Economics Author:Henry Rogers Seager Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II THE CONSUMPTION OF WEALTH 12. Characteristics of Human Wants.—As one of the main divisions of economics, consumption treats of the relations betwe... more »en wants and the means to their gratification, goods. The characteristics of wants first demand attention. It is a familiar fact of human experience that wants are indefinitely numerous. Every day, in the consciousness of every normal person, many wants for commodities and services are felt which must of necessity go ungratified. Upon this simple fact is based the law that the consuming power of a community is indefinitely great. A second familiar characteristic of wants is that they are of very different degrees of intensity. This is realized as soon as one tries to arrange all of the wants of which he is conscious in a scale according to their importance. Such an endeavor reveals also the difficulty of measuring wants and the complexity of those which direct daily life. Corresponding to every want that comes within the scope of economics, is a utility or combination of utilities capable of gratifying it. The intensities of wants determine degrees of utility and thus, as is shown later, have great influence in fixing the values of the economic goods in which utilities are embodied. 13. The Law of Diminishing Utility.—Variable as they are in intensity, all wants are subject to a law of gradual diminution and final satiety as consumption is continued. This may be illustrated by reference to food. A healthy American boy, given a breakfast of unlimitedbuckwheat cakes, attacks the first plateful with great avidity. His eagerness is reduced by each additional plateful, until his hunger is satisfied and he must reluctantly confess that he has had enough. As an individual's capacity to enjoy food is limited, so is his ca...« less