Industrial AND ENGINEERING Chemistry
VOLUME2S NUMBER 2
FEBRUARY 1933
J
HARRISONE. Horn, EDITOR
The Editor’s Point of View
S
ELL AMERICAN.
However we may feel about advancing international good will as opposed to extreme nationalism, the fact remains that the law of self-preservation is still a basic one, Other nations, notably Great Britain, realizing what restricted buying power means in the life of an industrial country, are emphasizing the importance of buying the products of home labor. “Buy British,” urged and used as a patriotic slogan, has been expanded into “Buy Empire,” while the Ottawa conference, among other results, led to the acceptance by the Dominions of the ancient colonial policy that they should supply the mother country with foodstuffs and raw materials and take from her manufactured products. Reports are that “Buy British,” endorsed by that popular salesman the Prince of Wales, has been most potent in keeping labor from suffering further idleness and has led even to some trade revh al. And what do we do3 Generally we buy from anyone who can make a low price, and then we complain because there is no increase in the demand for our wares and no improvement in our buying power. We make the most of price advantage, even if it represents a low scale of wages and living standards, but we are among the first to cry aloud when one in our own line resorts to price-cutting. “Buy American” is being urged and is actually being practiced by many. Why not “Sell American?” The number of consumers who concern themselves about the source of their purchases is always comparatively small and the merchants constitute a group which we should be able to convince. The merchant or seller should understand easily that, when he buys from an American producer, there is better opportunity for that money to flow back to him. I t is related that when Abraham Lincoln was asked about tariffs he replied that he knew very little about the tariff, but he did know that, when we bought steel rails abroad, they had the money and we had the rails, but when we bought steel rails in America this country had the rails and the money also. Of course this and similar statements do not apply
to those things unobtainable in satisfactory quantity or quality in the United States. If anyone imagines that, by purchasing cheap imported merchandise which competes with our own manufactures, we will stimulate the export of goods which compete with articles made in the country of destination, he needs but make a careful study of import and export statistics. Many a country is now confronted with the difficult problem of whether to become more isolated, more self-contained, or to encourage a freer interchange of its raw materials and commodities. Some have proceeded far enough along the way to indicate clearly their tendencies and current policies. Nothing is fixed, and we should be slow to express convictions until we have studied the evidence and seen some of the results of the policies proposed. Self-defense and the preservation of our standards would seem to dictate the wisdom of selling American until something better offers as a constructive program.
..
T
HE SEW MOUTH WASH. Just as if we did
not have more than enough reading to do in the course of our work, the press, ever eager for something new and doubtless tired of war debts, prohibition, and politics, seized upon technocracy as a new subject. Immediately there began a series of articles which many of us have followed in the hope of finding what it is all about. The game has now reached the stage where suggestions for collateral reading are being printed in the form of bibliographies, and no doubt there will soon be an encyclopedia on the subject. Will Rogers early announced technocracy to be merely a new mouth wash. We hear that Columbia University, now divorced from technocracy, has among its souvenirs a new college song, entitled “Columbia the Germ of the Notion.” The word would seem to mean a social state ruled by technologists, but that idea is certainly more than a decade old. The men who are said to be furthering technocracy are described as engineers. The defini-
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tions usually accepted for engineering are doubtless broad enough to include them, though we must say many of the published data lack the accuracy we expect in true engineering. The procedure of presenting conclusions without first having offered all of the evidence is anything but a scientific approach to the subject. The idea put forth by the technocrats that a $10,000 income is possible in exchange for working four short days a week, naturally created a furor in the public press and served to center the attention of many readers. As we understand it, the technocrat wants as a basis of exchange and as a measure of value some unit of energy, such as the kilowatt, horsepower, erg, etc., and he points out that all activities in modern life are subject to accurate energy measurement. The principal reason for the adoption of this plan is that the advance of technology has made obsolete the system of monetary prices, in vogue for thousands of years and still in use to measure the value of what one does or makes and offers in exchange for other goods and services. But nowhere have we seen taken into account by the technocrats the element of skill with which energy may be used, and we know of no method for satisfactorily measuring the various qualities of work done by brains. We suspect the differences in actual energy expended by two men in thinking might be impossible of measurement, and yet the output could be as different as invaluable is from valueless or as failure is from success. Thus far most of the paper and ink have gone to remind us of well-known and proved facts concerning the things which technology and its offspring, the machine, have done to the race, contending that technologic advance and mounting debts endanger the capitalistic system. Many of the statements made appear inaccurate. The cases chosen have been far from typical, and in other instances the data have not been set down in straight-forward complete engineering fashion. The cures and blessings of science, the laboratory, and the machine have again been paraded. A t least this has been helpful, for it has served to focus attention on the need for more, rather than less, scientific work. Even those who have hitched their wagons to the technocracy star do not advocate a return to the days when the only power was that of man and domestic animals and when the value of applied science was unknown. The impossibility of enjoying what we now have under any less efficient system is altogether too easily demonstrated. Further, the number profitably employed per thousand has actually increased in the period under discussion. Simeon Strunsky in The New York Times for January 8 points out that it would require 37,500,000 men working 8 hours as copyists to produce a single issue of The New York Sunday Times, unaided by technology as represented by the contributions of Gutenberg. Mnrgenthaler, and their kind. One needs to read
Vol. 25, No. 2
“The Forty-niners,” a book of 1931, to be reminded of the difference in the rate and comfort of travel that has taken place since those eventful days. Less than 20 miles per day, accompanied by hardship, ever-present hazard, and too frequently loss of life, is a m e r e n t thing from what we regard as average travel today. It would require literally millions of messengers working full time to transmit the information which daily goes over our telephone, telegraph, and radio. But there is no need to prolong these comparisons. A consideration of these and many like them is only one way of indicating what science, technology, and the machine have done for us. Just recently Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., president of the General Motors Corporation, asked one hundred and fifty leaders of American life in the fields of research, industry, engineering, economics, education, and finance to record their views as to whether there should be a halt in technical advance. The responses emphasized the faith which these leaders have in the uninterruptred development of research, invention, and labor-saving devices as means for improving production, creating new things and new industries with enlarged employment opportunities as a way toward prosperity. An increase in research and technology is wanted, and not a cessation of such efforts. Whether it is possible to substitute certificates of ergs or kilowatts for the good old dollar, which is potent even in small numbers, is highly debatable. Measures of energy from the standpoint of variable value would seem to offer no improvement over the gold standard, and no concrete plans are so far offered for this proposed step. The energy survey of North America is far from complete, and even if it were we should consider any change in our monetary system as quite remote if, indeed, a possibility. Undoubtedly, as has been so frequently said, the acquirement of scientific facts and their application to industrial processes have given us an accumulation of power which, in this century, has brought about or paved the way for far-reaching economic changes and indicates the need for new systems for the distribution of created wealth. Action, however, lies along lines other than those which technocracy seems to favor, though we have yet to find any one who, from reading what the technocrats have put forth, can demonstrate an understanding of their meaning. Their pronouncements have been a godsend to the press, although incomprehensible to an intelligent public. It is almost a platitude to say that, in conquering the problems of production, we have practically neglected the difficulties of proper distribution and that, in applying science to industry, we have brought complete leisure to a few, when we should have made possible more leisure to all. What lies immediately before us is the task of finding an equitable way of distributing to labor a greater proportion of the wealth and the goods which technology helps to create.
