The consumer's rational and coherent approach when spending is not hedonistic, nor arbitrary and abstract, but rather he or she also acts with managerial mentality trying to obtain the maximum differential between income and expense; a differential that is summed up, in our opinion, in the possibilities of developing a satisfactory and self-materializing task in the future.
-----------------

1.Utility and its hedonist deviation in the theory of value

Although there were predecessors like Gossen or the Spanish Balmes, it was above all Jevons, Menger and Walras, and in general all the later marginalism theories, that introduced consideration of utility (and marginal utility) into economic theory as an explanation of the phenomena of the economic value of goods. Above all, they criticized the theories of incorporated value-work that had dominated classic thought, indicating that the worth of one or another product does not depend on the effort measured in labour force or working time, but more in terms of the utility or service that it potentially lends to the necessities and objectives of the end users.
The value of intermediate goods, unfinished, and in general of all productive factors, depended therefore on the value of the end use goods. The demand for productive factors (among them work) was a demand derived from the value of finished products for their direct consumption. From the classic position, that highlighted the factors of supply and costs, the situation changed to one where demand factors prevailed. The whole process of physical production of goods and services concentrated on the consumers' preferences.
Encouraged by these budgets, the road to the principle of sovereignty of the consumer opened up. The whole managerial productive process was directed by the sovereign choices of the consumers. The demand for end consumer products conditioned and guided the supply of these products as well as the demand for intermediate products to achieve those. Demand in the job market is also a demand derived in the last analysis from the demand for finished products which that helps to manufacture. The company in turn becomes the key institution that supplements and absorbs the different inputs to achieve the best and greatest output in the market of finished products that are the final goal of the productive project.
Up to here the suggestion adheres coherently to the roads that economic value of goods covers in an economy that is governed by the principle of free and voluntary individual decision. But although I understand that such conclusions are theoretically coherent, I consider that they are insufficient, that the economic circuit is unfinished and that there is a danger of neglecting an indispensable part in the mechanism of strengthening economic growth and development.
The course of economic goods originates in raw materials and ends with the consumption of the finished products. The hedonist influence, that starting with Bentham's utilitarianism is introduced via Jevons in western economic theory, has consecrated the principle of maximization of satisfaction and pleasure as criterion of the individual's performance. The individual, in his performance, tries to obtain maximum pleasure with minimum effort and pain. The hedonist consumption would be the positive of the scale and work, as soon as it produces effort and tires, would be the negative. Extrapolating reasoning to the maximum, it would then mean consuming the maximum and working the minimum. This type of attitude is always among the models that are based on hedonistic principles.
Although as early as Fisher a process was introduced that led to emptying the concept of utility of all hedonistic contents, and Slutsky, Hicks and Allen achieved it on a theoretical level, this pleasant temptation has been repeated continually on a practical level in daily economic activity.
But the utility of goods, emptied of hedonism, remained in a merely abstract concept that could be useful for everything and for that reason, it was not good for anything in economic practice.

2. Consumption as an intermediate good and investment in human capital

The studies carried out in the last few years are beginning to emphasise that the consumer's rational and coherent approach when making purchases is not hedonistic, nor is it arbitrary and abstract, but rather that he also acts with managerial mentality trying to get the maximum differential between income and expenditure. The domestic economy demands goods and services in the market based on strengthening the value of its properties, including among these the selfsame human capital that is produced through professional work. The domestic economy also acts on its goods demand and labour supply with future expectations.
Gary Becker's studies on the family and human capital are indicative of this tendency to consider the consumption of end goods as intermediate consumption in order to improve future activity. The expenses of the domestic economy in food, clothes, housing, education, furniture, domestic physical capital, time, etc., are oriented to achieve an improvement in the human capital of members of the family unit, that will provide better returns in the future.
"... we formally introduce in the analysis, an amended theory about consumption decision, in which the goods compared figure as inputs in the production of "goods" that directly form part of the structure of preferences (...). The same individuals "produce" these goods, combining different products of the market, the consumer's time that is required for consumption, and other inputs in its functions of production (...). This focus abandons the traditional separation between production and consumption and transforms individuals into producers as well as consumers."
Consumption, from this perspective, becomes investment in human capital and the criterion of choice between different goods, different inputs, will be marginal productivity with regard to better future activity, with regard to the output.
With this vision, a coherent and rational economic conduct of the domestic economy will lead to looking for the most productive consumption goods and leaving aside of unproductive ones that only make sense from a purely hedonistic horizon. The "investments" in consumption goods condition future revenues via working retributions from all members of the family unit.
Substituting the hedonistic purpose of the consumer for a purpose that is guided to the improvement of the activity of future human life, entails leaving behind the meticulous study of managerial activity, and focussing on an exhaustive and deep study of the economic process that is carried out within the family. The domestic economy is the one that "produces" and improves the human capital of society and becomes essential for economic progress and development.
If labour demand were an action derived from the demand for finished products, we see now, if we do not interrupt the process, that the demand for consumption goods is also an action derived from labour demand.
With this new perspective, work is incorporated into the process of valuation of finished products. But not as past work necessary to produce them, but as future work to which consumer activity is aimed. The requirements of future work have an influence on current consumption by way of attraction, by way of purpose. Future work influences productive consumption via demand. The utility of consumption depends on its capacity to potentialize better future activity. Consumption cannot simply remain as an end use good; it is oriented to the future; productive consumption is an intermediate good.
The previously indicated displacement of utility towards hedonism corrupted the important and positive fact of the theoreticians of marginalism, that consisted of introducing human ends and objectives into the processes of economic valuation independent to work incorporated to objects. Future work, as a productive and creative activity, can also become the objective of human action. If we disconnect the concept of working from fatigue and effort, we transform it into a creative act that, besides humanizing the matter on which it acts, humanizes the selfsame working individual.

