[Letter] May 21,1889,Smith College [to F.H. Giddings]

May 21, 1889, Smith College.

Dear Friend,
       The stay-at-home
through the summer
part of your letter did not
give me pleasure. I
hope something will
change that program. I
now expect to visit my
friends at the Adirondacks
about July 15 and
stay till about Aug 15;
but my plans are not fixed.
 The proof I have read
with the greatest interest. It
is excellent. The points
are sound and good. I am
not so certain that Prof.
B. Bawerk would regard it
as contradicting him at
any point. It supplements
him, and exactly tallies
with my idea that capital
needs to be studied as a
positive producing agent. He
objects to the idea that
cap. is a producer. That
seems to me a matter
chiefly of words. It is a
condition of production, an
increase of production. I
meant to have said something
like this in my review of
the book, but cut it out,
as coming better in an
independent article, also
because Prof. M. Smith wanted
to save all possible space,
being overcrowded.
 On the overtime idea
my notion has been
(1) the sacrifice entailed by work increases
as it is prolonged: (2) the
subjective benefit decreases
as work is prolonged. Referring
to my little "want scale" in the
Phil. of Wealth, and putting the
intensive wants at the bottom,
let the figures 5, 4 etc.
represent the force of different
desires, the gratification of
which costs in each case one
unit. We have
 Intensity of desire for    Relative sacrifice
 different objects          involved in successive
                            units of work

 e.g. improvement of   1         5 5th period
      quality of food
 e.g. ornament         2  also   4 4th period
 e.g. shelter          3         3 3d 3 hrs.
 e.g. clothing         4         2 2d 3 hrs.
 e.g. food             5         1 First 3 hours
             Geometrically represented
             
             Cost of labor of
             successive periods

 Now what we have to do
to make this agree with
Prof. v. B. Bawerk's analysis
is to add that a gratification in
the future of the kind graded
as 5 has in the present
a value of 4; very far
in the future it has a value
that ranks it with a gratification
graded in the table as 1.
Future necessities rank
with present luxuries, and
both are the result of high
cost labor.
 It is clear that
perspicuity is not a quality
of my supplement to the
wages paper. I must expand
that, especially the final
part. I must make a book
on Capital as soon as I can,
but must finish the two
articles on hand first. I
must have if possible a
jaunt over the hills with
you before finishing the
articles. If not the jaunt
besides the visit, I want anyhow
the visit. We must arrange
it somehow.

          Yours Very Truly,
               J. B. Clark

P.S. A pleasant letter
rec'd from Prof. Bastable
says he considers v. Böhm-
Bawerk very able, but not
so original as Mr. Bonar
thinks.
 I must add that
I still seem to see a
difference between the way
in which the fact of
interest payments is to be
justified, and a mode of
justifying the whole competitive
system that leads to the
payments. Does not B. B.'s
reasoning reduce interest to a
mere offset or equalizer? Does
an interest payment need any
farther justification? Are you not
seeking rather to justify a
system leading to this
offsetting or equalizing arrangement
than to justify the offset itself?
It seems to me you are on
a particularly ethical plane,
while B. B. is on an
economic one exclusively.
Do you recall our former
and various arguments in
which I used the notion of
"psychological present worth?"
That point of view leads me
to take the offset argument
as in an economic way
furnishing the ground of interest
and justifying interest payments.
You go farther and take a
more ethical plane, is it
not so?