The Work, Wealth, and Happiness of Mankind
By
[Doubleday, Doran, 2 vols., $7.50]
MORE than one economist has been beset by the idea, during the last ten years, that the time is ripe for another great work on the subject of political economy. Someone should do for our day what Adam Smith did for his one hundred and fifty years ago, and what John Stuart Mill accomplished for his generation in the middle of the last century. The task is a difficult one, as Mr. Wells found. He tried various approaches to this problem of making clear to the common man what our workaday activities are all about, what we are all up to, why some of us are toiling so industriously to produce things, and some, it seems, doing nothing but consuming. He found it a tremendous task, and in the end he brings forth a book much less ambitious than he had originally planned. He recognizes that it is a less finished work than his Outline of History, or his Science of Life, which, together with this volume, are intended as a trilogy. In the long run, he Feels, a better work of the same substance must replace this one. The author’s frank recital of his difficulties is not the least of his contributions to the future of economic writing.
The book is organized quite differently from the ordinary textbook on economics, and is, as anyone might suspect, much more readable. Indeed, it, is nothing short of fascinating to the lay mind as well as to the professional. The unconventional nature of his approach is founded on something deeper than the author’s literary skill and daring. It has its roots in the new point of view which dominates the science of philosophy at the present day. We are striving to see everything as part of a process, as growing out of the past under the operation of ascertainable laws, and giving rise in a similar manner to the future. For economics this means that a doctrine of process in the field of industry and trade should show us the immediate phases of our world as consistent and intelligible parts of economic process at large. It should enable us to understand their human significance, and to act wisely with reference to them, especially with a view to rational social control aimed at economic welfare. Here we have the key to Wells’s method of approach and execution.
To him the most surprising thing about most of our methods of producing wealth is their novelty. Whether we are dealing with our mastery over force and matter, with the conquest of distance or of hunger, with the problem of housing or of health, we are employing a technique which is in most instances less than a century old. In many cases it has been in use only a few decades or even years. All the world is in flux; hence the emphasis upon process. All this is set forth with a freshness and enthusiasm which captivate the reader.
But our mental habits and our political and financial institutions are more rigid. They have been much slower in their adjustment to these new methods of production than the welfare of our race demands. In attacking them Mr. Wells is his old iconoclastic self. He spares practically none of them, and government comes in for an especially penetrating critique. Space does not permit of a review of his specific criticisms or his proposals for reform, but a single quotation bearing upon our present muddle in the field of credit and finance will give the reader some notion of the quality of his attack upon established institutions,
‘Things that are now impossible will become practicable, easy, and “natural.” . . . There is no essential reason why a world-controlled monetary system should not be continually draining away indebtedness by a steady, gentle, continual monetary inflation; why it should be necessary to upset the balance of production and consumption by “savings”; why the creation of new productive capital should be possible only by the evocation of debts. The economic mechanism of mankind groans under a vast burthen of debt now, by habit and custom, and not by necessity. Debt prevents plenty, it is a restraint and a subtraction, but debt is no more essential to economic life than was human sacrifice to the building of a bridge or the raising of wheat. Yet for ages men were unable to disentangle the one thing from the other.’
DAVID FRIDAY