The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET AUCKLAND THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 1930 THE WORLD AWRY

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1074, 11 September 1930, Page 8

The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET AUCKLAND THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 1930 THE WORLD AWRY

APART from those who do not need to work, there are enough unemployed persons in the world today to people a new continent and give it all the activities of modern life—if money and markets were available for its development. A conservative estimate of universal unemployment exceeds 12,000,000. Jn all probability the actual total is a great many more, because revolutions smother statistics in South America, while Russia and China, with teeming millions of population and seething with trouble, are, as far as reliable industrial information is concerned, virtually “outside the natural orbit of international intercourse.” Let us borrow freely from a London banker, whose profession lias become as talkative as politicians, and assert with him that the whole economic world is awry. A vast area of it is seriously distressed. Together, the British Empire, the United States of America, and Germany muster nine million unemployed—a total equal to that of the Allied armies in the World War, and one exceeding the population of Canada, which also has slipped into an economic slough. The prairie Dominion is losing £2,000,000 a month through unemployment. It need not whimper. Its plight relatively is far from being desperate or even exceptionally distressing. Since there is some comfort ip mass misery, it may be consoling to many people to know that America is more depressed than Great Britain, although its propaganda swirls and scintillates about prosperity. An international journalist has written a stimulating hook discussing “What’s Right AVith America,” and has supplied the answer in one word, “Everything.” Mr. Sisley Huddleston claims that America wants to see the wheel# go round—not merely the wheels of motor-cars and machines, but the wheels of life. Moreover, the American industrialist believes that success in selling depends on the purchasing power of the public; also that low costs of production are compatible with high salaries, that indeed high salaries are an indispensable condition of low costs of production. All those ideas and ideals may be excellent in the United States, but apparently they are not always practised in America’s dealings with other countries. Foreign purchasers of cinema films do not appear to be enthusiastfc over America’s basic principle of success in selling. In any case everything is not right with America. Its unemployment problem is worse than that of the British Empire. If the whole economic world be awry it is clear that its balance will not be restored by the work of politicians. All over the earth they have been weighed in the balance and found wanting. Their experiments and expedients turn confusion into chaos. Germany is spending* £108,000,000 a year on unemployment insurance, without reducing the ranks of the unemployed. Great Britain, in the past decade, has spent £644,000,000 in a similar way with the same result.- Each country has learnt that the world’s ills cannot be cured by a slogan, whether it be Unemployment Insurance, Protection, Free Trade, or the beautiful Socialism of Democracy’s dreams. There appears to be less difficulty in revealing the causes of world depression than about discovering remedies. Even the greatest economists differ about cause and remedy, although they all agree on the question of effect. It may be noted, however, that Professor Gustav Cassel, who has had the temerity to say that there is a great deal of confusion of thought among the economists, asserts that the public will never get its bearings on the subject so long as financiers and politicians refuse to recognise that the main cause of all the trouble is the relentless international struggle for gold, instead of aiming at stabilising its purchasing power throughout the world. So, until the competing nations are “in a position to give a more or less satisfactory stability to the unit in which we calculate the price of our goods the world may still expect a further fall in prices of goods and a further increase in the economic depression.” Of course, he also may be wrong, but his view seems more accurate than that of some financiers who have suggested that, the probable causes of the decrease in demand and the continued decline in prices have been and still are the unrest in Russia and the short skirts of women ! The truth of the matter is that the whole world is in a stage of transition with forces at work which are beyond the ability of Parliaments which are not suited, because of their democratic representation, for dealing with economic problems. New standards of living have been created in many lands, and the necessaries of life have been raised to semi-luxuries. Must these standards he reduced ?