PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL INFLUENCES ON THE WORKING POWER

The increase and decrease of the ability to do good work depends of course not only upon the direct fatigue from labor and the pauses for rest; a large variety of other factors may lead to fluctuations which are economically important.  The various hours of the day, the seasons of the year, the atmospheric conditions of weather and climate, may have such influence.  Some elements of this interplay have been cleared up in recent years.  Just as the experiments of pedagogical psychology have determined the exact curve of efficiency during the period of an hour in school, so other investigations have traced the typical curve of psychical efficiency throughout the day and the year.  Sociological and criminological statistics concerning the fluctuations in the behavior of the masses, common-sense experience of practical life, and finally, economic statistics concerning the quantity and quality of industrial output in various parts of the day and of the year, have supplemented one another.  The systematic assistance of the psychological laboratory, however, has been confined to the educational aspect of the problem.  Psychological experiments have determined how the achievement of the youth in the schoolroom changes with the months of the year and the hours of the day.  It seems as if it could not be difficult to secure here, too, a connection between exact experiment and economic work.  Much will have to be reduced to individual variations.  The laboratory has already confirmed the experience of daily life that there are morning workers whose strongest psychophysical efficiency comes immediately after the night’s rest, while the day’s work fatigues them more and more; and that there are evening workers who in the morning still remain under the after effects of the night’s sleep, and who slowly become fresher and fresher from the stimuli of the day.  It would seem not impossible to undertake a systematic selection of various individuals under this point of view, as different industrial tasks demand a different distribution of efficiency between morning and night.

Such a selection and adjustment may be economically still more important with reference to the fluctuations during the course of the year.  Economic inquiries, for instance, have suggested that younger and older workingmen who ordinarily show the same efficiency become unequal in their ability to do good work in the spring months, and the economists have connected this inequality with sexual conditions.  But other factors as well, especially the blood circulation of the organism and the resulting reactions to external temperature, different gland activities, and so on, cause great personal differences in efficiency during the various seasons of the year.  Inasmuch as we know many economic occupations in which the chief demand is made in one or another period of the year, a systematic study of these individual variations