Page:Neurath O. (1942) International Planning for Freedom.pdf/4

Rh various countries, since often a change in man's food and shelter is of less importance than a change in his state of being bullied or humiliated by certain institutions - man does not live by bread alone.

I see no reason, why we should distinguish what, in this context, is often called 'economic' and 'non-economic' items. We should drop these terms together with the discussions based on them, and also terms such as 'cost', 'capital' etc., in our comprehensive research on 'happiness conditions'. It is not sufficient to introduce expressions such as 'real capital' because in the 'reckoning in kind', as explained here, we do not find even counterparts to these terms of the traditional 'money reckoning'.

We shall find more difficulties in comparing 'happiness conditions'of two countries than in comparing 'happiness conditions' in the same country at different times or the 'happiness condition' resulting from two or more plans under discussion. We have no unit for measuring the various items and for thus computing them and forming one characterising number. No 'value reckoning' helps us here and moreover 'mathematical economics' would lead us astray.

It was a century ago in England that some unhappiness created by industrial revolution was described by public investigators; representatives of all groups were interested in these studies (very differently interpreted), even people who were not prepared to make any personal sacrifice for a reduction of these pains. Perhaps our era will investigate both happiness and unhappiness which will prove to be related to planning.

The Industrial Revolution found its theorists in economists and sociologists of the 18th century; many of them predicted increasing political freedom and the increasing productive capacity of all industries - the tenor of their writing sometimes recalled, as it were, Aristotle's saying that neither the architects would need servants, nor the masters slaves, if the shuttle wove of itself. But they did not anticipate the increasing pauperization in the period to come, nor the (just then) increasing working hours (which were shortened again much later) nor the periodic bankruptcies and unemployment, nor all the intentional restrictions put upon production. In the daily discussions of planning, this situation is often insufficiently put into the account, and the salvage problem is being much analyzed with regard to the future time of peace; but our pre-war peacetime trouble was how to put the unemployed, the unused natural resources and machines, to work, how to avoid the intentional destruction