No War, No Poverty?

...What Galbraith calls "the conventional wisdom" holds grimly to the thought, inherited from Ricardo and made ferocious by Herbert Spencer, that only private output constitutes wealth...

...The chief business of the federal government continued to be military, including pensions to the Grand Army of the Republic...

...Or could the Constitution be amended to cover it...

...The great corporation in America is zooming ahead in a kind of political vacuum, irresponsible and mighty...

...Pressure on the food supply becomes more acute, especially in Asia, and this situation revives the dread formula of Mai thus...

...We picnic on cellophaned packaged foods from a gleaming portable icebox, beside a polluted stream lined with billboards, empty beer cans, and bits of discarded Kleenex...

...When we say that poverty has been overcome, we mean that most American families are now above the line, where in 1909 most families were below the line...

...By that he means a plethora of consumer goods and a shortage of community goods and services—plenty of TV sets, and sleek, low cars, richly decorated with upswept fins and sex symbols, but not enough schools and hospitals...

...Yet with strong unions on one side, and a strong government, committed to the welfare state and the graduated income tax, on the other side, big business perhaps does not have the free-swinging power it had in 1909...

...Megalapolis is spreading over the United States countryside, as the bulldozer levels fields, forests, streams and bosky dells, while the water table drops alarmingly...

...Factory workers too are beginning to lose ground in relative numbers...

...The first is the impossibility of open, hot war as a practical instrument of great power politics...

...Main Street is jammed with saffron colored dream boats and no place to park them...

...They lived mostly on farms, where Jefferson hoped they would remain in sturdy self-reliance...

...American business enterprise not only makes the physical stuff, it also makes the demand for the stuff by a remorseless din of advertising...

...But some group somewhere in the economy must take the responsibility of seeing that public necessities keep up with private output...

...Abundance has at last reached the ultimate consumer...

...The engineering of that transfer, indeed the ways and means to put our new-found affluence on a firmer basis, as an example to the world, is a challenge to every liberal American...

...The public school system was yet to be widely established, and poverty was the lot of most Americans...

...Research in pure science...

...We buy it, furthermore, on the installment plan, forcing consumer credit into the stratosphere, and generating a perpetual creeping inflation...

...The eight were: Britain, Germany, France, Austria, Italy, Russia, Japan and the United States...

...Perhaps a new political party might be founded on it...

...The mass media, unknown in 1789, feeble in 1909, are now strewing waste paper over the landscape and blaring their propaganda and their messages (in the West their commercials), into everybody's ears, from Moscow to Cairo to Los Angeles to Peiping...

...Industry was in the handicraft stage of little mills on streams, little ironmasters, little shipbuilders...

...Hours of labor are going down, with the 30-hour week and the three-day weekend on the horizon...

...The federal government employed fewer than 5,000 persons, and its chief business was military preparedness...

...today not more than 12 per cent...

...and George Washington's false teeth were made of wood...

...In his celebrated book, The Affluent Society, J. K. Galbraith notes that "case" poverty and "insular" poverty persist in America, but affect only a small fraction of our 45 million families...

...One draws a sigh of cautious relief but he soon begins to wonder what will happen to the economic systems of the West when governments no longer spend 80 per cent of their budgets buying lethal hardware...

...A huge adjustment will have to be made, affecting every segment of the economy...

...The old slogans are worn out...

...The industrial revolution had overrun the land, pushing the sturdy, self-reliant farmer into second place, numerically if not politically...

...If American leaders could feel that Communists were stupid but not immoral, and the leaders of Russia and China could feel that capitalists were stupid but not full of sin, there would be little to fight about...

...2. The testing of nuclear weapons discharges lethal radiation into the atmosphere, the sea and the land, leaving residues which will affect generations yet unborn...

...The battle for raw materials, real estate and international markets is quite secondary...

...If the United States could achieve a balance of true wealth, namely consumer goods and public outlays complementing one another, the range of civilized human wants would expand, leaving far less to be contrived by the tomtoms of Madison Avenue...

...The list could be indefinitely extended...

...A substantial part of the output is not wealth but waste, what Veblen called "illth...

...3. The population curve is soaring all over the world, as modern medicine drives down the death rate, leaving the birth rate high...

...Back of the Yards" in Chicago was something to see once and then try to forget...

...Russia, China, and other dictatorships, however, can take it in stride, shifting manpower from munitions to bathtubs and boots without upsetting any vital vested interest...

...The economic structures described by Ricardo and Karl Marx are unrecognizable today...

...In one sense of course they are right —depending on how poverty is defined...

...Now practically everybody in the United States has enough bread, with wheat still spoiling in the elevators...

...Adequate law courts where calendars are not overcrowded...

...The United States is locked in a struggle, primarily ideological, with the other two—the open society idea versus the closed society...

...The financial community can hardly be expected to dance in the streets on the day that peace breaks out while the market plunges downward...

...If we accept the usual definition as a condition where the necessities of life—food, shelter, clothing, health services, and education—are not met, and where not even the hope of meeting them exists, the great majority of American families are not in a state of poverty...

...So we put them in cellars, old barns, abandoned warehouses, and on double shift...

