Plenty by Competition
elusive characteristics, casting a variegated light on his social habits. We must put these aside and seek in the evidence of his behavior, throughout history and wherever we find him, a constant pattern. This, and there can be no question about it, is his life-long preoccupation with the making of a living. His will to live compels him to be the "economic man." Even the nonmaterial facets of his makeup—metaphysical, cultural, and spiritual—are in one manner or another tied in with the way he goes about making his living. The constancy of his concern with economics indicates that it must be the foundation on which he builds his social environment; all else is superstructure.
Society, then, is basically an economic phenomenon. It is an aggregation of individuals who, by means of the techniques emerging from cooperation, better their circumstances. It is a means of raising the general wage level; if it did not effect that result it would tend to disintegrate. The social integrations we call primitive are those in which the economic techniques have not been developed, for one reason or another, while the advanced Society is one that exploits them as fully as the cooperators know how. A perfect Society, or one as perfect as human knowledge can make it, would be one where these techniques, collectively called the market place, operated without friction; this, the world has not yet seen, for reasons that will be explored in the following chapters.
