here
is the question of the handling and direction of these groups. No
economic institution is of value unless it will perform some useful
service by turning out an economic good or by affording a benefit that
corresponds to some human need.

Each rational person, and every self-directing social group seeks to get
the largest possible return in the form of satisfaction for the time and
the energy invested in any given enterprise. This law of maximum
advantage--which applies with double force to social enterprises,
underlies all intelligently directed effort.

Unintelligent effort concerns itself with the principle of minimum
outlay--seeking to ascertain the least possible expenditure of energy
that will yield a subsistence. This is one of the essential distinctions
between the present day society and most of those that have proceeded
it. Likewise it is the difference between the more and the less highly
civilized portions of the earth at the present time. The individual or
the group--operating on a very narrow margin, or on a deficit that
involves constant misery and that may at any time spell disaster, tends
to slip by with the least possible misery or suffering, or, to put it
more technically, tends to expend the least possible amount of energy
that is required for survival. The moment the tables are turned, and the
individual or the group operates on a surplus which permits the
enjoyment of more than the bare necessaries, the law of minimum outlay
is supplanted by the law of maximum returns.

The truth of this principle is strikingly illustrated in Canada,
Australia, Argentina, and other relatively new societies where resources
are abundant and surplus is large. The same men and women who, under
European conditions of narrow marginal living, were satisfied to survive
with the least possible expenditure of effort, are transformed into
creatures operating on another economic plane. In these new and fertile
countries, where the individual, and indeed, the entire group is able to
live above the line of bare subsistence, and where surplus is so easily
accumulated, the individual devotes himself untiringly to the economic
struggle. It is not because they are poor, but because they have a
chance to get rich that these people are willing to expend unusual
effort.

Just as the individual, working on a basis of economic surplus, directs
his energies to the task of insuring and of increasing the surplus, so
the group, whic