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Microeconomics
R O G E R A. A R N O L D
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY
SAN MARCOS
9E
Kor Ki
Microeconomics, 9E © 2010, 2008 South-Western, a part of Cengage Learning
Roger A. Arnold ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this work covered by the copyright hereon
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iv
Contents
Preface xvii
v
vi CONTENTS
Economists Only if They Want to “Make Money” 29 Myth 4: Economics Wasn’t Very
Interesting in High School, So It’s Not Going to Be Very Interesting in College 30 Myth 5:
Economics Is a Lot Like Business, But Business Is More Marketable 30
What Awaits You as an Economics Major? 30
What Do Economists Do? 31
Places to Find More Information 32
Concluding Remarks 32
E C O N O M I C S 24/7 The Straight-Line PPF: Constant Opportunity Costs 33 The Bowed-Outward (Concave-
Downward) PPF: Increasing Opportunity Costs 34 Law of Increasing Opportunity Costs 36
The PPF and Your Grades
40
Economic Concepts Within a PPF Framework 37
Exchange or Trade 39
Trading Prisoners
41
Periods Relevant to Trade 39 Trade and the Terms of Trade 41 Costs of Trades 42
Trades and Third-Party Effects 44
Jerry Seinfeld, the
Doorman, and Production, Trade, and Specialization 44
Adam Smith Producing and Trading 44 Profit and a Lower Cost of Living 47 A Benevolent and All-
47 Knowing Dictator Versus the Invisible Hand 48
OFFICE HOURS A Reader Asks 50
“What Purpose Does the Chapter Summary 50
PPF Serve?” Key Terms and Concepts 51
49
Questions and Problems 51
Working with Numbers and Graphs 52
OFFICE HOURS Application 2: Where Will House Prices Change the Most? 94
“Doesn’t High Demand Application 3: Why Do Colleges Use GPAs, ACTs, and SATs for Purposes of
Mean High Quantity Admission? 95
Demanded?”
109
Application 4: Supply and Demand on a Freeway 96
Application 5: Price Ceilings in the Kidney Market 97
Application 6: The Minimum Wage Law 99
Application 7: Price Floors and Winners and Losers 101
Application 8: Are Renters Better Off? 102
Application 9: Do You Pay for Good Weather? 104
Application 10: College Superathletes 105
Application 11: 10 A.M. Classes in College 107
Application 12: What will Happen to the Price of Marijuana if the Purchase and Sale
of Marijuana Are Legalized? 108
A Reader Asks 110
Chapter Summary 110
Key Terms and Concepts 111
Questions and Problems 111
Working with Numbers and Graphs 112
Micr oe cono m ic s
Part Microeconomic Fundamentals
E C O N O M I C S 24/7 The Market and the Firm: Invisible Hand Versus Visible Hand 166 The Alchian and Demsetz
Answer 167 Shirking in a Team 167 Ronald Coase on Why Firms Exist 168 Markets:
High School Students,
Staying Out Late, and Outside and Inside the Firm 169
More The Firm’s Objective: Maximizing Profit 169
177 Accounting Profit Versus Economic Profit 170 Zero Economic Profit Is Not as Bad as It
What Matters to Global Sounds 171
Competitiveness? Production 172
182 Production in the Short Run 172 Marginal Physical Product and Marginal
“I Have to Become an Cost 174 Average Productivity 177
Accountant” Costs of Production: Total, Average, Marginal 179
186
The AVC and ATC Curves in Relation to the MC Curve 180 Tying Short-Run Production to
OFFICE HOURS Costs 183 One More Cost Concept: Sunk Cost 184
“What Is the Difference Production and Costs in the Long Run 188
Between the Law of Long-Run Average Total Cost Curve 188 Economies of Scale, Diseconomies of Scale, and
Diminishing Marginal Constant Returns to Scale 189 Why Economies of Scale? 190 Why Diseconomies of
Returns and Diseconomies Scale? 190 Minimum Efficient Scale and Number of Firms in an Industry 190
of Scale?”
