(which it is customary to
term "joint products") such that the production of one commodity
belonging to the group necessarily implies or very greatly facilitates
the production of the others. Wool and mutton; beef and hides; cotton
and cotton-seed are a few familiar illustrations. The important
feature of these "joint products" is the fairly precise relation which
must exist between the quantities in which the different products are
supplied. If you plant a certain crop of cotton, it will yield you so
much cotton lint and so much cotton-seed. You can, of course, if you
choose, throw away part of the seed, as indeed at one time planters
used to do; but unless you do this, you cannot vary the proportions of
the two things which you will have for sale. Similarly, if you keep a
flock of sheep, or a herd of cattle, you will obtain wool and mutton
in the one case, or beef and hides in the other, in proportions, which
indeed you can vary within certain limits by choosing a different
breed,[1] but which you cannot radically transform. When, however, we
turn to the uses to which these products are put, no similar relation
is to be discovered. Cotton lint is used chiefly for making articles
of clothing; cotton-seed for crushing into oil, on the one hand, and
cake for cattle fodder on the other. There is no apparent connection
of any kind between the demands for these different things, and still
less is there any obvious reason why these demands should bear to one
another the particular proportions which characterize their respective
supplies. It is very much the same with wool and mutton; with beef and
hides; with all "joint products." Why should we consume mutton on the
one hand and woolen clothing on the other, in a ratio at all
commensurate with that in which they are yielded by the sheep?

[Footnote 1: These possibilities of small variation are of very great
importance as will be shown in Chapter V, but they do not affect the
present argument.]

What, then, might we expect to find if order was nonexistent in the
economic world? Surely that some things such as wool would be produced
in quantities many times in excess of the demand for them, quite
possibly five, ten, or twenty times in excess; while conversely the
supplies of others such as mutton might fall far short of what was
required. But in practice we find nothing of the sort. Somehow it
comes about that an equilibrium is established between the demand for
and the supp