The Changing Basis of Economic Responsibility

Twenty years ago an economist writing under this title would have been expected to deal chiefly or solely with the responsibility of the individual for his own economic destiny: his responsibility for paying his debts and keeping out of the poor-house. Economic responsibility meant self-reliance and self-dependence., Today any treatment of the subject from such a limited standpoint would be an anachronism. The ideas of obligation which embody the actual relations of man to man in the twentieth century, and answer the needs of the twentieth century, are radically different from the ideas which dominated the nineteenth. Some have failed to realize what the change means and have resisted it uncomprehendingly. Interdependence means no more to them than it did in the days when free exchange seemed adequate to organize the world, and enlist the far islands of the seas ' Cf. Hadley, Economics, chap. ii. Cf. also Henry C. Adams, The Relation of the State to Industrial Action, pp. 80-85. Here the dominant note is reliance on free competition wherever free competition naturally prevails. Action by the state is urged, (i) to enable the majority in a trade to decide what the plane of their competition shall be, and (2) in the case of natural monopolies. The author announces the theory of responsibility as the keynote of this policy, using the term "responsibility" none too definitely, but in a strongly individualistic sense.