192 Shifts in Cost Curves 190
Taxes 191 Input Prices 191 Technology 191
A Reader Asks 193
Chapter Summary 193
Key Terms and Concepts 194
Questions and Problems 194
Working with Numbers and Graphs 195
E C O N O M I C S 24/7 Who Are the Rich and How Rich Are They? 339 The Effect of Age on the Income
Statistics Can Mislead if Distribution 341 A Simple Equation 342
You Don’t Know How Measuring Income Equality 344
They Are Made The Lorenz Curve 344 The Gini Coefficient 345 A Limitation of the Gini Coefficient 346
343
Why Income Inequality Exists 347
Winner-Take-All Markets Factors Contributing to Income Inequality 347 Income Differences: Some Are Voluntary,
350 Some Are Not 349
Q&A: Poverty and Income Normative Standards of Income Distribution 350
356
The Marginal Productivity Normative Standard 350 The Absolute Income Equality
OFFICE HOURS Normative Standard 353 The Rawlsian Normative Standard 353
“Are the Number of Persons Poverty 354
in Each Fifth the Same?” What Is Poverty? 354 Limitations of the Official Poverty Income Statistics 355 Who Are
358 the Poor? 355 What Is the Justification for Government Redistributing Income? 356
A Reader Asks 359
Chapter Summary 359
Key Terms and Concepts 360
Questions and Problems 360
Working with Numbers and Graphs 360
CONTENTS xiii
E C O N O M I C S 24/7 Loanable Funds: Demand and Supply 361 The Price for Loanable Funds and the Return
on Capital Goods Tend to Equality 364 Why Do Interest Rates Differ? 364 Nominal
Is the Car Worth Buying?
367
and Real Interest Rates 365 Present Value: What Is Something Tomorrow Worth
Today? 366 Deciding Whether or Not to Purchase a Capital Good 367
Loans for the Poorest of the
Poor Rent 369
368 David Ricardo, the Price of Grain, and Land Rent 369 The Supply Curve of Land Can Be
Upward Sloping 370 Economic Rent and Other Factors of Production 370 Economic
Insuring Oneself Against
Terrorism Rent and Baseball Players: The Perspective from Which the Factor Is Viewed
374 Matters 371 Competing for Artificial and Real Rents 371 Do People Overestimate Their
Worth to Others, or Are They Simply Seeking Economic Rent? 371
OFFICE HOURS
Profit 372
“How Is Present Value Theories of Profit 372 What Is Entrepreneurship? 374 What a Microwave Oven and an
Used in the Courtroom?” Errand Runner Have in Common 374 Profit and Loss as Signals 375
376
A Reader Asks 377
Chapter Summary 377
Key Terms and Concepts 378
Questions and Problems 378
Working with Numbers and Graphs 379
E C O N O M I C S 24/7 How Countries Know What to Trade 428 How Countries Know when They Have a
Dividing the Work Comparative Advantage 430
431 Trade Restrictions 432
You’re Getting Better The Distributional Effects of International Trade 432 Consumers’ and Producers’
Because Others Are Getting Surpluses 432 The Benefits and Costs of Trade Restrictions 435 Why Nations Sometimes
Better Restrict Trade 438
433
World Trade Organization (WTO) 441
Offshore Outsourcing, or A Reader Asks 443
Offshoring
439 Chapter Summary 443
E C O N O M I C S 24/7 Current Account 447 Capital Account 450 Official Reserve Account 451 Statistical
Merchandise Trade Deficit, Discrepancy 451 What the Balance of Payments Equals 451
We Thought We Knew The Foreign Exchange Market 453
Thee The Demand for Goods 453 The Demand for and Supply of Currencies 454
452
Flexible Exchange Rates 456
Back to the Futures The Equilibrium Exchange Rate 456 Changes in the Equilibrium Exchange
458 Rate 457 Factors That Affect the Equilibrium Exchange Rate 457
Big Mac Economics Fixed Exchange Rates 460
463
Fixed Exchange Rates and Overvalued/Undervalued Currency 460 What Is So Bad
OFFICE HOURS About an Overvalued Dollar? 461 Government Involvement in a Fixed Exchange Rate
“Why Is the Depreciation System 462 Options Under a Fixed Exchange Rate System 464 The Gold Standard 465
of One Currency Tied to Fixed Exchange Rates Versus Flexible Exchange Rates 466
the Appreciation of Another Promoting International Trade 466 Optimal Currency Areas 467
Currency?”
