attention upon production or exchange, and too few upon problems of distribution. For the last twenty-five years the problem of distribution has attracted more attention than all the others; but now the idea is beginning to dawn that consumption is the most important field of all, though it has been receiving the least attention of any.
THE MEANING OF WEALTH
Now that economics is definitely focusing attention upon problems of national prosperity, it is important that the student should understand clearly the leading concepts of the science before proceeding to study its literature. The leading concept is that of wealth, but this is a term with two distinct but closely related meanings. In the first place, it is the name of a condition of well-being, in which sense it is not very different from the Saxon term weal, from which it is descended. In the second and more usual sense, wealth is the collective name for a category of goods. Goods are the means of satisfying desires, but not all goods are wealth. Only those goods are wealth upon which the satisfaction of desires depends in a very special and practical sense. People desire air, sunlight, and a number of other things which do not constitute wealth. But if they not only desire a thing, but desire more than they have, or more than there is to be had at once, then that thing is wealth. Their state of satisfaction is definitely affected by the question of more or less of this
- ↑ See Harvard Classics, x, and Lecture III in this Course.