3. Work as a human necessity

Work, besides being an efficient cause of creation and increment of economic value, becomes an activity in which the very person self-achieves and improves humanly in diverse degrees. Referring to intellectual work, Hayek affirms "man enjoys the gift of his intelligence in the process of learning and the consequences of having learned something new."
Therefore you can consider work as a necessity and a purpose of conscious and rational performance of the human being. Not only as a marginal necessity but also as a high-priority necessity that would have to be included in the function of utility of the individual "consumer": Man has a need to "consume" work because this produces an important "satisfaction" independently from the remuneration.
To obtain that self-affirmation and self-expression, the worker has to put his all into what he is doing. If he does not do that, his activity stops being human to be converted into purely animal or mechanical, resembling the activity of a machine. For work to be self-attaining, it has to be well done. It has to exert that function of genuinely humanizing the material instead of man materializing.
The great problem of unemployment is not only defined as a consequence of the impossibility of obtaining monetary resources and through them, the necessary material resources, but it is also increased because work helps personal self-expression and human growth. Some words by Handy on the future of human work are very relevant:
"Work is being redefined not by legislation, but by the action of people who believe - and they are right- that life needs work of some type to really be life. If there is not enough employment, what people will do is slowly create other forms of work for themselves, putting their creativity and zeal into them."
If the scales of economic investigation can be tilted towards the human being, leaving goods in pure means, it will appear as a basic factor for human realization in work. Work will not only be a production factor but it will also be able to be considered as a consumption factor, in the sense that it is the source of multiple benefits in terms of human realization. Work is a necessity for the common run of people, not only to be able to achieve their indispensable means of subsistence, but also to reach a minimum of personal realization as man.
Full employment for these and many other reasons becomes the main goal to reach for economic development. The humanization of work, allowing man to develop his corporal and spiritual capacities, his creativity, appears as a second goal to achieve after full employment.
An economic policy will be suitable if it gives priority to, conditioning the rest of the reasoning, the attainment of full employment or the greatest employment and then, "better employment." Schumacher's ideas about intermediate technology and its applicability in less developed or developing areas have influence here.
"Work is man's measurement; but a good job, that is, a job that allows us to express ourselves and that provides a outlet for our creative energy, for our capacity to do things and relate to others. Work is under our control, it is not work that controls us.
If we cannot find that type of good work in employment, we will create it in the alternative worlds of work, when we have enough time and energy."

4. The humanising quality of work

Discovering the usefulness of work for our personal development, means discovering that tangible assets are means and instruments at our service.
Schumacher distinguished on one occasion between tools and machines. Tools, he said, are humanity's servants, and they have enlarged our field of action, our musculature and our capacities. Machines, on the other hand, are our masters. They force us to work to their rhythm, to adapt to their demands, to go where they are. It is possible that industrialization has indeed produced economic benefits, but it tended to transform people into human robots.
This mechanization of man could be at the root of people resigning from certain employments voluntarily, trying to take refuge in what Jonathan Gersbuny called the dawn of the "self service society." It deals with substituting formal mechanised activity, for one's own work. Values such as being self-sufficient, living ecologically, meditating, worrying about peace, justice, freedom, etc are beginning to be discovered.
"... there is a human necessity to be expressed in a job. If work is not guaranteed, it will be more sensible to be expressed in domestic work (...). A survey carried out by the newspaper The Guardian, in December 1981, thought about the questions of what the most important elements were in job satisfaction. Top of the list were the obtaining of personal freedom, respect to colleagues, learning something new, incentives, realization of a project, helping others... This is a way of saying that work is something essential for total expression of our human quality."
Work is not only a means, an indispensable productive factor for the human improvement of the material world, but rather it is also a means in which the selfsame worker is perfected. Many workers increase their productivity acquiring new qualifications and improving, while they work, on others that they already possessed.
It is not good, even psychologically speaking, to classify anybody as unemployed. Ontologically being unemployed, is being without activity, without life. Those activities that are work without being framed in official formal employment must be socially recognised, even on occasions in fact the type of work that is scarce because it is the one that is most necessary.
It is not a cliché to affirm that the unemployed person is humanly demeaned; it is also inasmuch that he cannot cling to the fundamental bond that unites other men in society.
"Excepting social parasites, work is the fundamental motivation of human action in contemporary society, if we keep in mind the most extensive masses. The important thing is that it does not only entail the stimuli related to earning a livelihood, but also the fight for the desired social position and hence our role in society, that will be obtained by means of work and employment... Because work is now the symbol of its independence, of its complete social value, and the means that allows to progress, without which the stimulus to learn disappears and life is dominated by an existential void, where boredom reigns in the sense of lack of interest for what happens in public life."
It is understandable, then, that one can speak about he who does not work, or subjectively considers that he does not work, losing the meaning of life, falling into a degraded existential void.
"... the problems of the meaning of life have been treated recently in an extensive way in psychiatry, especially in the tendency denominated "logo therapy" whose creator was the professor Victor Frankl, a psychiatrist of Vienna. Without expanding on an explanation of the logo therapeutic treatment, I would like to point out its theoretical foundation, that is: the concept of the existential void. It is reduced to the idea that for life to have meaning, that is to say, being aware of why one lives, is a human necessity. For that reason, the loss of such awareness (in other words, the loss of the meaning of life) results in a specific existential void with pathological character that causes several mental illnesses."
It is necessary to recover approaches of economic performance more in accordance with human nature, that consider such consumption as a means and not an end, and that recuperate a higher place for human work on the scale of individual and social values.

Joseph John Franch Menéu
Published in the Magazine of Social Development (Revista de Fomento Social)
Number 181 January - March 1991