Doctors of Business

BUSINESS is out of kilter and what’s to be done? Some turn out their rulers, some go in for nationalization of resource and industry, some, like ourselves, would rather hang on to the familiar ropes while they try to bring the craft back into less troubled water.

IT may be the weather. At any rate, here are three excellently qualified gentlemen telling us just what and how much —it is very much - is wrong with England and America, and for some reason or other I am not properly depressed. It is not that, as an economist, I find a good deal to dissent from in their arguments. It is a purely personal failure. I apologize to them and to the reader.

There is perhaps some excuse for me in the case of Stuart Chase.The Nemesis of American Business (Macmillan, $2.00) is a brilliantly written book. Despite its being mainly a portrayal of the innumerable results of business enterprise that neither Mr. Chase nor any other sensible person can endure, this is entertaining, not lugubrious, reading. They all are here — ghost writers and super-salesmen, back shippers and yes-men, all the humbugs and wastes and stupidities of unregulated enterprise for which Mr. Chase has such a keen eye; but in the sheer vigor of the presentation is a spirit of hope and faith and energy that is positively stimulating. Mr. Chase’s indictment is always specific, as one expects of an accountant; it finds expression through a gift for happy phrasing, — ‘a money and credit situation which does not throw off purchasing power as fast as factories can throw off vendable commodities’; ‘vast transportation systems pumping us back and forth from places where we would rather not live to places where we would rather not work,’— and his remedial schemes have a breadth that is sometimes suggestive of H. G. Wells.

Business Adrift, by Wallace B. Donham (Whittlesey House, $2.50), is in style and temper almost the complete antithesis of Mr. Chase’s book. A preface by Professor Whitehead, ‘On Foresight,’ is calculated to put one in a suitably subdued frame of mind for what is to come (I am unable to discover that it serves any other useful purpose); and the Dean of the Harvard business School then dons his prophetic mantle with a solemnity that has appalling effects on his style. Dean Donham’s ‘tentative theory of foresight’ consists in a series of elaborate statements which he persistently calls ‘methods,’ but which prove on close inspection to be merely maxims, and not very profound ones at that. We are then introduced to certain general problems confronting the business world, — the farm surplus of both produce and population, the manufacturing surplus and technological unemployment, the slowingup of new consumption, the competition for foreign markets, and so forth, — in each of which the data are presented with a surprising lack of precision, and the analysis carried much less far than the number of words devoted to it would suggest. Occasionally the author becomes lucid, and is then even more patently inadequate. For example: ‘Of course even if we had a general plan, no one would have power to enforce it, but this is not an insuperable obstacle,’ Perhaps not; but the dictum needs a good deal more support than Dean Donham has managed to find for it. Again: ‘ We should keep our Safeguarding tariffs as low as they can he and still protect adequately our own social groups.’ Which groups? And what does ‘protect adequately’ mean? That is the gist of the dilemma, but the Dean fails to inform us. Or again: ‘State unemployment insurance plans threaten the very foundations of our democracy, for they build up great groups of men feeding on government bounty while their will to work disappears. Since when have ‘insurance’ and ‘government bounty’ been synonymous terms? And is it scientific fact that statecreated work Dean Donham’s alternative—is so much more satisfactory?

The plan for American business to which all this leads up is, however, an interesting attempt to show that the oncoming situation can he adequately met without changing any of the main positions of business fundamentalism. The protective policy is to be maintained, the home market developed, and production limited in the main to its needs. High wages and shorter hours will stimulate demand to a point at which surplus man power will be reabsorbed despite increasing population, and despite the inevitable decline in the export trade, which must be accepted. Dean Donham’s sole conception of world trade is one of bitter competition, from which, for the sake of Europe and stability, this country had better withdraw. This conception of world economics, it must be admitted, is apparently that of most American delegates to world conferences; but it may none the less be open to more question than Dean Donham has given it. His theory of foresight does not, however, — he says so explicitly, — extend to the possibility of intelligent world-wide coöperation.

And so to England’s Crisis, by André Siegfried (Harcourt, Brace, $3.00). Graphs, maps, figures, charts; not a page nor a paragraph wasted; and yet, like everything M. Siegfried writes, a readable and frequently amusing book. (At least, as an Englishman, I find much of M. Siegfried’s criticism amusing - he is so thoroughly Gallic when he takes us seriously!) His ominous diagnosis deserves specific and detailed consideration that would be out of place here; but some notion of it may he inferred from the author’s main positions. ‘The doctrine that every state should be economically self-supporting,’ he says, rather dogmatically, ‘is now generally accepted.’ Accordingly he regards the abandonment of the free-trade tradition as inevitable. In so far as England is not economically self-supporting and cannot be, she can survive only by reducing her standard of living and abandoning every obstacle of whatever sort that stands in the way of that alluring prospect. The possibility of radical change in the system of production and distribution M. Siegfried does not seriously contemplate. His point of view lies entirely within the system of political ideas by which England has hitherto survived. Those who accept that point of view will find it difficult to escape M. Siegfried’s pessimistic conclusions. But even those who reject it — those who regard a fundamental reorganization of the economic and political system as both possible and necessary—must admire M. Siegfried’s delicate and incisive analysis; even if, by reason of the faith that is in them, they have an antidote to its depressing quality.

After all, it may not be the weather. M. Siegfried has another explanation. ‘ As their optimism, he says of the English, ‘is a mixture of patriotism and lethargy, it can hardly be undermined.’ But he writes on his final page: ’When England changes, we say she is dying; and it is never true.'

WILLIAM ORTON