The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News and The Echo. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 1930. WEATHER AND FINANCE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 39, 15 February 1930, Page 8

The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News and The Echo.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 1930. WEATHER AND FINANCE.

For the cause that laclcs assistance, For the tcrong that needs resistance, For the future in the distance, And the good that we can do.

Considering all that the people of New Zealand in general, and Auckland in particular, have suffered from our climate this summer, weather conditions here supply an entirely legitimate topic for public discussion. There is a point of contact between Meteorology on the one hand and Economics and Public Finance on the-other, and it is from this standpoint that we now desire to approach the perennial subject of the weather.

Some eighty years ago astronomers engaged in observing sun-spots established the fact that these extraordinary phenomena occur on a large scale at regular intervals of about ten years. Now, whatever the precise cause or nature of sun-spots, there is no doubt that they are accompanied by serious meteorological disturbances. This means that with their recurrence the earth is subjected to certain extreme influences of a climatic nature at regular intervals of ten or eleven years.

But evidently meteorological changes such as we have described necessarily affect the earth's productive capacity. From this it follows that at intervals of ten years or so the world in general finds its ability to maintain its inhabitants seriously modified by climatic causes —periodic droughts or floods and changes of temperature. These conditions naturally apply with most force to the production of those foodstuffs on which the majority of mankind depend for subsistence. And so we reach the conclusion that the productivity of the earth and the supply of primary products are subject to cyclical modifications chiefly due to certain regularly changing conditions in solar activity.

The first thinker jp modern times who ever attempted to collate these facts and give them a distinctly economic bearing was Professor Stanley Jevons, one of the most brilliant scientific theorists of the nineteenth century. In an article in "Nature," entitled "Sun-Spot= and Commercial Crises," Jevons endeavoured to link together the periodic series of events or phenomena which we have described, and to summarise his inferences in the form of a definite economic theory. Thus we arrive at the famous doctrine of the periodicity of Commercial Crises which Jevons formulated sixty years ago, to the effect that as periodic solar disturbances produce changes in climatic conditions, and these in turn modify the productivity of the earth, we may expect that the supply of commodities, the value of goods, and the state of the world's finance will be subject to "cyclic perturbations" at approximately the intervals at which the sunspots tend to recur.

Much ridicule was poured upon this theory by ignorant or superficial critics Avhen it was first put forward. Of course, Jevons was far too able a scientist to ignore the possibility of conflicting causes, and he makes full allowance for such modifications. But not only is his theory of Commercial Crises within the limits that he laid down strictly logical and scientific; it is also supported by the records of economic and financial history. Jevons was able to show that during the greater part of the nineteenth century, periods of economic disorder and financial stringency did actually occur at intervals often or eleven years iu strict accordance with the periodical variations in the state of the solar universe indicated by the reappearance of sun-spots. This view of economic conditions, which makes them subject to immutable physical laws, may produce rather a discouraging or paralysing effect upon certain types of mind and character. But Man spends the whole of his existence in struggling with the forces of Nature, and human progress merely marks his successive triumphs over them. If commercial and industrial crises tend to recur periodically, it is our obvious duty in time of prosperity to be prepared for "the evil days to come"; and when the ebb of depression is at its lowest we may at least console ourselves with the reflection that, other things being equal, sooner or later the tide, in accordance with inexorable physical laws, must surely turn.