Page:Confessions of an Economic Heretic.djvu/77

During the nineties, and even later, my lectures on Problems of Poverty and related themes brought me into contact with a good many business men and trade unionists who were willing to show me the works in which they were engaged. Even such fragmentary contacts with industrial realities were of great service in correcting my jejune generalizations. Later on some work of investigation done for the Board of Trade, and service on several public committees, including the important one presided over by Lord Colwyn, helped me a good deal to adjust my ideas to authentic facts and established situations. I am aware how slight and haphazard such personal experience has been, as compared with that of a regular worker or employer. But it did help me to a better understanding of the producer side of the economic problem. On the consumer side everybody with a limited income and many needs is compelled to be a more or less skilled amateur: the only experts are the social workers who study closely working-class expenditure on a sufficient scale. Though my heresies have led me to assign supreme significance to the financial situation of the consumer, I cannot pretend to possess intimate knowledge of anybody else’s standard of consumption, and living, as I have done for the most part upon the least defensible of all forms of unearned income, I have not been driven to the nice calculations of expenditure to which most men with families to keep are driven.