The Current International Monetary System 469
471
A Reader Asks 472
Chapter Summary 472
Key Terms and Concepts 473
Questions and Problems 474
Working with Numbers and Graphs 474
Practical Eco n om ic s
Part Financial Matters
We b Chapte r
Part Web Chapter
the world.
goods, X and Y. If we change things, and let the population grow from
Instructor:
That’s correct. What we are assuming when we say the “average
person” can be made better off is that if we took the extra output and
divided it evenly across the population, then the average person would
Many New Applications
marginal revenue and marginal
grade (say, a 90), but this ignores how much higher the grade could be better off in terms of having more goods and services. By the way,
have been (say, five points higher) if he hadn’t worked more hours at this is what economists mean when they say that the output (goods
his job. The frontier of the PPF reminds us that there are trade-offs in and services) per capita in a population has risen.
life. That is an important reality to be aware of. We ignore it at our
Student:
I’ve also heard that the PPF can show us what is necessary before the
“average person” in a country can become richer. Is this true? And
what kind of richer do we mean here?
Points to Remember
1. The production possibilities frontier (PPF) grounds us in reality.
It tells us what is and what is not possible in terms of producing
various combinations of goods and services.
2. The PPF tells us that when we have efficiency (we are at a point
on the frontier itself), more of one thing means less of something
The Ninth Edition of Economics
includes many new applications in
else. In other words, the PPF tells us there are trade-offs in life.
Instructor: 3. If the PPF shifts rightward and the population does not change,
We are talking about becoming richer in terms of having more goods then output per capita rises.
THE PPF AND YOUR GRADES
AD/AS framework.
and services. It’s possible for the “average person” to become richer
through economic growth. In other words, the average person in
Y
ou have your own PPF, you just may Or you can spend four hours studying for
society becomes richer if the PPF shifts rightward by more than the
not know it. Suppose you are study- economics and get a C (point 2), leaving you
Misconceptions. Incorporating Thinking Like an Economist into that are relevant to your lives: Ex Ante
Phrase that means “before,” as in
before a trade.
BEFORE THE TRADE Before a trade is made, a person is said to be in the ex ante
position. For example, suppose Ramona has the opportunity to trade what she has,
$2,000, for something she does not have, a plasma television set. In the ex ante posi-
tion, she wonders if she will be better off with (1) the television set or with (2) $2,000
worth of other goods. If she concludes that she will be better off with the television set
the lens of economic analysis. • Which is better, a tax rebate or a tax bonus?
• Is economics at work in the plastic surgeon’s office?
CHAPTER 2
Suppose an advance in technology allows more military goods and more civilian goods
Economic Activities: Producing and Trading
exhibit 6
39
• Finding Economics illustrates the • What economic concepts are illustrated in the popular
to be produced with the same quantity of resources. As a result, the PPF in Exhibit 6 shifts
outward from PPF1 to PPF2. The outcome is the same as when the quantity of resources
is increased.
Finding Economics
Economic Growth Within
a PPF Framework
An increase in resources or
an advance in technology can
increase the production capa- economics around us, such as how ABC television series, Lost?
• Is the law of demand at work for iPods?
bilities of an economy, leading
In an Attorney’s Office to economic growth and a shift
ers once farmed with minimal capital equipment, today they use computers, tractors, pesticides, PPF2
Because of technological advancements, fewer farmers were needed to produce food and so many
farmers left the farmers for the cities, where they entered the manufacturing and service industries.
different countries?
0 Civilian Goods
In other words, people who were once farmers (or whose parents and grandparents were farmers)
began to produce cars, airplanes, television sets, and computers. They became attorneys, accoun-
tants, and police officers.
What we learn here is that a technological advancement in one sector of the economy can have
ripple effects throughout the economy. We also learn that a technological advancement can affect attorneys, accountants, or teachers.
• How does the government spend taxpayers’ money?
the composition of employment.
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In Appreciation
This book could not have been written and published without the generous expert assistance of many people. A deep debt of
gratitude is owed to the reviewers of the first through eighth editions and to the reviewers of this edition, the ninth.
