In order to do so, it is true, he must persuade enough buyers that they 'want' the article and 'want' it more than some other articles on which they otherwise might spend their money.To unreflecting persons this, no doubt, appears a sufficient test of utility.But is it? The purchaser must be made to feel or think that the article is 'good' for him at the time when it is brought before his notice.For this purpose it must be endowed with some speciously attractive property, or recommended as possessing such a property.A cheap mercerised cotton cloth, manufactured to simulate silk, sells by its inherent superficial attraction.A new line in drapery 'pushed' into use by the repeated statement, false at the beginning, that 'it is worn', illustrates the second method.In a word, the arts of the manufacturer and of the vendor, which have no direct relation whatever to intrinsic utility, overcome and subjugate the uncertain, untrained or 'artificially' perverted taste of the consumer.Thus it arises that in a commercial society every standard of class comfort is certain to contain large ingredients of useless or noxious consumption, articles, not only bad in themselves, but often poisoning or distorting the whole standard.
The arts of adulteration and of advertising are of course responsible for many of the worst instances.A skilled combination of the two processes has succeeded in cancelling the human value of a very large proportion of the new increments of money income in the lower middle and the working-classes, where a growing susceptibility to new desires is accompanied by no intelligent checks upon the play of interested suggestion as to the modes of satisfying these desires.
Where specious fabrication and strong skilled suggestion cooperate to plant new ingredients in a standard of consumption, there is thus no security as to the amount of utility or disutility attaching to the 'real income' represented by these 'goods'.But this vitiation of standards is not equally applicable to all grades of consumption, or to all classes of consumers.Some kinds of goods will be easier to falsify or to adulterate than others, some classes of consumers will be easier to 'impose upon'
than others.These considerations will set limits upon the amount of waste and 'illth' contained in the goods and services which comprise our real income.
First, as to the arts of falsification.Several laws of limitation here emerge.Some materials, such as gold and rubber, have no easily procurable and cheaper substitutes for certain uses.Other goods are in some considerable degree protected from imitation and adulteration by the survival of reliable tests and tastes, touch and sight, in large numbers of consumers.This applies to simpler sorts of goods whose consumption is deepest in the standard and has a strong basis of vital utility.It will be more difficult to adulterate bread or plain sugar to any large extent than sauces or sweets.It will be easier to fake photographs than to pass off plaice for soles.But it cannot be asserted as a general truth that the necessaries are better defended against encroachments of adulteration and other modes of deception than conveniences, and conveniences than luxuries.Indeed, there are two considerations that tell the other way.A manufacturer or merchant who can palm off a cheaper substitute for some common necessary of life, or some well-established convenience, has a double temptation to do so.For, in the first place, the magnitude and reliability of the demand make the falsification unusually profitable.In the second place, so far as a large proportion of articles are concerned, he can rely upon the fact that most consumption of necessaries lies below the margin of clear attention and criticism.Except in the case of certain prime articles of diet, it is probable that a consumer is more likely to detect some change of quality in the latest luxury added to his standard than in the habitual articles of daily use, such as his shoe-leather or his soap.In fact, so well recognised is this protection afforded to the seller by the unconsciousness which habit brings to the consumer, that, in catering for quite new habits, such as cereal breakfast foods or cigarettes, the manufacturer waits until the original attractions of his goods have stamped themselves firmly in customary use, before he dares to lower the quality or reduce the quantity.
These considerations make it unlikely that we can discover a clear law expressing the injury of commercialism in terms of the greater or less organic urgency of the wants ministered to by the different orders of commodities.
It will even be difficult to ascertain whether the arts of adulteration or false substitution play more havoc among the necessaries than among the luxuries of life.In neither is there any adequate safeguard for the organic worth of the articles bought and sold, though in both there must be held to be a certain presumption favourable to some organic satisfaction attending the immediate act of consumption.If a 'law' of falsification can be found at all, it is more likely to emerge from a comparative study not of necessaries, conveniences, comforts and luxuries, in a class standard, but of the various sorts of satisfactions classified in relation to the needs which underlie them.Where goods are consumed as soon as they are bought, and by some process involving a strong appeal to the senses, there is less chance for vulgar fraud than where consumption is gradual or postponed, and is not attended by any moment of vivid realisation.Other things equal, one might expect more easily to sell shoddy clothing than similarly damaged food: the adulteration of a jerry-built house is less easily detected, or less adequately reprobated, than that of a jerry-built suit of clothes.
