Economics and the Public

Dominion, Volume 25, Issue 267, 6 August 1932, Page 16

Economics and the Public

’iry ▼ B all know that in industry to-day one man can produce V / what would once have employed twenty men or more,” says % / Dr. Temple, Archbishop of York, in the course of a lengthy V V contribution in the “Contemporary Review.” “The new appliances are called labour-saving machinery. All through the nineteenth century, with rapidly expanding markets, it could be assumed that the results of the economy so effected could be invested and that the market would sufficiently expand to absorb the additional product. “ It is no longer true that demand expands at the same pace as production. In the system under which we have lived it has been inevitable that labour-saving, machinery should be used not directly to save labour but to save labourers. We have gone on the supposition that labour is a commodity to be sold in the market like any other'commodity and therefore to be sold as dear as the seller can sell and to be. bought As cheap as the buyer can-buy.- ' • . “ The trouble is that currency, or money, has been bound up with production, as a result of the great advance of the nineteenth century, instead of being bound up with the capacity to produce. If you make that change in your mind, the result will be that you want money to be available for members of the community in relation to its capacity to produce; but if this is done you must effect some combination with the existing tradition;, because if yon made that change pure and simple the result would be you ■would have a policy of the kind generally called inflation, a debased or deteriorated currency. .' “The aim of the new school of economic thought is to create demand by distribution of such purchasing-power as will set all the nation’s productive plant working. But, if it were distributed irrespective of the share

taken in actual production,' most people would take no share, and production would cease just as much as now when purchasing-power is not available. “But it remains true that in large measure pepole are thinking only of producing and not of. any effort to increase or distribute purchasing power. After all.j/sbme of our home industries have continued to flourish just because the unemployed have had some money to buy goods and so made a demand upon them. The dole has partly saved the home market. What we must keep in our minds is that, .if only you can get a good market, the market sets the process of production going. 1 “ The consumer is really the pivot of the situation; but the problem of production has been so acute that, our attention has been fastened on that. Now there are a number of people at this moment trying with very great thoroughness to work out what effects such a transformation would have upon our economic, system. . It is desirable that, the public should more widely and carefully follow that line of inquiry. “I do not imagine that any of those who are following it have thought it through to the'end or have any recommendation upon which we could act now or upon which it would be reasonable to act until by other means the nation has rescued itself from the present immediate crisis. But even when that is done we shall merely pass from one crisis to another more acute than the last unless something along these lines is attempted. “Moreover, this way of approachtag the matter is really more consonant with Christian principles than most approaches, because it begins with people instead of beginning with things. We are rather fond of saying that ‘things are In the saddle and ride mankind? and having thus quoted some ingenious person’s epigram we thing we have summed up the matter and we leave things to go on riding men.”