RURAL SOCIOLOGY

Evening Post, Volume CXXVII, Issue 17, 21 January 1939, Page 23

RURAL SOCIOLOGY

NEW ZEALAND'S POLICY

"Rural Australia and New Zealand," by Dr. Edmund de S. Brunner, of Teachters' College, Columbia University, New York, where he is Professor in Charge of Rural Sociology, is a booklet of about seventy pages, and is published by the American Council of the Institute' of Pacific Relations. It is counted as No. 2 in "Studies of the Pacific." In 1937 Dr. Brunner left the United. States on a southern tour as a fellow of. the Carnegie Corporation, "to study trends in rural Australia and New Zealand." The resulting booklet has about forty pages on Australia and thirty on New Zealand.

In 1937. and 1938 experiments like the guaranteed price (dairy produce) in New Zealand moved so rapidly, and relevant economic figures available in 1937 became obsolete so rapidly,; that Dr. Brunner's work : would requirg both alteration, and. addition to-be up to date: but this fact arises from obvious circumstances,beyond his control. Sociological,experiments often take the experimenters, as well, as the commentators, into unexpected places. The author tries, by an addenda inset, to cure this defect, but it is incurable. Nevertheless, if the student allows for political as well as economic evolution, for the guile, of Ministers as well as for the guile of those who criticise Ministers, he will find this little volume worth reading/

In" a series of pros and cons about the guaranteeing of prices, and in an endeavour to be impartial on a politi-cal-economic issue, Dr. Brunner still comes back to the economic principle that a guaranteed price for dairy produce is in great danger of being capitalised in, land values and cow prices. "Production costs will always tend to approach the guaranteed price level." Dr. Brunner has not discovered in the New Zealand guaranteed price experiment anything to reverse these wellknown economic trends. The New Zealand Government's dairying policy is "quite the equivalent of the present price fixing desired by certain farm groups in.the United States." But, so far, only desired.

In a way Dr. Brunner is prophetic. The fall in New Zealand's London funds (sterling) up to July 31, 1937, had caught his eye. "I was amazed to hear several persons dismiss this rather lightly by saying that a second devaluation, with or without exchange control, would suffice to right the situation if necessary." Well, the second devaluation (of the New Zealand pound in relation to sterling) has not yet arrived in any substantial degree, but exchange control is here, with "selection of imports." . Read with a knowledge of what has happened since its writing, the booklet is well, worth a student's attention. Its limitations are admitted in the introduction. New Zealand's limitations in research .are also set forth. New Zealand began experimenting with the dairy industry's structure without much study of it. This American rural sociologist finds that our guaranteed price experiment is now, at last, being followed by rural sociological research that should have come first. New Zealand's rural economic policies need "much basic-re-search . . . most of which should have preceded putting the law into operation." One is forced to the conclusion that the authors of the New Zealand policies are not rural sociologists who started from a scientific basis to a political result. They are politicians who may end up by being rural sociologists if they can learn from their experience.