The Guardian And Evening Star, with which is incorporated the West Coast Times. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 7, 1927. ECONOMIC BETTERMENT

Hokitika Guardian, 7 October 1927, Page 2

The Guardian And Evening Star, with which is incorporated the West Coast Times. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 7, 1927. ECONOMIC BETTERMENT

I According to the Belfast Chamber of Commerce journal, Sir Josiali Stamp I spoke recently at the Manchester Luncheon Club on “Human and NaItural Factors in Economic Betterment.’’ In the course of his remarks I he expressed the view that the future world was going to be a very different I place from what it had been, and there were many problems presented to us of an extremey delicate character. There was the question of the relations between employments of different kinds of the interest of labour in the conduct of industry, of the distribution of population, of national savings, of whether we wanted a large or small foreign trade in proportion to our total trade or whether it should he left to chance, and the question of price-level control. All these problems needed to be approached by all kinds of brains from all kinds of angles, and they were problems wo could not think of in times of strife. To do so would be like attempting to play billiards in a storm at sea. Generally speaking, we seemed to alternate between two periods—one during which, free from industrial strife, wc were content to go along as we were, anyone who wished to meddle with industrial conditions was regarded as academic, eccentrics, or officious; and the other a period of actual conflict, when we all wanted to think but could not. Our responsibilities could easily be dodged but we could not dodge the consequences of dodging. And if we carefully examine public affairs and problems we should find that we had ignored in the past that there were natural limits which must be accepted, and human limits could be overcome. Our industrial system was likened by the speaker to an extremely complexmachine consisting of a variety of delicate parts, which, when they worked harmoniously, resulted in a productivity the world had never seen before. But when any derangement set in productivity was reduced in proportion to the complexity of the machine. There was nothing to be gained by suggesting where the blame lay for the troubles of the last ten years. Reviling the past was useless. What we wanted was the closest application to our problem in the future, free from all recrimination. Any reference to the prospects for human betterment must take into account factors that were human and factors that were natural. The natural factors were food supplies and population, which must be considered in conjunction with the results of the past human action which could be only slowly modified, such as the ! effects of war on debt, currency, and < foreign trade. On the human side was 1 the will to work, to save, to take risks *

and to pioneer, and to bo sensible in consumption. And more important, perhaps, than all others was the capacity to think rationally and fairly. Many of tis thought acutely sectionally, hut the cultivation of a wider range of national thinking was imperative. W© must learn to fit local facts into their complete setting. Human faults could be divided into faults of temperament and faults of knowledge. The latter the lecturer regarded as the

more important. Most people, lie explained, understood in a general way that we coukl not have a higher standard of life unless we produced plenty. But the implications of this doctrine were rarely understood. Merely to suggest that the remedy for all our trouble was to increase production was to preach folly, because although the doctrine was good in the long run, it was not always good in the short run. Production had to be related to human requirements, and the closest study of the requirements of our markets should he made before we preached the increase of output as the single solution of our difficulties. It was not tho ignorance of facts and principles of our employers to which tho speaker chiefly objected, but their failure - to relate them together. In America,, for example, employers had the clearest ideas about keeping free of European entanglements and about investment policy, but you could never get tlicm to face the fact that their investment policy implied that in another twentyeight years they would ho owners of half Germany. And what would become of their foreign policy then? In Britain there was failure to co-ordin-ate in any sort of way the London money market policy with the question of cheap exports. \ T et money could not he lent abroad unless wage costs were low enough to make people take such exports. AVe never asked ourselves whether we could afford-' to maintain an output of foreign loans, which should depend upon the amount of our national savings. Nowhere wag there any conscious co-ordinate thinking. And so economic betterment may come only from a logical consideration of the whole facts of the case in a closo financial review.