xpectation has been realized and
I have acted wisely or unwisely. Thus a problem is economic when the
fact of the limitation of my external resources must be eventually and
frankly faced. The characteristic quality of a problem grown economic is
a certain vexatiousness and seeming irrationality in the ill-assorted
array of nevertheless indisputable interests, prosaic and ideal, that
have to be reduced to order.

It is perhaps this characteristic emotional quality of economic problems
that has insensibly inclined economists to favor a simpler and more
clear-cut analysis. As for ethical problems--they have been left to
"conscience" or to the jurisdiction of a "greatest happiness" principle
in which the ordinary individual or legislator has somehow come to take
an interest. That they arise and become urgent in us of course does
human nature unimpeachable credit and economics must by all means wait
respectfully upon their settlement. So much is conceded. But economics
is economics, when all is said and done. What we mean by the economic
interest is an interest in the direct and several satisfactions that a
man can get from the several things he shrewdly finds it worth his while
to pay for. And shrewdness means nicety of calculation, accuracy of
measurement in the determination of tangible loss and gain. Here, then,
is no field for ethics but a field of fact. Thus ethics on her side must
also wait until the case is fully ready for her praise or blame. Such is
the _modus vivendi_. But its simplicity is oversimple and unreal. It
pictures the "economic man" as bound in the chains of a perfunctory
deference that he would throw off if he could. For the theory of
constructive comparison or creative intelligence, on the other hand,
instead of a seeker and recipient of "psychic income" and a calculator
of gain and loss, he is a personal agent maintaining continuity of
action in a life of discontinuously changing levels of interest and
experience. His measure of attainment lies not in an accelerating rate
of "psychic income," but in an increasing sense of personal
effectiveness and an increasing readiness and confidence before new
junctures.

The possession and use of commodities are, then, not in themselves and
directly economic facts at all. As material things commodities serve
certain purposes and effect certain results. They are means to ends and
their serving so is a matter of technology. But do I seriously want
their services