I would like to thank Peggy Crane of Southwestern College, who revised the Test Bank, and Jane Himarios of the University
of Texas at Arlington, who revised the Instructor’s Manual. I owe a dept of gratitude to all the fine and creative people I
worked with at South-Western/Cengage Learning. These persons include Jack Calhoun; Alex von Rosenberg; Michael Worls,
Executive Editor for Economics; Jennifer Thomas, Senior Developmental Editor; Kim Kusnerak, Senior Content Project
Manager; John Carey, Senior Marketing Manager; Michelle Kunkler, Senior Art Director; and Sandee Milewski, Senior
Frontlist Buyer.
My deepest debt of gratitude goes to my wife, Sheila, and to my two sons, David, eighteen years old, and Daniel, twenty one
years old. They continue to make all my days happy ones.
Roger A. Arnold
Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
forms of her own experience. When she is disorderly, and her
mother or nurse arranges her hair or washes her hands, it is in order
that she may not continue to be disorderly. The child is envisaging
the wind and the rain as a kind of naughty child who can be got to
behave properly by effacing the effects of its naughtiness. In other
words they are both to be deterred from repeating what is
objectionable by a visible and striking manifestation of somebody’s
objection or prohibition. Here, it seems unmistakable, we have a
projection into nature of human purpose, of the idea of
determination of action by end: we have a form of
anthropomorphism which runs through the whole of primitive
thought.
It seems to follow from this that there is a stage in the
development of a child’s intelligence when questions such as, ‘Why
do the leaves fall?’ ‘Why does the thunder make such a noise?’ are
answered most satisfactorily by a poetic fiction, by saying, for
example, that the leaves are old and tired of hanging on to the
trees, and that the thunder giant is in a particularly bad temper and
making a noise. It is perhaps permissible to make use of this fiction
at times, more especially when trying to answer the untiring
questioning about animals and their doings, a region of existence, by
the way, of which even the wisest of us knows exceedingly little. Yet
the device has its risks; and an ill-considered piece of myth-making
passed off as an answer may find itself awkwardly confronted by
that most merciless of things, a child’s logic.
We may notice something more in this early mode of
interrogation. Children are apt to think not only that things behave in
general after our manner, that their activity is determined by some
end or purpose, or that they have their useful function, their raison
d’être as we say, but that this purpose concerns us human creatures.
The wind and the rain came and went in our little girl’s nature-theory
just to vex or out of consideration for ‘mamma’ and ‘Babba’. A little
boy of two years two months sitting on the floor one day in a bad
temper looked up and saw the sun shining and said captiously, ‘Sun
not look at Hennie,’ and then more pleadingly, ‘Please, sun, not look
at poor Hennie’.[40] The sea, when the child C. first saw it, was
supposed to make its disturbing noise with special reference to his
small ears. We may call this the anthropocentric idea, the essence of
which is that man is the centre of reference, the aim or target, in all
nature’s processes. This anthropocentric tendency again is shared by
the child with the uncultured adult. Primitive man looks on wind,
rain, thunder as sent by some angry spirit, and even a respectable
English farmer tends to view these operations of nature in much the
same way. In children this anthropocentric impulse is apt to get
toned down by their temperament, which is on the whole optimistic
and decidedly practical, into a looking out for the uses of things. A
boy, already quoted, once (towards the end of the fourth year)
asked his mother what the bees do. This question he explained by
adding: “What is the good of them?” When told that they made
honey he observed pertinently enough from his teleological
standpoint: “Then do they bring it for us to eat?” This shrewd little
fellow might have made short work of some of the arguments by
which the theological optimists of the last century were wont to
‘demonstrate’ the Creator’s admirable adaptation of nature to man’s
wants.
The frequency of this kind of ‘why?’ suggests that children’s
thoughts about things are penetrated with the idea of purpose and
use. This is shown too in other ways. M. A. Binet found by
questioning children that their ideas of things are largely made up of
uses. Thus, asked what a hat is, a child answered: “Pour mettre sur
la tête”. Mr. H. E. Kratz of Sioux City sends me some answers to
questions by children of five on entering a primary school, which
illustrate the same point. Thus the question, ‘What is a tree?’ brings
out the answers, ‘To make the wind blow,’ ‘To sit under,’ and so forth.
