Fifth and finally, for the present, we postulate that man tends to be a creature of habit and powerfully influence by the social counterpart of habit, namely, custom. William James once called habit "the enormous flywheel of society" and this still seems a fair characterization since habit, like the flywheel, brings the powerful factor of inertia into play in human affairs.  The same is true of custom.  From the standpoint of the distributive process both habit and custom are tremendously important since they tend to stabilize existing systems of distribution by causing men to accept and take for granted even those distributive arrangements which work to their disadvantage and are not essential.  Thus such arrangements prove far more durable and stable than one would expect and persist far longer than a careful analysis of the pattern itself would otherwise indicate (1966, p.32).