20th Century's New Deal

20th Century's New Deal

Where are the demobilized army and defense workers going to get new jobs? . . . Who is going to own and operate the plants which the Government is financing or building outright? How long must price controls and priorities be continued after the war ends? . . .

To keep these and other equally important questions from suddenly confounding the nation at war's end, the 20th Century Fund has set out to get them discussed at once. To that end the Fund this week publishes the first of six economic essays on the post-war world by New-Dealing Economist Stuart Chase.

In this first short volume (The Road We Are Traveling, 1914-42; $1) he reviews the economic trends of the last three decades, and comes up grasping one really big idea: that society should find some means to get its economic machine running in peacetime at wartime capacity.

In this respect his book is a success. In other respects it is mostly Stuart Chase. His apt observations on the past economic mistakes of the U.S. are interlarded with inferences based on such uncritical assumptions as:

That technological unemployment and "oversaving" are basic causes of depressions; that economic frontiers have been reached and the opportunities for private capital investment are decreasing; that public-works programs can raise the living standard; that heavy armaments expenditures produce prosperity; that a big factor in past U.S. prosperity was rising real-estate prices.

Using such dubious ideas as if they were axioms, he finally reasons that technological progress, enabling men to produce more of the necessities with less effort, is "a major cause" of unemployment, of agricultural surpluses, of excess plant capacity, of the decline of free markets, of the falling rate of interest, even of the falling birth rate. These things, he says, in effect, have done in capitalism for good.

He does not detail his picture of a better economic world, but he foreshadows it by insisting that, whether men like it or not, Government must operate the nation's peacetime economy as it operates the wartime economy.

Truest line in the book: "The books which will explain the new world we are entering have not been written."

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