ECONOMIC WASTE.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21145, 1 October 1930, Page 6

ECONOMIC WASTE.

The natural propensity which most of us have for fastening our attention upon the dramatic, and looking about for individuals upon whom responsibility or blame can be placed, has no doubt a certain social value in diversifying the monotony of a drab existence, and even in providing some stimulus for further progress. But in many directions its influence is unfortunate, because it hinders us from paying due regard to some of the most important, but unseen, because largely impersonal, factors which prevent our economic standards from reaching the high level which, even with our present equipment of knowledge, it would be reasonable to expect. Reflections such as these are suggested by study of some of the tables in the last published volume of the 1926 Census Report on Unemployment from Sickness and Other Causes. The more obvious topics of political and industrial controversy are so much more superficially interesting,

and provide so much scope for picturesque clash of forceful personalities, that we easily overlook the enormous wastage caused every year throughout the Dominion by sickness and accident, a great part of which is presumably avoidable. Unfortunately tnany people at the time of the 192(j censuTs failed to answer the questions - on this subject in such a way as to make possible the inclusion of their cases in a statistical summary. The published figures cover therefore only 41 per cent, of the males following a gainful occupation, and 27 per cent, of the females. But even within this restricted field an arresting picture of economic waste is presented. The Census 'Report refers to the year 1925-26, but there is no good reason for supposing that the position is very different to-day. If the answers given to the' census questions were reasonably reliable, the number of working days lost during 1925-26 as a result of sickness and accident exceeded four million, the average being a little more than 19' days, or roughly one-sixteenth of the normal working period, per person answering the census inquiry. The average thus calculated is somewhat misleading, as it gives undue weight to instances where people were incapacitated for the whole of the year, but even when all allowances of this kind • are made the loss revealed is deplorable. One male in eight and one female in ten were losers of one month or more from sickness or accident arising out of their employment. It is interesting to observe that the average number of days lost by those who were unemployed at -the time of the census is much greater than that of other sections of the community. 111-health often causes unemployment, continued unemployment causes sickness, and thus in a vicious spiral the costs of social wastage are piled up. Anyone who claims to have a panacea for our economic ills may at once be set down as a charlatan, but if, instead of indulging in futile mutual recriminations, the community as a whole were to set its mind seriously to the study of the prevention of ill-health, the relations between working conditions, accident, and occupational diseases, and the causes of the marked variations in disease risk run by persons, working in different occupations, many of the controversies about which we often become much more excited could be viewed more calmly and with a better sense of proportion. These are matters not to be looked at merely, or even mainly, as questions of sentiment or of charitable organisation; an understanding of them should form part of the intellectual equipment of every hard-headed, prosaic student of. economic development and progress.