Little by little this idea of a definite purpose and use in this and
that thing falls back and the child gets interested more in the
production or origination of things. He wants to know who made the
trees, the birds, the stars and so forth. Here, though what we call
efficient, as distinguished from final, cause is recognised,
anthropomorphism survives in the idea of a maker analogous to the
carpenter. We shall see later that children habitually envisage the
deity as a fabricator.
All this rage of questioning about the uses and the origin of things
is the outcome, not merely of ignorance and curiosity, but of a
deeper motive, a sense of perplexity, of mystery or contradiction. It
is not always easy to distinguish the two types of question, yet in
many cases at least its form and the manner of putting it will tell us
that it issues from a puzzled and temporarily baffled brain. As long
as the questioning goes on briskly we may infer that a child believes
in the possibility of knowledge, and has not sounded the deepest
depths of intellectual despair. More pathetic than the saddest of
questions is the silencing of questions by the loss of faith.
It is easy to see that children must find themselves puzzled with
much which they see and hear of. The apparent exceptions to rules
don’t trouble the grown-up persons just because as recurrent
exceptions they seem to take on a rule of their own. Thus adults
though quite unversed in hydrostatics would be incapable of being
puzzled by C.’s problem: why my putting my hand in water does not
make a hole in it. Similarly, though they know nothing of animal
physiology they are never troubled by the mystery of fish breathing
under water, which when first noted by a child may come as a sort
of shock. The little boy just referred to, in his far-reaching zoological
interrogatory asked his mother: “Can they (the fish) breathe with
their moufs under water?”
In his own investigations, and in getting instruction from others,
the child is frequently coming upon puzzles of this sort. The same
boy was much exercised about the sea and where it went to. He
expressed a wish to take off his shoes and to walk out into the sea
so as to see where the ships go to, and was much troubled on
learning that the sea got deeper and deeper, and that if he walked
out into it he would be drowned. At first he denied the paradox
(which he at once saw) of the incoming sea going uphill: “But,
mamma, it doesn’t run up, it doesn’t run up, so it couldn’t come up
over our heads?” He was told that this was so, and he wisely began
to try to accommodate his mind to this startling revelation. C., it will
be seen, was much exercised by this problem of the moving mass of
waters, wanting to know whether it came half way up the world.
Probably in both these cases the idea of water rising had its uncanny
alarming aspect.
It is probable that the disappearance of a thing is at a very early
stage a puzzle to the infant. Later on, too, the young mind continues
to be exercised about this mystery. Our little friend’s inquiry about
the whither of the big receding sea, “Where does the sea sim (swim)
to?” illustrates this perplexity. A child seems able to understand the
shifting of an object of moderate size from one part of space to
another, but his conception of space is probably not large enough to
permit him to realise how a big tract of water can pass out of the
visible scene into the unseen. The child’s question, “Where does all
the wind go to?” seems to have sprung from a like inability to picture
a vast unseen realm of space.
In addition to this difficulty of the disappearance of big things,
there seems to be something in the vastness, and the infinite
number of existent things perceived and heard about, which puzzles
and oppresses the young mind. The inability to take in all the new
facts leads to a kind of resentment of their multitude. “Mother,”
asked a boy of four years, “why is there such a lot of things in the
world if no one knows all these things?” One cannot be quite sure of
the underlying thought here. The child may have meant merely to
protest against the production of so confusing a number of objects
in the world. This certainly seems to be the motive in some
children’s inquiries, as when a little girl, aged three years seven
months, said: ‘Mamma, why do there be any more days, why do
there? and why don’t we leave off eating and drinking?’ Here the
burdensomeness of mere multiplicity, of the unending procession of
days and meals, seems to be the motive. Yet it is possible that the
question about a lot of things not known to anybody was prompted
by a deeper difficulty, a dim presentiment of Berkeley’s idealism, that
things can exist only as objects of knowledge. This surmise may
seem far-fetched to some, yet I have found what seem to me other
traces of this tendency in children. A girl of six and a half years was
talking to her father about the making of the world. He pointed out
to her the difficulty of creating things out of nothing, showing her
that when we made things we simply fashioned materials anew. She
pondered and then said: “Perhaps the world’s a fancy”. Here again
one cannot be quite sure of the child-thought behind the words. Yet
it certainly looks like a falling back for a moment into the dreamy
mood of the idealist, that mood in which we seem to see the solid
fabric of things dissolve into a shadowy phantasmagoria.
