Hans Mayer, Gut (1927)

Hans Mayer’s encyclopedia entry examines the economic concept of a good and the classifications through which it explains production, valuation, and exchange. Its two principal sections establish the concept’s theoretical function and distinguish orders of goods, patterns of consumption and durability, and disputed categories of immaterial goods. The organizing claim is that goods are not defined by material substance or intrinsic worth: their economic character depends on their relationship to acting subjects, their needs, and their capacity to command scarce means.

Mayer begins by rejecting definitions grounded in linguistic intuition or purported insight into an essence. Scientific concepts should instead be judged by their usefulness in explaining economic connections. A good is a means of satisfying needs, not the satisfaction itself. Happiness, truth, and virtue, when desired for their own sake, therefore fall outside the economic category. Good-character presupposes needs, a subject’s judgment that something can satisfy them, and the possibility of disposing of it. Specifically economic problems arise only when available means are scarce relative to requirements.

Da ferner nur die im Knappheitsverhältnis stehenden Wirtschaftsmittel Gegenstand der wirtschaftlichen Wertschätzung sind, weil Nutzen mit ihnen nicht nur gestiftet wird, sondern von jeder ihrer Teilmengen abhängt, läßt sich der Begriff der Güter in kürzester Form als Wirtschaftsmittel von Wert fassen.

English translation: Since, furthermore, only economic means that stand in a relation of scarcity are objects of economic valuation, because utility is not merely provided by them but depends on each portion of them, the concept of goods can be expressed most briefly as economic means possessing value.

This formulation distinguishes merely useful abundance from the scarcity that makes allocation, economizing, and valuation necessary. Mayer would reserve the term “goods” for scarce means, treating so-called free goods simply as economic means. Scarcity itself is relational: it can change with needs even when physical supplies remain unchanged. Nor are reproducible goods arbitrarily reproducible, since their production ultimately depends on limited original productive resources.

Good-character is consequently subject-relative without being arbitrary. Changing tastes can remove it; discoveries can confer it on previously unrecognized resources. Even an ineffective medicine can function economically as a good when people believe in its efficacy, with corresponding effects on demand and prices. Conversely, usefulness alone does not suffice: sunlight lies outside human command, while distance or legal prohibition can prevent otherwise suitable things from becoming disposable means. Exchange partly conceals this subjectivity, since demand gives things exchange value and thereby makes them useful even to people who do not personally consume them. Against Amonn’s proposal to replace the good with the socially defined object of exchange, Mayer argues that this formal category identifies problems but cannot explain quantities, production, or prices.

The second section develops these explanatory implications through Carl Menger’s orders of goods. Consumer goods stand nearest to need-satisfaction; productive goods occupy progressively more remote stages, terminating in natural resources and human labor. The decisive causal direction runs from the ends of economic activity toward its means:

Die Gutsqualität der Güter höherer Ordnung ist also die Folge, und nicht, wie die ältere Lehre (Arbeitswerttheorie) annahm, die Ursache, der Gutsqualität der Güter niederer Ordnung.

English translation: The good-character of higher-order goods is thus the consequence, and not, as the older doctrine (labor theory of value) assumed, the cause, of the good-character of lower-order goods.

Productive resources retain their status when one use disappears if other needs still sustain alternative uses. Shared inputs establish relationships among products and their prices. Complementarity adds a further condition: productive means generally require access to other inputs before they can serve their purposes. Mayer then distinguishes goods exhausted in one use, durable goods permitting repeated uses, and non-consumable goods such as land. Durability directs attention from physical objects to their useful services: objects become economically intelligible as bearers of services, and durable assets as bundles of them.

This service-based account governs the extended discussion of immaterial goods. Mayer traces the expansion beyond material products through Say, but refuses to recognize every valuable abstraction as a separate good. Labor and personal services qualify because they satisfy needs, are scarce, and can be directed toward economic ends. Their status does not depend on producing a tangible, storable object. Employment gives the employer limited command over labor power, bounded by contract, law, and custom. Mayer insists that recognizing this economic relationship neither endorses every use of labor nor cancels its personal character:

Diesen im Wesen der Wirtschaft gegebenen Tatbestand mit seiner ethischen, sozialphilosophischen oder sozialpolitischen Verurteilung oder Rechtfertigung zu verwechseln, wäre ein schweres Mißverständnis.

English translation: To confuse this fact, grounded in the nature of economic activity, with its ethical, social-philosophical, or social-policy condemnation or justification would be a serious misunderstanding.

Rights receive a different treatment. They secure present or future command over goods rather than adding independent goods to the stock of wealth.

Die Rechte sind also die Form, welche die allgemeine Bedingung jeder Gutsqualität „Verfügungsmacht über ein Ding“ in der rechtlich organisierten Gesellschaft annimmt.

English translation: Rights are thus the form assumed in legally organized society by the general condition of anything’s good-character: “power of disposal over a thing.”

Counting both a thing and the right to it would duplicate wealth; treating credit claims as newly created goods compounds this error. Monopoly positions, customer connections, and business reputation likewise describe conditions affecting the control, scarcity, or returns of real goods, not independently disposable additions to them. Finally, creative ideas can qualify as goods when controllable and usable as means, whereas inseparable skills and abilities enhance labor power rather than constitute separate goods. The entry’s significance lies in combining a subject-relative theory of value with a disciplined account of what may be counted as an economic means: neither materiality nor market valuation alone settles the question.