HIGH LIVING COSTS

Gisborne Times, Volume LXIII, Issue 10141, 29 October 1925, Page 7

HIGH LIVING COSTS

CAUSES DISCUSSED. Few would challenge the general contention that less extravagance and harder work would increase prosperity and contentment. In a discussion of this scheme, Mr Frank Munsey wrote of the conditions in America : “increased wages and shorter hours, and perhaps lower efficiency for the hours worked, have cut a bigger figure in tlie high cost of living than anything else. This high cost of production is expressed in every phase of endeavour and in every phase of living—expressed alike on the farm, in the factory, in mining, merchandising, transportation, clerical force and in domestic service. We cannot get something for nothing: we cannot double the cost of a business or residential building and expect to get rents at the same price. And the cost of building is tremendously increased as the hours of labor are decreased and the wages of labor advanced. This lias its bearing as well as in the material that goes into the building and the transportation of the material, as it docs in assmbling, fashioning it into

uabitable structure. Taxes arc necessarily higher as municipal expenses increase, and this, too, is expressed in the price of x*ents either in business or residential properties. Indeed, the effect of higher wages and shorter hours of work is felt in a thousand ways, all of which have to do with the present high cost of living. Moreover, high living has a good deal to do with the high cost of living.' Our demands are constantly expanding as we drift further and further away from the siniple life. We nvust»have better homes, with more conveniences, and more luxuries, must dress better and better and dress our children better,, and have, more a niusement than a dozen years ago. ' With a return, to the thrift of our forefathers and something of their genius for the love of work, wo should no longer feel tlie grip of the high cost of living. In our extravagance in our sweep. towards ease and idleness our growing antinathy to work, is a real danger to the nation.” That might have been written of present conditions in New Zealand, hut the chief interest is that it does not refer to the post-war period at all, but was published in Oct., 1912. • •