The Doctors' Dilemma

The patient was the whole U.S., and diagnosing its state of health was something like standing in shallow water and trying to feel a whale's pulse. There was room for all, and last week doctors were crowding alongside by the scores, prodding with their stethoscopes, waving hastily scribbled prescription blanks, and bitterly berating each other as quacks, bunion choppers, herb cooks and barbers.

All were agreed that the patient had some symptoms; a light rash of unemployment and a certain falling of the price structure had been in evidence for six weeks. But what did these signs portend? Alarmists detected evidence of galloping depression. Others believed that it was just a case of a leveling-off of prices, that the patient's chart looked good and that nothing was needed but some turnip greens and a good belt of sulphur & molasses.

Keyserling Says If. The sound of dispute was loudest in Washington. The President, unmoved by signs of deflation, still demanded an anti-inflation bill. In defense of this view, Administration Economist Leon Keyserling assured the House-Senate Committee on the Economic Report with some fervor last week that the boom could go on through 1949. But he qualified this and almost everything else he said with such a muddy flow of technical phrases that in the end he seemed to have uttered only one word--if.

Both Keyserling's own brand of cautious happiness and the turgid swirl of the argument in general were well illustrated by one exchange with Pennsylvania's loud, lanky G.O.P. Congressman Robert F. Rich:

Rich: In my judgment, prices of all kinds are coming down and have been doing so since Christmas in every line.

Keyserling: I am going to show you the prices that are increasing ... I can't show they are declining when they are increasing.

Rich: I can take you down to any store in town and show you price tags ... being reduced.

Keyserling: I have said, Congressman, that there has been some softening, some very minor softening . . .

Silent Nourse. Dr. Edwin Nourse, chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, missed the hearing entirely. Dr. Nourse, a tall, white-haired man, is an able, middle-of-the-road economist who was once vice president of Washington's Brookings Institution. He skipped nimbly out of town, evidently too horrified by the idea of an anti-inflation bill to get into the argument.

Some Cabinet heads also seemed to be suffering from a mild political schizophrenia, unhappily trapped between their own ideas and loyalty to the Administration. The Senate was heading in two directions at once--one committee was investigating the cause of high prices and another the cause of falling prices. Meanwhile, except for a few aching spots here & there, the patient seemed to be generally enjoying the situation. Prices were lower than they had been for months, and a man with a job could buy a steak again, and an egg for his beer if he liked it that way.

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