Page:The Economics of Unemployment.djvu/49

of adequate provision for surviving dependents. Saving, in order to live more expensively later on, or to make a considerable provision for the family after death, which are the chief incentives to the saving of the well-to-do, do not yet belong to working-class economy.

(4) Such saving as they make even for short-range emergencies, much more for distant ones, is costly, not only subjectively, in that it involves a sacrifice of really useful and highly valued present satisfaction. It is also objectively costly in two ways. Such small savings are seldom able to find advantageous investments, their cost of collection and administration in Friendly Societies and similar organisations is very large, so that they may be said to rank very low in the investment market. Still more deterrent against such saving is the high measure of uncertainty in the power to keep up payments of premiums or other contributions. A much larger proportion of the savings of the workers fails to mature in any tangible future advantage to them than is the case with the savings of the more solidly established classes.

But it does not follow from this consideration of the small and precarious savings of the workers under existing conditions that a steady and constant policy of equalisation which enlarged their share of national income would impede the growth of capital by the low rate of saving that it would bring about. For each of these working-class conditions adverse to saving for industrial investment would be modified under an economic order in which the workers' income was at once larger and more secure. Saving for