Building A Better World With Free Enterprise

CAPITALISM, often misinterpreted, often misunderstood, took on new dimensions in San Francisco last week. Recognizing the competitive challenge to free enterprise in a world clamoring for swift material progress, 551 bankers, government officials and business leaders from 62 nations gathered for the first such meeting to assess the vast needs and soaring hopes of the free world. The occasion: a week-long International Industrial Development Conference sponsored by TIME-LIFE International and Stanford Research Institute. The conference theme: Investment -Key to Industrial Development.

From all points of the compass and most segments of the political and economic spectrum gathered an international Who's Who of high finance and high office. Through the Fairmont Hotel's marble-pillared lobby trooped old-line cartel capitalists and socialist bureaucrats, Japanese financial shoguns and silk-clad Burmese magnates. From London came financiers whose firms had bankrolled the Industrial Revolution; from Berlin, the brisk businessmen who have built Europe's sturdiest economy from the rubble of war. Fiat's Managing Director Vittorio Valleta flew in from Turin, the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s George Meany from Washington, Banker G. D. Birla from India. Biggest delegation was a 202-man phalanx of U.S. executives spanning the economy from Ritz Crackers to R.C.A.

From the tip of its Bay to the Top of its Mark, the delighted delegates found sophisticated San Francisco the perfect host. They learned to hop cable cars, ask for cracked crab, order California's good white wine.

After intensive, day-long sessions at the Fairmont, the-lenders and the borrowers fanned fraternally across the San Francisco hills to attend a reception given by the city in the famed Palace of the Legion of Honor, a special performance of Poulenc's The Carmelites at the Opera House (see MUSIC), and parties at restaurants and homes.

Whether in informal lobby conversations, in round-table talks, or at conference sessions, business and government leaders discussed the opportunities, fears and responsibilities of free enterprise in advancing backward economies. By the very fact of their meeting they gave dynamic new impetus to capitalism and proved that the areas of agreement between the businessmen of the highly industrialized and the underdeveloped nations of the world are far greater than the more publicized disagreements. By the time they headed back across the world, they had generated new enthusiasm for the task of raising living standards everywhere, a task that often has seemed to defy the free world's resources. As El Salvador's Francisco de Sola told fellow conferees: "This is no time for people with weak hearts."

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