Capital and the Heritage of Improvement

By the heritage of improvement I mean the net economic advantage which we and other generations who come late in the history of mankind, possess in consequence of what has been done by mankind in the past. I say the net advantage rather than the advantage simply, because some of what has been done in the past is no advantage, but a disadvantage to us; and I speak of the heritage of improvement rather than the heritage simply, both for that reason and because heritage alone might be taken to include the natural unimproved world which Man, perhaps with undue presumption, traditionally holds to have been created in order to be possessed by successive generations of his species. Much of the difficulty of economic science in our day arises from the fact that the political economy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries tried to explain a very elusive thing, namely national economy, and also something wider, namely the economy of isolated society or mankind at large, by beginning with individuals in the existing conditions and then combining the individuals into the nation or society without ever trying to work backwards from society to the nation and the individual. Thus, in regard to capital and the heritage of improvement, the economists worked outwards from the individual to the nation and society, rather losing interest as they went, without testing results by working backwards from society to the individual, and the consequence has been that capital, unduly glorified, has been allowed to usurp the place which should properly be occupied by the heritage of improvement, to the great detriment both of economic theory and of public policy. A characteristic of Man which seems to divide him from the other animals is a certain flair for improvement. The other animals will alter their habits and alter the materials used in the

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• Major Douglas and Social Credit

  John Pullen, J M Pullen et al.•History of Political Economy•1997

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