Patten, Simon Nelson (1852–1922)

Simon Nelson Patten was an American economist, social scientist, and educator. Born in Illinois and educated at Northwestern University and Halle University, Germany, he was a founding member of the American Economics Association (AEA) and a member of faculty (later chair) of Wharton Business School, University of Pennsylvania (1888–1917).

An economist and theoretician, Patten was one of the earliest proponents of the economic importance and benefits of a mass consumption society. Critical of the harsh conditions created by industrial capitalism, Patten's theories of a “social commonwealth” as an ideal state devoid of economic and social pain preempted much of the consumerist thought of the New Deal and postwar period. Yet Patten was equally as concerned with restraint and moderation as he was with a mass consumption economy, what he termed a pleasure economy. During his forty-year career, he wrote more than twenty books and many more articles and devoted as much space to the importance of consumption as he did to how Americans could purge themselves of their vices—among them smoking, drinking, poor morals, and poor nutrition—and embrace a life enriched by communal living, abandonment of intense partisan politics and nationalism, and a transition from a pain to a pleasure economy. Major publications include The Theory of Social Forces, which laid out his ideas for a social commonwealth, and The New Basis of Civilisation, which was his most popular and influential work.

Patten's theory of consumption was premised on the notion that by the late nineteenth century, the United States was passing from a pain to a pleasure economy, from scarcity to abundance. While this transition brought many benefits, Patten's concern was that these would be concentrated at the top of the social scale rather than evenly distributed. The answer to this was the construction of a social commonwealth, a new form of social and economic organization and value system that was focused on the achievement of a high standard of living for all rather than for the few. At the same time, Patten hoped that this prized abundance would not be destroyed by humans' baser instincts. For this reason, a key component of the social commonwealth was that these instincts were restrained by intermediate social institutions such as church and social clubs and by individuals accepting responsibility for the greater good. Such restraint was the only way that people would be able to prosper and move to a higher state of progress. He opposed class divisions and politics and favored economic welfare, increased wages for workers, and other socially progressive measures that were very much in tune with those advocated by other key social reformers of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Writing at a time of vast inequalities in wealth and living conditions, Patten made a profound contribution to the fields of social work, social science, and professionalized economics at a time when these fields were flourishing.

World War I shattered Patten's dream of a social commonwealth; he opposed the war on the grounds that the prolonged conflict would endanger the promise of an economy of abundance. He stood behind U.S. involvement in the war in 1917, but his former antiwar stance and his views on social reform had damaged his standing at Wharton, and he was retired from the faculty. Until his death in 1922, he remained convinced that abundance for all could be realized if Americans adopted new values and new restraints.

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