The best we can do is to fight cheerfully against the stream of resistances in which we now hang poised,—like a raft occupied by a nervous pleasure party on the upper terraces of the Niagara.
Wherever we are at the moment, therefore, effort and resistance may be rationally assumed to balance. Otherwise we would be somewhere else.
National wealth, or total value, then, equals EffortResistance . This is our economic equilibrium, or what, for purposes of measurement, we may call economic unity.
So far, what has been sketched is a general picture of our economic situation; but within this assumed equilibrium, as Jevons puts it, we pull, push, lift, press and carry; and it should be apparent that the value of these interior efforts can only be measured in terms of the equilibrium. When we lift a weight from the earth we also lift the whole earth a little at the same time; since we have upset a balance which both the weight and the earth promptly make an effort to adjust. In the same way, when we exert an advantageous effort in our assumed economic equilibrium, the whole sum of national wealth is properly involved until the disturbance is adjusted.
Now, for the sake of the simple mathematics involved, let us consider the dimensions of our national economic unit. We must enlarge our raft to an area of 1,903,215,360 acres and our crew to well over 100 million souls—all more or less conscious that while above them there may be quieter reaches, yet below them, without any question, are the rapids. The effort of this crew has put our gigantic economic raft in the position where it now floats quietly on the stream of adversity. The value of this vantage point is our true national wealth. That we employ the Bureau of the Census to tally this wealth, or value, item by item, in terms of an unknown number of ounces of gold, owned by someone else, is just our primitive way of doing things. MacArthur and Forrest perfect the cyanide process, or a busy Secretary of the Treasury issues twenty or thirty billion imaginary titles to gold,—and all our silly calculations are upset.
