Egg-Throwing Champions of Turlock
LAST spring I read about the Turlock, California, plan for reducing overproduction of eggs by direct action. The patriotic men of Turlock, according to the dispatches, agreed to throw the surplus eggs at each other. The affair was sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce. Two local groups — fittingly named the Rotary Club and the Exchange Club — entered the competition for the egg-throwing championship of Turlock. The winning team, with one hundred cases of more or less fresh-laid ammunition, was to challenge teams from Merced and Modesto. That seemed to me, at the time, like an idea that might be carried much further.
I admit that I am nothing but an amateur in economics — a dub, in fact, with a handicap of fifty. To me every shot in economics is a mental hazard. When anyone asks me, suddenly, why people have to starve in the midst of plenty, for the life of me I cannot think of the answer. I know it must have something to do with the law of supply and demand. Everything has. But the very thought of ‘supply and demand’ is to me like a pond in front of the first tee.
Still, even I could see at once that there was merit in the Turlock plan. Certainly the hens cannot be blamed for overproduction. The Poultry Division of the State University has long been teaching them how to lay more eggs. It has even gone so far as to provide electric lights, so that the endurance sitters could work twenty-four hours a day. No doubt every one of these misguided birds thought that she was rendering a service to the state every time she laid an egg. She even cackled over it — in spite of being a Californian.
No, the hens are not wholly to blame. Slocum, who works in the office where I work, says that even if the hens got together to limit output and maintain prices they would be prosecuted, under the Sherman Act, for conspiracy in restraint of trade. The least we can say of the Turlock plan, Slocum says, is that it is truly Californian: anyone who has been often to the movies knows that this has long been the Hollywood method of reducing the surplus production of custard pies.
But for disposing of surplus fruit, it must be admitted, this method does not work so well — at least not in Boston; for when Rudy Vallée was on the stage in that cultured city, crooning ‘Give me something to remember you by,’ the college student who threw a grapefruit at him was expelled from college. The faculty, it seemed to me, did not grasp the profound economic significance of this brave example in a country which is groaning under the weight of too much of everything.
Still, I realized that a college faculty must know far more about economic theories than I do. I don’t even know what Adam Smith said about the theory of direct action, as applied to citrous fruit, or how Malthus proposed to solve the problem of too much food of all kinds. It may be that the faculty referred the case to the School of Business Administration, and were informed that the Turlock method of egg-throwing contests would not wholly solve Pittsburgh’s problem of too many steel rails — or even, Slocum added, the college’s own problem of too many students.
Perhaps, after all, the best way to solve economic problems is to leave them alone. Laissez faire. Let nature take its course. This means, Slocum says, leaving it to the Lazy Fairies. But Slocum speaks too flippantly of the forces of nature. When it comes to destroying surplus wealth, for example, what is so swift and sweeping as a great flood! Everybody knows how merrily the cash registers began to ring in Vermont, and how quickly the confidence of business men was restored, by the destruction of wealth in the great flood. Perhaps we should pray for bigger and better floods — or for another war. After all, nothing but a world war could relieve the world of its surplus wealth on so grand a scale.
No, the Turlock plan is too slow.
Just as I came to that conclusion, I read about a plan which seemed far more sensible. Why not attack the trouble at its source? Why not reduce production? ‘Our efforts to produce goods in America should be eased off,’ says Mr. J. George Frederick. ‘To avoid burdensome surpluses, production must now be definitely throttled down. The country’s men and machines could perform veritable miracles, if the product could be absorbed. But it can’t.’ Here is a business man’s solution of a business problem. Mr. Frederick is President of the Business Bourse of New York City.
‘Growers,’ he says, ‘must refrain from working as hard and as long. The only question is how production can be reduced most evenly and painlessly.’
When I read that, I wondered why I had n’t thought of it myself. How true it is that all really great ideas are very simple!
No sooner had I heard of this plan than I began to read in the papers about various practical ways of carrying it out. I read about the decision of Minneapolis to ban the use of laborsaving machines in municipal projects, and go back to picks and shovels. Then I read about the bill proposed by the painters’ union in Brooklyn, New York, requiring all painters to use three-inch instead of six-inch brushes. I wondered why the city fathers of Minneapolis had not thought of the simple device of forbidding the use of shovels more than three inches wide.
While we are about it, why not abandon the use of typewriters and telephones? Why not sow and reap by hand? Any ingenious person can think of a hundred other ways of making one blade grow where two grew before; and, what is more important, making two jobs grow where one grew before.
The chief cause of overproduction, evidently, is efficiency. Clearly, then, the cure for overproduction is inefficiency. When I said that to Slocum, he agreed at once. He declared that industry, in the United States, needs above all else bigger, better, and busier inefficiency experts. The government, he thinks, might be able to supply them.
As a symbol, the new order might use a three-inch painters’ brush, rampant. Slocum says a crab, couchant, would be more appropriate, but Slocum never takes things seriously. He even goes so far as to say that the chief cause of overproduction is scientific research, and that Hoover ought to bring about a ten-year moratorium on inventions.
I had about concluded that the President of the Business Bourse was right, — that the only question is how production can be reduced most evenly and painlessly, — when Maggie, our charwoman, came into the office; and I could n’t help wondering how production could be reduced painlessly for Maggie — for Maggie and her three small children. Or, indeed, for four million other families which, if we can believe the charity societies, are now suffering from anything but superabundance.
To tell the truth, the more economic theory I read, the more confused I get. Why are so many millions in want? Because we have produced too much. Why must they wear shabby clothes? Because we have too much cotton, too much wool, too many mills, and too many mill hands who want to make cloth. Why must millions live in slums — foul breeding places of disease and crime? Because we have too much lumber, too much steel, too many carpenters, too many plumbers. Why can’t we transport surplus products to the places where they are needed? Because we have too many freight cars, too many railroad workers, too many trucks, too many —
But this does n’t make sense. The economists told us, even in the heights of our prosperity, that ten million families were trying in vain to live decently on what they could buy with less than fifteen hundred dollars a year. Since then production has fallen off 20 per cent, and ten million families have been forced further down the scale of living.
What can be done about it? Only one thing, we are told. ‘The only question is how production can be reduced most evenly and painlessly.’
Well, as I said in the beginning, I am a dub at economic theory. I can’t see how either throwing eggs at each other or painlessly preventing the hens from laying so many eggs will solve Maggie’s problem. And I fancy it is on the solution of Maggie’s problem that our national security depends.
Slocum says there are only two cures for general overproduction, anyway: one is to reduce production and stabilize poverty; the other is to increase consumption and stabilize prosperity. The first cure we have been trying for the past two years: we have been ‘throttling down production to the level of consumption’ — and, of course, throttling down jobs in the process. I wonder how much more throttling the people will stand.