BRITISH INDUSTRY.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVII, 30 October 1928, Page 9

BRITISH INDUSTRY.

AS WELL MANAGED AS AMERICAN. HARVARD PROFESSOR’S COMMENT. Professor Allyn A. Young, of Harvard University, now on the faculty of London University, paused a startled murmur to run through tlie economics section of the Convention of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

Professor Young was speaking on the increasing returns of business, and had been expected as an American to laud the efficiency of American methods. Instead, he turned tables on the audience and declared, “I know of no facts which prove or even indicate that British industry, when seen agaftist the background of its own problems and possibilities, is less efficiently organised or less ably directed than American industry.

Professor Young, who is a heavily built man with a booming voice, declared : ‘ ‘Those who hold that American industry is managed better, that its leaders study its problems more intelligently, plan more courageously, more wisely, can cite: no fact- to support their opinion save differences in the results achieved.” Sometimes the fact that the American laborer works with the help of a larger supply of power-driven, labor-saving machinery than do tlie laborers of the other countries, is cited as evidence of the super-intelligence ot the average American employers, but this will not do. The volume of the American industrial product results, he said, from the vastness of the American domestic market, with foreign egress often unimpeded by tariff barriers. In the course of his presidential address before the engineering" section of the British Association, Professor Win. Ellis observed that strong rumours were current of the advent of a new type of toot steel which is expected to bring about a great change in output. He doubted if the announcement would be welcomed by many large industrial firms, already equipped at considerable outlay with reasonably modern tools, now "about to become obsolete —a curious repetition in history of so many mechanical inventions.

Among other subjects discussed were fermentation, secret societies, liighpressure boilers, starfish and Japanese antiquities.' .Women natural scientists participated, one discoursing on sandhills in central Alberta, another gave an account of Egyptian deities, a. third spoke of the forests of Europe.