The subject of origins is, as we know, beset with puzzles for the
childish mind. The beginnings of living things are, of course, the
great mystery. “There’s such a lot of things,” remarked the little
zoologist I have recently been quoting, “I want to know, that you
say nobody knows, mamma. I want to know who made God, and I
want to know if Pussy has eggs to help her make ickle (little) kitties.”
Finding that this was not so, he observed: “Oh, then, I s’pose she
has to have God to help her if she doesn’t have kitties in eggs given
her to sit on”. Another little boy, five years old, found his way to the
puzzle of the reciprocal genetic relation of the hen and the egg, and
asked his mother: “When there is no egg where does the hen come
from? When there was no egg, I mean, where did the hen come
from?” In a similar way, as we shall see in C.’s journal, a child will
puzzle his brains by asking how the first child was suckled, or, as a
little girl of four and a half years put it, "When everybody was a
baby—then who could be their nurse—if they were all babies?" The
beginnings of human life are, as we know, a standing puzzle for the
young investigator.
Much of this questioning is metaphysical in that it transcends the
problems of every-day life and of science. The child is metaphysician
in the sense in which the earliest human thinkers were
metaphysicians, pushing his questioning into the inmost nature of
things, and back to their absolute beginnings, as when he asks ‘Who
made God?’ or ‘What was there before God?’[41] He has no idea yet
of the confines of human knowledge. If his mother tells him she
does not know he tenaciously clings to the idea that somebody
knows, the doctor it may be, or the clergyman—or possibly the
policeman, of whose superior knowledge one little girl was forcibly
convinced by noting that her father once asked information of one of
these stately officials.
Strange, bizarre, altogether puzzling to the listener, are some of
these childish questions. A little American girl of nine years after a
pause in talk re-commenced the conversation by asking: “Why don’t
I think of something to say?” A play recently performed in a London
theatre made precisely this appeal to others by way of getting at
one’s own motives a chief amusing feature in one of its comical
characters. Another little American girl aged three one day left her
play and her baby sister named Edna Belle to find her mother and
ask: “Mamma, why isn’t Edna Belle me, and why ain’t I Edna
Belle?”[42] The narrator of this story adds that the child was not a
daughter of a professor of metaphysics but of practical farmer folk.
One cannot be quite sure of the precise drift of this question. It may
well have been the outcome of a new development of self-
consciousness, of a clearer awareness of the self in its distinctness
from others. A question with a much clearer metaphysical ring about
it, showing thought about the subtlest problems, was that put by a
boy of the same age: “If I’d gone upstairs, could God make it that I
hadn’t?” This is a good example of the type of question: ‘Can he
make a thing done not to have been done?’ which according to
Erasmus was much debated by theologians.[43]
With many children confronted with the mysteries of God and the
devil this questioning often reproduces the directions of theological
speculation. Thus the problem of the necessity of evil is clearly
recognisable in the question once put by an American boy under
eight years of age to a priest who visited his home: “Father, why
don’t God kill the devil and then there would be no more wickedness
in the world?”
All children’s questioning does not of course take this sublime
direction. Along with the tendency to push back inquiry to the
unreachable beginning of things we mark a more modest and
scientific line of investigation into the observable and explainable
processes of nature. Some questions which a busy listener would
pooh-pooh as dreamy have a genuinely scientific value, showing that
the little inquirer is trying to work out some problem of fact. This is
illustrated by a question put by a little boy aged three years nine
months: “Why don’t we see two things with our two eyes?” a
problem which, as we know, has exercised older psychologists.
When this more definitely scientific direction is taken by a child’s
questioning we may observe that the ambitious ‘why?’ begins to play
a second rôle, the first being now taken by the more modest ‘how?’
The germ of this kind of inquiry may be present in some of the early
questioning about growth. “How,” asked our little zoologist, “does
plants grow when we plant them, and how does boys grow from
babies to big boys like me? Has I grown now whilst I was eating my
supper? See!” and he stood up to make the most of his stature.
