ABSTRACT
The market of services or efforts follows the general law of the market. The flow of services of every kind determines the point down to which the desire for them is satisfied, higher or lower on the collective scale according as the stream is narrower or broader. The market in human effort is characterised by the fact that effort cannot be stored (except in a secondary sense and to a limited degree) unless embodied in some material thing, animate or inanimate; and therefore it runs to waste if not used as the capacity for it rises. Further, in many cases it is impossible for the holders to maintain an effective reserve price. And again it is impossible to detach it {unless embodied) from its source. Under these restrictions the law of the market dominates the exchange of human efforts with each other and with commodities. But the markets are often imperfect. The supply of each separate market of human effort constitutes a demand on the general market, and whereas its flow into the several markets is to a large extent dominated by economic forces, the original supply or production of human raw material is to be regarded almost entirely as incidental to expenditure of resources and expression of impulses, and scarcely at all as produced in response to a demand. Economic forces tend to secure to every one in the market as much as his effort is worth to any one else at the margin. It does not follow either that he has no claims beyond this, or that his marginal worth might not be increased; but seeing that the better society is supplied with the thing he makes the lower will be its place on the collective scale, it follows that each 316group of workers has an interest in society being rich in all things else but poor in what it itself supplies. Hence the lump-of-labour economics and much misdirected sympathy with anti-social action. A full recognition of the hardships involved in the uneven advance and the fluctuations of industry is a necessary condition of successfully combating anti-social ways of attempting to remove them.
