Page:Walter Renton Ingalls - Current Economic Affairs (1924).pdf/85



I have in the previous chapters repeatedly expressed the opinion that our national productivity has not been increasing at a rate commensurate with our increase in population, that upon the whole our national scale of living is not so good as it was before the war, and that our recent burst of industrial activity has been at the expense of necessary savings, for which we are going to be constrained ultimately to pay the penalty. There has been a good deal of publication of opinion to the contrary, much of which has been idle and shallow, but some of which has been intelligent and thoughtful. Of the latter the best expression appears in an article by the Hon. Herbert Hoover under the title “We Can Hold the Prosperity We Have” in the Nation’s Business for June 5, 1923. If this view is right of course my own is wrong. In order to bring out the issue clearly, therefore, I quote from Mr. Hoover’s article at considerable length as follows:

We must get our minds away from the notion that pre-war standards of living and volume of business would be normal now. Normalcy is a vastly higher and more comfortable standard than 1913. We must not judge the state of business activity by pre-war figures, but by a hugely increased base. We must not be frightened when our output of steel or textiles or automobiles, lumber, corn or hogs, or our car loadings amount to figures far in excess of those that would be implied alone in a normal growth of population.

There has been in the past decade an unparalleled growth of our industrial and commercial efficiency and our consequent ability to consume. I do not refer to that growth of productivity which should naturally be expected to accompany the addition of 14 millions to our population during the last