on its
general merits I have come to take a hypothetical interest can in no
wise affect my actual price-offer for it? Can it contribute nothing to
the preciser definition of my interest which is eventually to be
expressed in a price offer? If the answer is "No, for how can this
external fact affect the strength of your desire for the object?"--then
the reason given begs the question at issue. _Is_ my interest in the
object an interest in the object alone? And _is_ the cost of the object
a fact for me external and indifferent? It is, at all events, not
uncommon to be assured that an article "cannot be produced for less,"
that one or another of its elements of cost is higher than would be
natural to suppose. Not always scientifically accurate, such assurances
express an evident confidence that they will not be without effect upon
a hesitant but fair-minded purchaser. And in other ways as well, the
position of sellers in the market is not so defenseless as a strict
utility theory of price conceives--apart from the standpoint of an
abstract "normality" that can never contrive to get itself realized in
empirical fact.[63] It is true that, in general, one tends to purchase
an article of a given familiar kind where its price, all things
considered, is lowest. In consequence the less "capable" producers or
sellers must go to the wall. But the fact seems mainly "regulative" and
of subordinate importance. Is it equally certain that as between
branches of expenditure, such as clothing, food, and shelter, children,
books, and "social" intercourse, the shares of income we expend upon
them or the marginal prices we are content to pay express the original
strength of separate and unmodified extra-market interests? On the
contrary we have paid in the past what we have had to pay, what we have
deemed just and reasonable, what we have been willing experimentally to
hazard upon the possibility of the outlay's proving to have been worth
while. In these twilight-zones of indetermination, cost as well as
other factors of supply have had their opportunity. Shall we
nevertheless insist that our "demands" are _ideally_ fixed, even though
in fallible human fact they are more or less indistinct, yielding and
modifiable? On the contrary they are "in principle and for the most
part" indeterminate and expectant of suggested experimental shaping from
the supply side of the market. It is less in theory than in fact that
they have a salutary tendency (n