ates the act of the society which, in its own peculiar way,
sends labor from one department of industry where the "final utility"
of its product is small to another where it is larger. It is all done
by measuring the specific importance of goods.[1]

[1] For extended discussions of the relations of utility and
value the reader is referred to the works of Jevons, Menger,
Von Wieser, Von Boehm-Bawerk, and Walras. A study of
"effective" utility and its relations to value, by the writer
of the present treatise, is contained in the _New Englander_
for July, 1881.

_The Utility of Producers' Goods._--Consumers' goods have a direct
utility, which is a power immediately to serve a consumer. Instruments
of production, on the other hand, have indirect utility, since all
that they are good for is to help produce things that render the
immediate service. They have _productivity_, and this has to be
measured in determining their value. What we need to know about hoes
and shovels, hammers and anvils, spindles and looms, etc., is how much
power they have to create the goods that we want for consumption. Here
again the measurement has to be made in the specific way. The capital
goods have to be taken unit by unit if their value for productive
purposes is to be rightly gauged. A part of a supply of potatoes is
traceable to the hoes that dig them; but in valuing the hoes we do not
try to find out how much worse off we should be if we had no hoes at
all. We endeavor simply to ascertain how badly the loss of one hoe
would affect us or how much good the restoration of it would do us.
This truth, like the foregoing ones, has a universal application in
economics; for primitive men as well as civilized ones must estimate
the specific productivity of the tools that they use, and make hoes,
shovels, or axes according as the procuring of a single tool of one
kind becomes more important than procuring one of another kind.
Indeed, the measuring of the utility has to be done, as we shall soon
see, in a way that is even more specific than this; for the man has to
determine not only how many hoes he will make, but how good he shall
make them. The quality of each tool has to be determined in a manner
that we must hereafter examine with care. The earning power of capital
is, as we shall later see, governed by a specific power of
productivity which resides in capital goods.

_Cost and Utility._--A ripe consumers' good, in exhau