THE AGE OF GLUT

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXVIII, Issue 4631, 4 December 1934, Page 7

THE AGE OF GLUT

WHY PRODUCTION IS AMPLE.

WHILE PEOPLE STARVE. The present spectacle of faim'ne and waste the world over is without parallel in the record of modern civilisation, writes "The Literary Digest: Lines of the workless stand outside free food and clothing stations in all great capitals. Millions of peasants walk barefooted in Central Europe, we are told, and in China millions are driven by hunger to the verge of cannibalism.

But in Argentine and the United States, it is pointed out, they are burning wheat, in Brazil they are throwing coffee into the sea, in Hungary and in Rouma'nia, grain is fodder for the pigs, and in Holland vegetables for which there is no market rot in immense quantities.

In a word, the problem of production has been solved, remarks the London "New Statesman and Nation," but the unsolved problem of distribution leaves us in the age of glut amid worldwide misery. How long, asks this London weekly, will it take us to master distribution as we have mastered production? Where unaided nature produced an. ear of corn, we produce a thousand. Machinery now accomplishes with a dozen hands what a thousand hands could not accomplydi in the past. What is more, we have succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of the Eutopians in minimising the amount of necessary labour, but this London weekly goes on:

"The result is the very thing we have aimed at —leisure, or, as we call it, unemployment.

'So grotesquely have we failed in the task of distribution, and so tragically have we neglected the arts of living—in distinction from the art of making a living—that this prodigious addition to the leisure of mankind is considered a monstrous evil, a disease to be used by setting men to work. And in prese'nt conditions a monstrous evil it is.

"Yet unemployment is the ripe fruit of all the inventions of the last century, the object and the justification of every application of science to industry and agricuture. We are even on the way to removing the obstacle which economists used to think insuperable.

"Population, they thought, would always increase faster than production, so that we were doomed to eternal poverty. To-day that devil, too, is in chains. Civilised peoples produce faster than they propagate. We have escaped the old dilemma of the niggardliness of nature and the fecundity of men." The economists of a century ago, it is further remarked, if it were possible for them to observe present conditions, might say that the unbelievable thing about the twentieth century is that, having solved the infinitely complex problems of production, we yet continue to throw away all the benefits of our own cleverness by the fantastic muddle of our social and national organisation. "The New Statesman" thinks they might ask:

"How could there ever be a time when man habitually destroyed the goods they produced because they would not permit those who wanted them to have the purchasing power to pay for them?

"How could we continue to allow exchange to depend on the distribution of a metal which creditor nations could lock up with the result of impoverishing both themselves and their debtors? Is it possible, they would say, that the United States should really have preferred the payment (or title to the payment) of sums of money to the actual benefits of giving and receiving goods? "And what would they say of Brazil solemnly taking thousands of bags of coffee into a secluded valley and burning them, or, as an alternative, pressing them into briquettes as engine fuel, to cotton growers ploughing their crops into the soil, to rub-ber-planters rejoicing in the discovery of a new pest?

"The very oddest spectacle of all is presented by the economists, the doctors whom we are supposed to consult for guidance in these complex matters. The more orthodox of them —especially those who most fully recognise the folly of economic nationalism—seem to have turned away from any fruitful effort to consider the problem of this abundance. They have never tackled the economics of glut." «■

Deflation and economy are remedies for bad times, this weekly agrees, if the bad times are due to shortage. But why, when there is over-produc-tion, should we artificially make a shortage? Why not face the neces-. sity for a new economics, the economics of glut? "When the economists do face it, they will be forced to one general conclusion, however widely they may differ about its application. They will have to go far beyond their present denunciations of the follies of tariff barriers.

"They will have to go beyond the point of admitting that a new gener-

ation cannot forever be bound in the fetters of old indebtedness. They will have to agree that the only sane way of using the immense new wealth which modern science and machinery now offer is deliberately to organise its production and its distribution, not according to a theory of marginal profits, but according to human needs.

"They can call themselves Socialists or not as they please—it will not matter. They will have innumerable tasks of organisation to explore, and among them they will find it necessary to evolve a new basis of exchange; they may find gold a less suitable basis that a scientific price index.

"If they abandon their self-imposed task of explaining why we must all be poor in the midst of plenty,, and set to work to tell us how to make use of our wealth, they will find themselves, for the first time, speaking with real authority. "If they do not soon tackle their task, all the cranks and the inadequately trained people will do it for them. In which case we shall have another horrible mess.

"It will certainly be done, because the human animal, stupid and individualistic as he is, will not be bamboozled forever. When he is driven too hard he will kick, and unless the economists turn their minds to the real problems of organisation they may find the world they theorise about kicked away for a fraud—which would be an excellent thing if there were not a grave danger that the new civilisation which could take its place might be kicked away too. "Why not begin by recognising that we are really marvellously well off? Why not begin to.study the economics of glut."