NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21358, 6 December 1932, Page 8

NOTES AND COMMENTS

COMMUNITY SPENDING On the initiative of the Rotary Club, Bristol is organising a scheme of "community spending for employment" in that city, with the active goodwill and support of its leading citizens and organisations. Mr. Hugh E. Galloway, president of the British association of Rotary, explained that the Bristol scheme aims at reversing tho vicious revolution of reduced demand by securing personal pledges to purchase goods and services which will most directly tend to increase employment locally. A schedule of such goods and services has been prepared and (apart from other forms of publicity) between 20,000 and 30.000 householders and firms are being circularised with personal pledge cards and a house-to-house canvass organised. The aim is to secure £IOO,OOO worth of additional local spending during the months of January, February and March. "The same scheme is now being recommended by our association for tho simultaneous consideration of tho Rotary clubs situated in some 370 cities and towns of the British Isles, and we hope that all citizens who are in sympathy with the scheme will use their best endeavours to assist," Mr. Galloway added. Obviously a widespread local adoption would result in a stimulus national in its effects. Wo arc similarly bringing it to the immediate attention of Rotary International in tho hope that it may be earnestly considered by Rotary clubs throughout the world. We are convinced that wise spending is true economy and is necessary to tho rehabilitation of trade and tho consequent decrease of unemployment."

GOLD FOR AMERICA Referring to the war debts as international agreements to ship an agreed weight of gold to the United States, Dr. Herbert Levinstein, in an address at the Imperial College of Science, said that the only sensible way to carry out this undertaking was to arrange for this quantity to be obtained by extra production and not by withdrawing it from stock, by removing it from where it was wanted for the purpose of international trade and industry. "Do not for one moment thinkthat there is in tho world a shortage of gold-containing ore," he said. "The world stock of refined gold is insignificant compared with that contained in known deposits. Consider the position if the United States of America had demanded to be paid not in gold but in bricks. The quantity would have been large. Should we have pulled down our houses in order to supply her ? Wo should have arranged for their manufacture from clay in tho usual way and taken good care that the shipments did not prevent us from having all the bricks we wanted for our own housing schemes. But just because the material was gold, the ordinary commercial producers' outlook was never adopted. It is a proved fact that had we chosen to pay our £30,000,000 in gold to tho United States of America annually by mining weaker ores than private enterprise could have been expected to, the undertaking would have presented no serious difficulty. Now that gold is fetching a premium in terms of sterling new mines are coming into production, financed by experienced people, who see in so doing a handsome profit.' Having undertaken to pay tho interest on our war debt to the United States not in goods nor in sterling, but in gold, the obvious course was to produce ore and to send this gold to them." MEN OR MACHINES "Machinery has been for many years visibly displacing men from employment in all industries. No economic processes can ever find remunerative, work for them elsewhere, for science is progressively diminishing the demand for man-power," Sir Harold Bowden wrote recently in a letter to the Times. "An agricultural revival, emigration, a universal five-day week (were this possible) would act as palliatives, bat tho mechanisation process will inevitably continue and be intensified." These conclusions were challenged by Mr. P. Sargant Florence, professor of commerce in the Birmingham University. "Though in some manufacturing trades machinery appears to be displacing men, this is not true of industry and commerce in general, and it is incorrect to say that no economic processes can ever find remunerative work for displaced men, he wrote. "While in manufacturing industries the numbers actually employed between 1924 and 1929 increased about proportionately to population, the numbers employed in building, transport, distribution and services increased from 5,549,000 to 4,148,000, well in excess of population growth. Clearly the greater the output from manufacturing industry as a result of mechanisation the greater is the number of persons required to sell or serve that increased output, since this cannot usually be done mechanically. Tho consequences of tho introduction of machinery are not, in my opinion, beyond the possibility of mitigation through a policy of shorter hours, if the practice of working multiple shifts were extended. In that case, while work was more evenly distributed among available labourers, efficient machinery would be worked longer hours and tho fixed overhead machine costs ' considerably reduced per unit of product. This reduction would allow lower prices and increased sales, and might even permit the same wage to bo paid to labour as before.'l