Page:Walter Renton Ingalls - Current Economic Affairs (1924).pdf/42

28 pay and that some one can be no other than the general public. The latter must do without so much steel, or if it cannot dispense with some of that it must do without something else. In brief there can be no economic compensation for diminishing work hours if they be employed at maximum efficiency except by an offsetting invention. Otherwise there is simply deprivation.

Sociologists say comfortingly that improved methods and improved mechanicalization will be the immediately offsetting factor. What, pray, have the steel masters and their engineers been doing during the last 20 years? Fierce competition has not permitted them to preserve uneconomical methods. There will indeed be increased mechanicalization if for no other object than to make a machine do the work of a man with no advantage other than to obviate the scarcity of men willing to do disagreeable work. However, let it not be imagined that mechanicalization does not cost anything and is inherently economically advantageous. There are humane managers who instalinstall [sic] machines to relieve men from arduous and killing work even when they are economically more costly. There are many jobs done by hand that might be done by machine in instances where the capital charges on the machine would be more costly than the wages of the men whom it would displace. There is always a shadowy zone of economic uncertainty, influenced by wage rates, interest rates and other things between the choice of doing things by hand or by machine. Out of that zone we may rise to the immense economic advantage of the locomotive which with relatively small capital charges and the attention of only three men will do the work of 10,000 men.