shape of goods that
are also extra, or additional to whatever he would otherwise have
secured. They will represent special comforts and luxuries of many
kinds. The values of these goods may be measured and compared by means
of the quantity of labor that the man has thought it worth while to
perform in order to get them. If he values one of them highly enough
to think it worth while to work for an extra period of twenty minutes
at the end of a day in order to get it, it may be said to have one
unit of value; and if he is anxious enough to get something else by
doing this on two successive days, this second article may be said to
have two units of value. The savage who, by working for an extra hour,
makes some improvement in his canoe, and by doing the same thing on
another day makes some improvement in his food, establishes thereby
the fact that he values these two additional bits of consumers' wealth
equally. If he uses ten hours of the same costly kind of labor in
making an addition to his hut, he proves that he values that gain ten
times as highly as he does either of the others. Establishing values
by means of such final costs is a process that goes on in every stage
of social evolution.

_Unlike Results of Creating Wealth and Using it Summarized._--Wealth,
then, affects a man as a consumer in one way and the same man as a
producer in an opposite way. In the one case the effects are
favorable, and in the other they are unfavorable. At a certain test
point the two effects may be equally strong as motives to action, and
so may be said to be equivalent. The man is impelled to work by his
desire for a final unit of wealth, and he is deterred from it by his
aversion for the final unit of labor which he will have to incur if he
secures the benefit. If he performs the labor and gets the benefit, he
neither gains nor loses as the net result of this particular part of
his labor, though from all other parts of his labor he gets a net
surplus of benefit. It is natural to measure all such economic gains
in terms of sacrifices incurred at the test point where these are
greatest. This is the labor one would have to incur in order to add
the means of gratification to his previous supply of consumers' goods.

_Minimum Gains offset Maximum Pains._--Running through and through the
economic process are these two different measuring operations. Man is
forever estimating the amount of harm that wealth does him when he is
in the act of