Though Ruskin in no single book set out his economic “science” in its full strength, a reading of his several writings yields a sufficient basis for a human political economy, which should take account of the related processes of production and consumption and should evaluate both processes in terms of human worth.
From him I drew the basic thought for my subsequent economic writings, viz. the necessity of going behind the current monetary estimates of wealth, cost, and utility, to reach the body of human benefits and satisfactions which gave them a real meaning. But it is one thing to judge that all costs of production and utilization of consumption should be expressed in terms of human satisfaction and quite another thing to formulate such a judgment. Several sorts of difficulty at once become apparent. In this “human” economics it is almost impossible to differentiate the satisfaction and dissatisfaction one calls “economic” from other vital goods and ills which lie outside this economic ambit. That is to say, there is the tendency to fuse economic with other vital processes so as to disable them for separate study. Next there is the question how far one can take as criteria of human value the actual satisfactions and dissatisfactions currently attributed to various acts of production and consumption or should insist upon reference to what Ruskin termed their “‘intrinsic’ values.” Lastly, there remains the question how far the pleasures and
