Pointing Toward "Utopia"

...And once the new rules of a "welfare culture" have been established, decentralization through a balanced growth of interest groups within the infrastructure can mean an actual decline of state intervention...

...A whole psychology has been altered: the significant point, says Myrdal, is that this is a non-reversible process...

...There is no alternative except to build the Welfare World...

...The pure market economy conceived of man—or rather labor power—as a commodity, yet was unable to separ ate man from his ability to work...

...He has observed planning in small communities, at national levels and among international agencies...

...Once again Myrdal touches a raw nerve in American life: the split between creed and deed, is as marked in economics as in race relations...

...It emerged gradually under the pressures of objective needs...

...Planning, says Myrdal, exists in a way that most conservative writers refuse to acknowledge, despite the fact that the interests for which they frequently speak have not been especially known for an altruistic rejection of tariffs, land grants or other government subsidies...

...the gold standard, that myth of pristine automatism, was discarded...

...Man becomes a money-grubber whose selfish ness redounds to the happiness of all...

...As Sweden's Minister of Trade and Commerce, Executive Secretary of the United Nations European Commission, author of a monumental work on the Negro in America and now research director of the Twentieth Century Fund Asian Study, Dr...

...One economist who dismisses such antediluvian notions is Gunnar Myrdal...

...The dreadful conditions that this dilemma engendered during the Industrial Revolution was fully documented by Engels, Marx, Toynbee and the Hammonds...

...Myrdal concedes that planning as it is practiced today has served to widen the economic gap between the West and the "underdeveloped" nations...

...In Myrdal's terms, global planning means a world without boundaries and without the kind of discrimination that sets off one nation from the next...

...True, all this was at first ad hoc, limited and temporary...

...All this, Myrdal admits, is a Utopia...

...All too often the idea that careful forethought is essential to eliminate poverty and heighten the quality of economic existence is derided as a road to serfdom...

...Control and planning at enterprise, industry and national levels, became the dominant mode of answering economic questions...

...and with the collapse of colonialism and the coming of the cold war, there seems little likelihood that the Asian and African nations will soon catch up...

...And like all painters of Utopia, he has deliberately drawn the picture with broad, hopeful strokes so as to highlight its genuine possibilities...

...International economic disintegration has not been halted despite the heroic efforts after World War II...

...Drawing upon his experience with the Swedish welfare state, Myrdal insists that this is what people want...

...Consequently, the whole heated discussion on planning has an element of fantasy about it, for the fact is that government activity is now crucial for a viable economy and will continue to be so...

...But he is unwilling to admit that the cause of internationalism is hopeless...

...As he observes with no little acerbity, the International Trade Organization was stillborn, the Economic and Social Council mirrors the debating propensities of the General Assembly, the FAO draws blueprints which remain on paper, the ILO was outmoded 40 years ago...

...New personality types have been thrown up by changing economic forces...

...In fact, national economies more and more have been regulated and literally planned to an extent quite unthinkable a hundred years ago...

...The usual techniques and objectives are all there: fiscal devices, maximizing opportunities, better education, progressive taxation and full employment all culminating in a "created harmony...

...The present book takes planning for granted...

...Myrdal says yes, despite the sorry start made in the United Nations and its satellite agencies...

...he delicately balances pain and pleasure in order to arrive at business decisions...

...We here have been all too ready to discover deficiencies in this evolving society, but there are a good many more virtues in it, we are told, than can be found in our own political economy...

...Yet he feels that these sad failures represent stumbling beginnings toward a genuine international community...

...Measures were intended to protect women in factories, but the idea of state intervention to meet needs that private industry ignored was bound to spread...

...he can flit from industry to industry in search of ever greater profit...

...This is indeed a work of consummate optimism...

...Is this possible...

...We no longer fear to make private contract subordinate to public requirement and we have adopted bargaining between groups as the organizing principle for social action...

...Perhaps the major drawback in the kind of planning now going on is that it has intensified rather than lessened the parochial, nationalist sentiment which plagues all countries, large and small...

...He knows its values and its deficiencies, but he knows too that without planning only chaos will inherit the earth...

...Adopting a wide historical perspective (America "is still so young") Myrdal is hopeful that we shall move from ordinary intervention centered in narrow interests to meaningful planning...

...What has been happening, then, is a thrust toward a welfare state through "cumulative causation," a secular increase in state intervention occasioned by international crisis, increasing rationality, broader political participa tion and the growth of large scale organization in all sectors of political and economic activity...

...For those afflicted with a dyspeptic view of world affairs it may prove a rather heady draught...

...But so long as one harbors the slightest hope of a democratic socialism, MyrdaI's argument will have a strong measure of validity...

...We are still plagued by bureaucracy, a proliferation of legalistic rules and separatist tensions...

...One of the more curious things about the teaching of economics these days is the sharp and often vitriolic attack on planning...

...Old norms are losing their hold and more and more there is a desire to apply rational methods to recurrent problems...

...Economics, we are told, is a pure science concerned only with spelling out the inferences to be drawn from a set of a priori statements...

...Wars and depressions accelerated the process...

...he has sensitive antennae which impel him to respond instantaneously to the shifting demands of consumers...

...The most striking aspect of this development, says Myrdal, has been the change in people's outlook...

...and all this supposedly makes for the best of economic worlds which only "planning" threatens to destroy...

...A high degree of civic education and responsibility, with participation reaching deep into the political "infrastructure," has enabled the Swedes to meet their problems head-on...

...They feel freer, not less free in such an environment...

...Yet the evil brought its own cure in the beginnings of state intervention...

...and businessmen, oppressed by an evergrowing burden of overhead and fixed investment, learned that they could not entrust the fate of their enterprises to the vagaries of a free market...

...He urges that the only real prospect for man is to internationalize those very measures for integration which are pursued in building a national welfare state...

...PARADOXICALLY, planning has been unplanned...

...Myrdal has been able to draw from a deep well of practical experience to irrigate and make flourish an extraordinary body of theoretical work...

...Nowhere is this more evident than in the United States, where state intervention is rising only because the kind of inchoate planning we have has not yet caught up with "the need for coordination and simplification...