GOOD TIMES AND BAD

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 782, 16 July 1954, Page 19

GOOD TIMES AND BAD

ih as sex gives. life tothe novel, 80 it USed to be said that frequent references to inflation would énliven any discussion on economics. In the experience of A: J. Danks, Senior Lecturer in Economics at Canterbury University College, this is now not so. "Inflation these days," he’ says, "is no longer a term enshrouded in delicious horror. When it comes to prices rising and rising we -can take it: we are used to it." Without flatly Re aged the exife! that not nas wa will wth the last part of that proposition,. but no one will quarrel with his next’ conclusion that the still-infallible source of ‘worry and trouble is the prospect of a slump. "When is the slump coming?" Mr. Danks is regularly asked, and that gives him a starting point for six talks on the economics of boom and slump which are to be heard from YA and YZ stations at 9.15 p.m. on Thursdays, starting on July 22. Though Mr. Danks doesn’t share the certainty of many people that a slump is coming, he thinks that much not only can be said but needs to be said on the subject. For a start he assumes what he calls the "academic referee’s hold" and takes a look at what has happened already. Boom and slump, as history shows, isn’t something peculiar to our day, even if the slump of the 1930s was stubborn and prolonged beyond what previous history would have suggested. But if the trade cycle is something that can be studied over_ long periods, attitudes to it have not reCe a te

mained the same: the answer to the question "What should one’ do. about a slump?" is very different today ‘from what it was, say, 100 years ago. In fact, the conclusion Mr. Danks reaches at the end of his first talk is that people will no longer accept slumps. By way of protectionism, old age pensions, the dole and the. like, laissez faire has been fighting a losing battle, and with the Welfare State it has almost disappeared. "The point," says Mr. Danks, "is really not whether we shall have a slump again, but what we shall do about a recession, a threatened downturn." And it is this question of how depressions are generated and what can be done to stop them that concerns him in succeeding talks. Sa ne eS