CAN WE MASTER THE MACHINE AGE?
Lonigan, Edna
Can We Master The Machine Age? A TIME IS BORN, by Garet Garrett. Pantheon Books, Inc. $2.50. Reviewed by Edna Lonigan AT THE CLOSE of the last war, President Wilson ended all wartime economic...
...And the yoke will fit ever heavier on the helpless citizens who are producing a surplus for government officials to trade with...
...When the machine economy had spread that far, 19th Century "international trade was morally and politically bankrupt...
...The Federal Government has spent billions in economic activity, and added virtually nothing to public understanding of the machine economy, or the seeds of new employment...
...After 1918, creditor nations were afraid they would be paid...
...In his new book Mr...
...Meanwhile Continental nations, which had been afraid to give up government support of their markets, watched in wonder...
...Europeans decided that "the work of the world would be divided according to European man's sense of his own superiority...
...The temporary cure was for the richest nation of all to give away its substance...
...As industrialism spread, the industrial countries had no choice but to invade each other's home markets...
...how shall the tasks be divided...
...In the last 10 years the quality of economic, thinking has reacied a new low...
...The essence of the machine economy, says Mr...
...One critical postwar issue is the question whether the nations can disengage themselves from the mental habits of trade rivalries, and try the American method of building up the home market first, using trade to dispose of genuine surpluses only...
...The machine nations opened sources of raw materials and outlets for finished goods by selling machine products to agricultural nations...
...Not over half a dozen Americans know what American industry really did in the last war...
...they are bemused by the books...
...It is also something more...
...The machine adds a new dimension but it is a new form of the old problem...
...battle between the older machine nations, which had preempted the overseas markets and sources of raw materials, and the "have not" nations, which had come late to the feast...
...Reviewed by Edna Lonigan AT THE CLOSE of the last war, President Wilson ended all wartime economic controls with the Armistice...
...Shotwell calls Mr...
...They can, if they wish, reshape themselves into natural continental divisions, each of which supplies most of its raw materials, and uses most of its surplus in the home market...
...Garrett's picture of machine society is so fresh and alive that it may awaken our minds from the hypnotic sleep into which economic technicalism has lulled us...
...American business, having nothing to depend on but its wits, beat its rifles into typewriters and its machine guns into electric ice-boxes, and then built up mass distribution methods for its streams of new products...
...It worked for «nore than 100 years, but it is finished now...
...As he says, "For kings and princes, for the rich and the high caste, for the overlord people who rule and govern, there is no other...
...Masses of technicalism are useful for an administrative elite which wants to manage economic society from the center, but only their own observation and insight will help citizens who wish to make their own policies...
...The end of the book proposes the answer: chemistry, which makes it possible for over-crowded nations to create their own food and raw materials out of the air and the ground, makes it unnecessary for nations to fight for raw materials or markets...
...The primary postwar issue, I think, is: shall Americans give to foreign governments more of their technical arts and the products of their skill, or shall they finish designing a society in which workers in mass production are free of the yoke, and export their technical arts only to those who will strengthen human liberty...
...The literary fallacy is even more deadly in economics than in literature...
...But this also made it possible for the "backward" nations to learn the machine economy...
...THE problem before us is that a few machine nations can trade with many primary producers...
...but a world with many machine nations can only engage in suicidal war, or find a new answer...
...If they do not, we are faced with new international trade wars, but with rival governmental powers replacing rival businesses...
...The power to allot the tasks is the power to adjust the yoke...
...After the last war, Americans taught the nations how to make mass production provide abundance, but strong governments got hold of it and made it produce abundance of guns, while they fitted the yoke ever more tightly about the necks of their helpless citizens...
...Meanwhile the production of misinformation has gone on apace...
...One of those six is Garet Garrett, former editor of the Saturday Evening Post, and earlier of the New York Times and Tribune...
...Garrett, is that falling costs depend on increasing quantities...
...for himself, machine craft, trade, administration, and government...
...Garrett's book a prose poem...
...World War I marked the beginning of the...
...Garrett sends his vision backward in time to the day when men began to build cities in Mesopotamia, and forward to what may be a new design for the machine age...
...for other people, the heavier work of primary production...
...Prof...
...The thread with which he follows the maze is his definition of economic power as "advantage in the division of human labor...
...Americans have ceased to study their world with their own eyes...
...and this until now has been the ultimate political and economic power of the world...
...This is, in fact, the distinctive pattern of the American economy, and also the magnificent opportunity that the Germans missed...
Vol. 8 • October 1944 • No. 41
