Economics for the exasperated

IT WAS only a few weeks after the end of the second World War that we again read of fishermen dumping their catches back into the sea. Then we were sure that peace had really come at last. Soon, we knew, we should hear of coffee being burned, wheat being destroyed and cotton ploughed back into the ground. Then it would only need a rising unemployment rate for everything on the economic front to look normal again.

As I write we are in the midst of a severe labour shortage, and to many it will seem academic to talk of unemployment. 'With all this rebuilding and replacement to be done', people protest, 'how can there be any danger of unemployment?' Memories are short. There was plenty of building to do in 1931, plenty of people who needed feeding and clothing, but that did not prevent about three million people being out of work. Thes existence of unsatisfied human needs is not enough to create. work; there are disharmonies in the economic machine, which engender unemployment irresistibly. It would not be a verary serious gamble to bet that, by 1950, at least ten million people in Britain and the United States will be unemployed. DELHI

SCHO

This is not to say that the world will exactly repeat the mis takes it made in the inter-war years: it will make the old mistakes in a new way. For the world has moved on since 1930. The in dustrial west (we must face it) has abandoned the old, haphazard economics of Adam Smith and is groping its way towards some thing new. Only the United States, dizzy with the insubstantial prosperity of war-time, is set on retracing its steps towards laissez faire, but as soon as it has suffered the shock of a new and more terrible depression, it will hurry after the rest.

For, despite this floundering attempt to avoid depression, the western world will not escape the slump. The causes of its malady lie rooted more deeply in its system than it is ready to believe. It is in an attempt to lay bare these causes that this book has been written.