...Now, 50 years later, population has soared to 175 millions, and more Americans are working for the federal government than there were Americans on the continent in 1789...

...Two characteristics are particularly ominous: the continuing threat of inflation, and the "social unbalance" which we referred to earlier, a plethora of goods in the private sector and not enough in the public...

...Unpolluted air...

...A workable formula has yet to be found, but staggering as the difficulties are, the only alternative is World War III...

...To belong to a union was a dangerous if not illegal business in many areas, while workers in the steel mills labored 12 hours a day with 24 hours on the week-end shift...

...His point, that a big war would cost more in money than any nation stood to gain, was sound enough...

...The counterpart of increasing opulence," says Galbraith, "will be deepening filth,"—of which the manmade smog of Southern California is an outstanding exhibit...

...8. The governments of Russia and China control the formation and disposition of capital...

...There were no railroads, automobiles, airplanes, bulldozers, electric lights, telephones, billboards, skyscrapers, flush toilets, or quiz programs...

...The kids in my town go to a double shift high school...

...Private enterprise can go right ahead producing more and more useful commodities by its masterly formula of ever greater output per man hour...

...Galbraith has sketched a fresh, exciting blueprint, much closer to the realities of 1959...

...Each reacts on one or more of the others...

...85 a week, and hardly a family in the land is without its TV set...

...The difference between loss in treasure and loss in biological survival is considerable...

...Upton Sinclair and Lincoln Steffens were making a raucous din, and Eugene Debs was practicing to receive a million votes for President...

...is a pretty shaky one...

...Detroit has taken a terrible beating in its 1958 models, and waits in suspense to see whether—despite a zillion dollars worth of advertising —the longer, lower, snootier '59's will to taken off the market...

...Open spaces, wilderness areas...

...Schoolhouses lie in the field of public rather than private production...

...The formula upon which our affluent society is based, furthermore, "Ain't We Something...

...Still-cleaners in the Standard Oil refinery at Bayonne, New Jersey, were working a 60-hour week in temperatures up to 250 degrees inside the stills...

...1. An atomic war can wipe out civilization if not the human race, and the United States and Russia are fully equipped to fight such a war...

...The distribution deadlock has been broken...

...The federal government, however, still devotes most of its energy to war—nearly 80 per cent of the current budget, according to an analysis by the New York Times in 1958...

...Sixty million motor cars jam the roads, factory workers are averaging STUART CHASE, one of the country's leading social analysts, is the author of many books, the most recent of which, just published, is "Some Things Worth Knowing," reviewed in this issue...

...by 1909 they were down to about 40 per cent...

...the second is the relative abolition of poverty in at least one great society...

...Sooner or later our society, if it is to be a viable one, must achieve a practical balance in both physical production and fiscal control...

...The open societies of the West have no such arbitrary choice, but are now threatened with what Galbraith calls "social unbalance...

...Think of it—the end of war, the end of poverty, almost within our grasp...

...Support of the arts...

...The "class struggle," "nationalization," the "free market," "bust the trusts," are all but meaningless today...

...they cannot be wrapped in cellophane and sold, with their prices prudently "administered...

...Juvenile delinquency programs...

...Much of the entertainment provided by the mass media would have been thought vulgar 50 years ago, and the rest of the content includes a lot of what I call anti-knowledge...

...Urban redevelopment programs, adequate commuting service...

...Cities are exploding into the suburbs in a vast urban sprawl, largely unplanned...

...In Jefferson's day farmers constituted more than 90 per cent of the gainfully employed...

...Everyone of course is against inflation, but our financial pundits firmly reject any program which could effectively halt it—such as price and wage controls...

...and as they are in the rest of the world today...

...boxes by a mailman driving a horse...

...9. Farmers in the United States are becoming increasingly citified...

...This curious mental twist, which would have astonished both Pericles and Marcus Aurelius, results in some strange anomalies...

...The middle class is gaining over the working class, with automation hastening the change...

...too many shoe factories and not enough shoes...

...Safe highways and adequate parking...

...Educational TV...

...But he could not cite Strontium 90 to make his argument conclusive...

...Some readers may refuse to believe that poverty has been abolished in the United States or anywhere else...

...are the survivors, and another has been added, China...

...Each of these fourteen changes carries profound political, economic, and social implications...

...Then Detroit summons Madison Avenue to drum on our nervous systems until we are ashamed not to turn in the old for the new...

...Two effects stand out particularly, both unknown in 1909—in fact, almost inconceivable except in some dim and distant Utopia...

...Case" poverty is where the breadwinner has something seriously wrong with him—chronic illness, alcoholism, mental deficiency...

...public output is at best a necessary evil...

...More and more Americans are employed in the "service trades" as clerks, salesmen, repairmen, disc jockeys, managers, professional people, government employees...

...It is a blueprint to puzzle Old Bob LaFollette, but if he were around to read it I think that he would welcome it...

...They can hold any balance they please between the amount of consumer goods and capital goods produced...

...America today is short of such necessities as— Adequate conservation programs...

...Public opinion polls today show United States majorities solidly against war, but still believing World War III inevitable —meaning, I am afraid, that most of us suffer from a lack of imagination...

