Wairarapa Times-Age SATURDAY, AUGUST 20, 1938. SCIENCE AND SOCIAL LIFE.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 20 August 1938, Page 4

Wairarapa Times-Age SATURDAY, AUGUST 20, 1938. SCIENCE AND SOCIAL LIFE.

A.T the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which opened in Cambridge a day or two ago, mention was made of a decision reached recently to establish a new division of the association “to deal with the social and international relations of science and to investigate social problems arising from scientific advances.” The conditions in which the new division is to operate have yet to be defined, but a very wide.and important field evidently awaits its attention. Apart from the extent to which scientific discoveries are applied to purposes of destruction in war—a subject to which Lord Rayleigh referred in his presidential address — the world evidently is failing to make an intelligent use even in peaceful industry of the powers that science has unleashed. The initial fact commanding attention in any such study of social and international problems as the • British Association is now to undertake—it may be hoped in- an organised arid orderly fashion—is that much of the scientific and other progress on which we plume ourselves today amounts onlj r to detail achievements and that the art of making an intelligently co-ordinated use of increased productive and other powers is still in its infancy. This state of affairs is justly a reproach to men of science, besides indicating the need of higher general levels of intelligence in civilised communities. So far as the life of individual nations is concerned, the failure thus far to « make any such advance in general organisation as has been made in details of production appears most clearly in the persistence of widespread unemployment. After years of effort to that end, it is doubtful if a single country of any importance can claim to have solved the problem of unemployment. Statistics published recently by the International Labour Office’ showed, for instance, that in nine countries unemployment increased during the second quarter of 1938. as compared with the corresponding quarter of the previous year. These . countries were: The .United States, Canada, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Denmark, Bulgaria and Norway. According to still later estimates, 'there are now from 12 million to 13 million persons unemployed in the United States and at a recent date the number of registered unemployed in the United Kingdom was approximately 1,800,000. So bad is the position that in many instances governing and other authorities are reduced to saying that in modern conditions we are bound to have some unemployment. Why an increased command over natural resources and the processes of production should entail unemploy- » merit is not, however, explained. The position reaches its height of absurdity when, as is the case in New Zealand at present, ’ unemployment exists side by side with an admittedly serious shortage of population. The problems here involved offer splendid scope for orderly and sustained scientific investigation. Clear guidance is needed in order that the problem of unemployment and its accompanying evils may be attacked as they ought to be . Particularly in a country, like our own, in which there is ample room for expansion, it ought to be little more difficult to establish conditions in which productive employment would be available to the whole population than it is to adopt methods which increase or' multiply production in particular industries. At present however, we have established a tolerably effective command over production in detail, but stand baffled before the problem of intelligently organising our total working force. It should be recognised in New Zealand, as it is beginning to be recognised in countries of older development, that this problem must be studied and brought to a solution if anything like satisfactory stable social and industrial conditions are to be established.