Page:The Economics of Unemployment.djvu/36

In primitive societies the standards or methods of work are almost as conservative as those of consumption. Of civilised societies, and especially of modern industrial nations, this is no longer true. Invention and business initiative, enlisted in the cause of quick profiteering, transforms with great rapidity the arts of industry, raising this productivity by leaps and bounds. Though modern man, in his capacity of consumer, is far more progressive than his ancestors, his power of taking on new economic needs and of raising rapidly the quantity, variety and quality of his consumption, is limited by a narrowness of imagination and a servitude to habit which are far less dominant in production. There is in modern business a strong stimulus to progress in the great gain which comes to the man of inventive and initiative power, while, on the other hand, there is a strong stimulus to the early imitation and adoption of new superior methods by the whole body of members of a trade, who are otherwise outcompeted and ruined by their conservatism. Now a large part of consumption is carried on in the privacy of separate homes, under the bonds of custom, and withdrawn from any strong continual stimulus to imitation and competition; and though changes are quicker and more numerous in those factors of consumption, such as dress, travel and recreation, which are subject to publicity and imitation and carry personal prestige, the capacity of assimilating easily and quickly large new personal expenditure is comparatively rare. Indeed, it is needless to set out in detail the evidence for the comparative conservatism of consumption. For, if everyone was driven by a