The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice | Page 5

the immeasurable saving of labor
effected by machinery and the brute fact of the continuance of
hard-driven, unceasing toil.
Of the extent of this increased power of production we can only speak
in general terms. No one, as far as I am aware, has yet essayed to
measure it. Nor have we any form of calculus or computation that can
easily be applied. If we wish to compare the gross total of production
effected to-day with that accomplished a hundred and fifty years ago,
the means, the basis of calculation, is lacking. Vast numbers of the
things produced now were not then in existence. A great part of our
production of to-day culminates not in productive goods, but in
services, as in forms of motion, or in ability to talk across a distance.

It is true that statistics that deal with the world's production of cotton,
or of oil, or of iron and steel present stupendous results. But even these
do not go far enough. For the basic raw materials are worked into finer
and finer forms to supply new "wants" as they are called, and to
represent a vast quantity of "satisfactions" not existing before.
Nor is the money calculus of any avail. Comparison by prices breaks
down entirely. A bushel of wheat stands about where it stood before
and could be calculated. But the computation, let us say, in price-values
of the Sunday newspapers produced in one week in New York or the
annual output of photographic apparatus, would defy comparison. Of
the enormous increase in the gross total of human goods there is no
doubt. We have only to look about us to see it. The endless miles of
railways, the vast apparatus of the factories, the soaring structures of
the cities bear easy witness to it. Yet it would be difficult indeed to
compute by what factor the effectiveness of human labor working with
machinery has been increased.
But suppose we say, since one figure is as good as another, that it has
been increased a hundred times. This calculation must be well within
the facts and can be used as merely a more concrete way of saying that
the power of production has been vastly increased. During the period of
this increase, the numbers of mankind in the industrial countries have
perhaps been multiplied by three to one. This again is inexact, since
there are no precise figures of population that cover the period. But all
that is meant is that the increase in one case is, quite obviously,
colossal, and in the other case is evidently not very much.
Here then is the paradox.
If the ability to produce goods to meet human wants has multiplied so
that each man accomplishes almost thirty or forty times what he did
before, then the world at large ought to be about thirty or fifty times
better off. But it is not. Or else, as the other possible alternative, the
working hours of the world should have been cut down to about one in
thirty of what they were before. But they are not. How, then, are we to
explain this extraordinary discrepancy between human power and
resulting human happiness?

The more we look at our mechanism of production the more perplexing
it seems. Suppose an observer were to look down from the cold
distance of the moon upon the seething ant-hill of human labor
presented on the surface of our globe; and suppose that such an
observer knew nothing of our system of individual property, of money
payments and wages and contracts, but viewed our labor as merely that
of a mass of animated beings trying to supply their wants. The
spectacle to his eyes would be strange indeed. Mankind viewed in the
mass would be seen to produce a certain amount of absolutely
necessary things, such as food, and then to stop. In spite of the fact that
there was not food enough to go round, and that large numbers must die
of starvation or perish slowly from under-nutrition, the production of
food would stop at some point a good deal short of universal
satisfaction. So, too, with the production of clothing, shelter and other
necessary things; never enough would seem to be produced, and this
apparently not by accident or miscalculation, but as if some peculiar
social law were at work adjusting production to the point where there is
just not enough, and leaving it there. The countless millions of workers
would be seen to turn their untired energies and their all-powerful
machinery away from the production of necessary things to the making
of mere comforts; and from these, again, while still stopping short of a
general satisfaction, to the making of luxuries and superfluities. The
wheels would never stop. The activity would never tire. Mankind,