Robert Meyer’s theoretical journal article examines Simon N. Patten’s claim that increasingly varied consumption drives economic progress, raises marginal utility, and opens more favourable opportunities for production. Its six sections move from an exposition of Patten’s theory through four causes of consumption change—new goods, prices, wealth, and needs—to a qualified reassessment. Meyer’s central objection is causal: diversity is an outcome requiring explanation, not an independent law guaranteeing improvement.
Die zunehmende Mannigfaltigkeit der Consumption tritt uns daher nicht als eine elementare Thatsache, ein natürlicher Trieb, nicht als die Ursache, sondern als die Folge ungestört fortschreitender wirtschaftlicher Entwicklung entgegen.
English translation: Increasing diversity of consumption thus appears to us not as an elementary fact, a natural impulse, not as the cause, but as the consequence of uninterrupted economic development.
Rather than reconstruct conjectural primitive economies, Meyer starts with a historically given pattern of consumption and separates the forces that alter it. New products increase variety only insofar as they supplement rather than completely displace existing goods. Household diversity must also be distinguished from diversity across the economy: different households can consume different products while each remains narrowly supplied.
Drawing on Menger and Wieser, Meyer distinguishes particular wants from broad categories such as food or clothing. Goods commonly satisfy bundles of wants; an improved garment may combine warmth with greater beauty, while a cheaper substitute relinquishes one satisfaction to make others affordable. Innovation can answer an existing desire or awaken a previously unknown one. Producers, advertising, imitation, and consumers’ uncertain expectations therefore enter the explanation alongside deliberate household calculation.
The price analysis similarly separates wider consumption of a good from greater variety. Cheap units, rental arrangements, and freely accessible cultural goods bring satisfactions within reach of poorer households. Yet a price reduction can also eliminate competing substitutes. Its effect on variety depends on relationships among goods, including substitution and complementarity, rather than on cheapness alone.
The section on wealth supplies Meyer’s clearest counterexample to Patten. With unchanged wants, rising resources permit satisfaction of progressively less urgent needs, including previously excluded categories. Variety increases while marginal utility falls. Numerical schedules show that the extent of diversification depends on how different series of wants interleave:
Nicht die Länge der Reihe, sondern der Umstand, dass sie durch kein Glied einer anderen Reihe unterbrochen wird, ist das entscheidende.
English translation: What is decisive is not the length of the series, but the circumstance that it is interrupted by no member of another series.
This shifts attention from Patten’s contrast between strong appetites and temperate versatility to the relative ordering of satisfactions. A long series devoted to alcohol and one devoted to scholarly study may produce equally concentrated consumption but warrant opposite judgments. Variety itself supplies no criterion of improvement; the kinds of needs satisfied matter. Meyer assigns their physiological, educational, and moral evaluation partly to disciplines outside economics.
Changes in needs likewise have no uniform effect on marginal value. New demands raise it, at fixed resources, only insofar as they are not offset by weakened demands elsewhere. Higher marginal value can indicate increased deprivation rather than prosperity. Meyer consequently questions whether low marginal utility adequately measures welfare, suggesting that total utility may better capture participation in cultural goods.
This distinction gives the article a pointed social application. Workers can become materially better supplied yet feel worse off if education and urban life expand their needs more rapidly than their means. Demonstrating an absolute improvement in wages or consumption does not, by itself, answer their dissatisfaction. Nor does diversified demand necessarily discover superior production opportunities or overturn the Ricardian constraint invoked by Patten.
Meyer nevertheless preserves a constructive core in Patten’s project:
Nicht in gleichem Maasse die Vervollkommnung der menschlichen Bedürfnisse.
English translation: Not to the same extent the improvement of human needs.
The sentence contrasts economics’ limited attention to improving needs with its longstanding study of improved production. Temperance provides Meyer’s exemplary case: replacing dominant alcoholic consumption with more balanced wants can improve health, character, and productive capacity. Such benefits follow from the particular transformation, not from diversity as such. The article’s lasting conceptual contribution is to distinguish diversification from improvement while making the economic consequences of cultivated needs a legitimate object of inquiry. As engineers assess technical improvements, physicians and other specialists can assess changes in consumption; economists then investigate their consequences.
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