...More than half the gainfully employed are now in the category of the service trades...

...They hold a steadily declining share of the economy...

...In 1909 or thereabouts, Sir Norman Angell was talking about war as "the great illusion" and wrote a best seller under that title...

...What are some of the implications of these astounding changes...

...This does not necessarily mean "socialism," in the accepted sense of "the public ownership of the means of production...

...A happy, well adjusted people would not produce such an ominous crop of juvenile delinquents, or tolerate a Joseph McCarthy as long as it did, or maintain half of its hospital beds for patients suffering from mental disease...

...It was composed of layer after layer of settlers from overseas, in a melting pot still imperfectly melted...

...Nobody knows...

...Marx, we should remember, based his analysis squarely on Ricardo, but while the latter said the struggle between rich and poor must forever continue if wealth is to be produced, Marx wanted to end it with violent revolution and go on to a classless society...

...Is it destined to be controlled by pension fund trustees, as Adolf Berle fears...

...6. The United Nations are now trying to replace some of the functions of the old Great Power system, and are fumbling toward One World...

...It is doubtful if Robert M. LaFollette, Senior, ever dreamed that such an overturn could come in the lifetime of his children or even his grandchildren...

...In the face of this massive outlay, the fact remains that world wars are now unthinkable except for societies of madmen...

...In 1909, when The Progressive was launched, one hundred and twenty years later, population had jumped to 90 million...

...Most Americans still lived below the line of comfort, were indeed probably more uncomfortable in their slums and mining towns than were the farmers of 1789...

...Parks and playgrounds...

...4. Of the eight Great Powers which dominated the world of 1909 on a precarious balance-of-power basis, two retain their supremacy...

...5. The rise in power and independence of the non-white peoples of Asia and Africa is an outstanding and utterly unprecedented change...

...The robber barons held firm control of the trusts, with plug hats on their heads and dollar signs on their vests—at least in cartoons in the Hearst press...

...Crisis after crisis is laid before Dag Hammarskjold...

...Russia and the U.S...

...It shifts the chromium and the paint, adds new pushbutton contraptions to get out of order and run up the repair bills, gives enough new appearance to make last year's model look shabby before use has turned it shabby...

...Mental health research...

...When—and if—peace breaks out, furthermore, an enormous reservoir of manpower and materials will become available for the public sector, as we transfer production from guns to butter, say 30 billion dollars worth a year...

...Canada, Australia, Britain, and Western Europe are rapidly approaching the same condition, indeed Canada may already be there...

...Out of 31.5 million children in the public schools in 1956, there was no room for 2.3 million...

...Scholarships for bright youngsters who cannot afford college...

...The frontier had closed—no more 160-acre handouts from Uncle Sam— and technological unemployment faced the horse, the ox, and the mule...

...Some such routine has gone on for a long time in all sorts of products, and like many other routines, it keeps accelerating...

...Suppose we make a list of some of the major changes since The Progressive was first delivered to R.F.D...

...Insular" poverty is to be found in limited areas of poor soils and marginal farms, such as the coves of the Southern Appalachians and the Ozarks...

...Bathrooms are not far behind...

...He was ever a man to base his philosophy on the facts of life...

...They can cut down on silk stockings, station wagons, and vodka, in favor of schools, slum clearance, or guided missiles...

...One is forced to believe after taking thought that somehow the Big Powers are going to negotiate their way around a war which nobody could win, and which everybody in the world would lose...

...It does not follow that Americans have achieved the good life, or are contented in their chromium-plated, neon-lighted Utopia...

...no Communists, corporations, unions, Chambers of Commerce, DAR's, or KKK's...

...Some straight thinking, some concentrated effort, some leaders to lead...

...In the 1930's with breadlines on every hand we used to say: "Too much wheat and not enough bread...

...The economy of abundance, which some of us ventured to predict in the 1930's, has at last become a tangible reality for the people of one great nation...

...We buy it primarily to keep up with the Joneses...

...It is so central to our economy that any breakdown produces the gravest results...

...Clean rivers...

...Both sides are "have" blocs...

...Meanwhile self-perpetuating management groups have displaced both the stockholders and the single tycoon as the source of power in most large corporations...

...We have a surfeit of some things and are starved for others: too many annual models and not enough schoolrooms...

...7. The United States has achieved an "affluent society," where poor people are no longer in the majority, as they were in 1909...

...A word about each: To keep the public buying new automobiles, for instance, Detroit has to change its models every year when no technical change may be needed...

...Social unbalance, like consumer credit, has its limits, and we may be nearer finding them than the experts think...

...Social unbalance is the other shaky foundation under American affluence...

...It marks the virtual end of colonialism, and a vast shrinkage in the empires of Britain, France, Japan, Italy, and the Netherlands...

...Abundance lay in a surplus of raw materials—often burned or dumped in the sea, like Brazilian coffee—and in excess industrial capacity...

...Scientists are firing rockets at the moon, and there have been technological, political, and economic changes to stagger William Howard Taft if not Theodore Roosevelt...

...they have both groceries and hope...

...Pure food and drug inspection...