Clearer evidence of a directing of inquiry into the processes of things
appears in the fifth and sixth years. A little girl of four years seven
months among other questionings wanted to know what makes the
trains move, and how we move our eyes. The incessant inquiries of
the boy Clark Maxwell into the ‘go’ of this thing or the ‘particular go’
of that illustrate in a clearer manner the early tendency to direct
questioning to the more manageable problems to which science
confines itself.
These different lines of questioning are apt to run on concurrently
from the end of the third year, a fit of eager curiosity about animals
or other natural objects giving place to a fit of theological inquiry,
this again being dropped for an equally eager inquiry into the
making of clocks, railway engines, and so on. Yet through these
alternating bouts of questioning we can distinguish something like a
law of intellectual progress. Questioning as the most direct
expression of a child’s curiosity follows the development of his
groups of ideas and of the interests which help to construct these.
Thus I think it a general rule that questioning about the make or
mechanism of things follows questioning about animal ways just
because the zoological interest (in a very crude form of course)
precedes the mechanical. The scope of this early questioning will,
moreover, expand with intellectual capacity, and more particularly
the capability of forming the more abstruse kind of childish idea.
Thus inquiries into absolute beginnings, into the origin of the world
and of God himself, indicate the presence of a larger intellectual
grasp of time-relations and of the processes of becoming.
Our survey of the field of childish questioning suggests that it is by
no means an easy matter to deal with. It must be admitted, I think,
by the most enthusiastic partisan of children that their questioning is
of very unequal value. It may often be noticed that a child’s ‘why?’ is
used in a sleepy mechanical way with no real desire for knowledge,
any semblance of answer being accepted without an attempt to put
a meaning into it. A good deal of the more importunate kind of
children’s questioning, when they follow up question by question
recklessly, as it seems, and without definite aim, appears to be of
this formal and lifeless character, an expression not of a healthy
intellectual activity, but merely of a mood of general mental
discontent and peevishness. In a certain amount of childish
questioning, indeed, we have, I suspect, to do with a distinctly
abnormal mental state, with an analogue of that mania of questions,
or passion for mental rummaging or prying into everything,
“Grubelsucht” as the Germans call it, which is a well-known phase of
mental disease, and prompts the patient to put such questions as
this: “Why do I stand here where I stand?” “Why is a glass a glass, a
chair a chair?” Such questioning ought, it is evident, not to be
treated too seriously. We may attach too much significance to a
child’s question, labouring hard to grasp its meaning, with a view to
answering it, when we should be wiser if we viewed it as a symptom
of mental irritability and peevishness, to be got rid of as quickly as
possible by a good romp or other healthy distraction.[44]
To admit, however, that children’s questions may now and again
need this sort of wholesome snubbing is far from saying that we
ought to treat all their questioning with a mild contempt. The little
questioners flatter us by attributing superior knowledge to us, and
good manners should compel us to treat their questions with some
attention. And if now and then they torment us with a string of
random reckless questioning, in how many cases, one wonders, are
they not made to suffer, and that wrongfully, by having perfectly
serious questions rudely cast back on their hands? The truth is that
to understand and to answer children’s questions is a considerable
art, including both a large and deep knowledge of things, and a
quick sympathetic insight into the little questioners’ minds, and few
of us have at once the intellectual and the moral excellences needed
for an adequate treatment of them. It is one of the tragi-comic
features of human life that the ardent little explorer looking out with
wide-eyed wonder upon his new world should now and again find as
his first guide a nurse or even a mother who will resent the majority
of his questions as disturbing the luxurious mood of indolence in
which she chooses to pass her days. We can never know how much
valuable mental activity has been checked, how much hope and
courage cast down by this kind of treatment. Yet happily the
questioning impulse is not easily eradicated, and a child who has
suffered at the outset from this wholesale contempt may be
fortunate enough to meet, while the spirit of investigation is still
upon him, one who knows and who has the good nature and the
patience to impart what he knows in response to a child’s appeal.
38. The first question put by Preyer’s boy was, ‘Where is mamma?’
Die Seele des Kindes, p. 412. (The references are to the third
edition, 1890.)
39. Cf. some shrewd remarks by Dr. Venn, Empirical Logic, p. 494.
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