THE REVISION OF IMPLICIT GOALS

Mill's re-interpretation of the nature of economic laws was to have notable consequences. Not least among them was a challenge to an implicit value premise that had run through the whole of classical writing: that uninterrupted economic expansion was a goal of such obvious importance that it required no justification.

I know not why it should be matter of congratulation that persons who are already richer than anyone needs to be, should have doubled their means of consuming things which

give little or no pleasure except as representatives of wealth... It is only in the backward countries of the world that increased production is still an important object...14

In his view the stationary state was not necessarily a grave social ill. On the contrary, Mill observed:

I cannot... regard the stationary state of capital and wealth with the unaffected aversion so generally manifested towards it by political economists of the old school. I am inclined to believe that it would be, on the whole, a very considerable improvement on our present condition. I confess that I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other's heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human kind, or anything but the most disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress.15

These remarks, of course, were addressed to Mill's contemporaries in England. But affairs in the United States did not escape his notice; indeed his most barbed comment was reserved for the Northern and the Middle States of America. He viewed the population of this area as enjoying the highest stage of economic advance. Poverty had been eliminated, abundance was assured to all who were willing and able to work, and social injustices had been eliminated - at least all 'inequalities that affect persons of a Caucasian race and of the male sex'.

From the perspective of classical orthodoxy, these assertions amounted to heresy - a point his lay readers were quick to grasp. One reviewer commended the first edition in these words: '... here is no indifference to human suffering, no inordinate estimation of wealth, no sordid and groveling morality'.17 Another, noting with approval Mill's attitude toward the dread stationary state, observed: 'It is no little novelty to hear a political economists peak in the following manner of the mere elements of national wealth.'18 Mill was congratulated for demolishing those arguments 'by which his scientific predecessors had attempted to mislead the man of experience or of empirical knowledge'.19

It was not solely a distaste for some of the social manifestations of affluence that led Mill to this conclusion. He was also concerned about tendencies towards instability likely to be associated with the approach of the stationary state and with declining rates of profit. These circumstances would impel some entrepreneurs to reject prevailing rates of profit and to seek out high-risk ventures with the expectation of reaping above-average gains. With arguments like those heard more recently from bankers who voice concern about deterioration in the quality of credit risks during a period of expansion, Mill maintained that these conditions easily generated speculative rashness which, in turn, was likely to be followed by disappointments. The behaviour of those who tried to evade the natural tendency for profit rates to fall could thus lead to oscillations between boom and bust.

Mill was too closely associated with the Say's Law tradition of the classical mentality to press the analysis of this issue very far. Nevertheless, he perceived more clearly than had earlier contributors to the classical mainstream that the approach of the stationary state at a high level of economic activity was likely to increase the sensitivity of the economy to substantial fluctuations. Indeed, tendencies toward instability were inherent within an unregulated economic system.

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