John Stuart Mill on the Stationary State

The in much of classical economics was the notional end point of capitalist development, a stagnant, subsistencewage economy reached as profit rates declined to zero and consumption demand flagged. Its anticipation, underestimating the pace and power of technological progress and the scope for international trade and factor flows, was the reason Carlyle called economics the dismal science. The stationary state depicted by John Stuart Mill (1806-73) in thefamous chapter of his Principles of Political Economy reproduced below (Book IV, chapter 6) is of a somewhat different type, harking back to Plato as much as to Adam Smith. Growth of population and capital has halted, but not growth of productivity. Welfare can continue to improve indefinitely in both material and, especially, nonmaterial terms. Mill's Arcadia is that of the English country gentleman, albeit with a limited egalitarianism added, his concern with 'flowery wastes and wildlife a prefiguring of Sierra Club tracts. The contrast here is to views such as those of Bishop Berkeley, who (in Schumpeter's words) delighted in the vision of joyfully bustling multitudes'' (History of Economic Analysis, p. 257). (Britain at the time [1848] had little more than a third of its present population; London had some 2.3 million people.) But whatever one's desired level of bustle, Mill's concerns do raise the oddly neglected issue of what economic growth is for, once diminishing marginal utility of material consumption sets in. Mill's comments on the expansion of agriculture are pertinent today, in an era when international agencies indeed foresee (with equanimity, even with a sense of great accomplishment) every rood of land brought into cultivation. His calling attention to the modest impact that technological progress has on leisure also retains force, especially if nonmarket household production is properly attributed. The text is taken from the edition of the Principles edited by W. J. Ashley (London: Longmans, Green and Co.), first issued in 1909. Ashley largely follows the 7th edition (1871), the last published in Mill's lifetime, with sparing footnotes showing the chief textual changes since the first edition (1848). (A full variorum edition, identifying all such changes, appears as volumes 2 and 3 of Mill's Collected Works published by the University of Toronto Press, 1965.)

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