THE COST OF
PROSPERITY
THE COST OF PROSPERITY
I
Not long ago a despatch from Washington announced that “the highest
standard of living ever attained in the history of the world was
reached last year [1926] by the American people,” and gave as basis for
the statement the government’s figure for the income of our population,
which income was set at ninety billion dollars. The “high standard”
thus indicated is unhesitatingly accepted by almost everyone; but even
if we do accept as a fact, though it is far from being a universal
one, the ability of all persons to spend more and to buy more things
than ever before, it may be worth while to consider what some of the
by-products of the processes involved have been. Overwhelmed by the
material advance made in the past five decades or so and by the vast
amount of Pollyanna literature with which we are flooded by politicians
and business executives with axes to grind, we are apt to lose sight
of the law of compensation and to think of all change as unalloyed
improvement.
Change may or may not be “progress,” but whether it is or not it
is bound to involve compensatory losses. Man may have advanced far
from his ancestor which lived in the primeval slime, but that lowly
progenitor could breathe either in air or water and if he lost a leg
could grow another. To-day man can make his voice heard three thousand
miles away, but he dies if you hold his nose in a water basin and is a
cripple for life when he loses a foot. What he gains in one direction
he drops in another, unpopular as Nature or anyone else may be when
they tell him so. One is not necessarily a pessimist, therefore, when
one chooses to consider what losses may have been entailed by attaining
to the present “highest standard of living.”
Two points are notable in the popular belief as to that standard. One
is that all classes in the community are supposed somehow to share
in its beneficences, and the other is that the measuring rod used
is material and economic. The leaders in the “marvellous advance”
are automobiles, radios, vacuum cleaners, electric washing machines,
telephones, etc. It is assumed that spiritual and intellectual progress
will somehow come also from the mere accumulation of “things,” and
this assumption has become a sort of American religion with all the
psychological implications of religious dogma. In business circles,
mass-production, on which our present prosperity is based, is not
considered merely as a transient and possibly an unsound economic
phase, but as the creator of “the highest standard of living ever
attained,” and, as such, as little to be doubted or questioned as God
the Creator before Darwin. At any rate, mass-production is so closely
linked to the ninety billion dollars that the two may be considered as
the heads and tails of the same coin, and the by-products of one those
of the other.
It may be noted that, although ninety billion dollars is a staggering
sum to contemplate, we receive something of a shock when we read
farther that the average income of all persons “gainfully employed”
was $2210 a year. When we turn to another statistical source and find
that nearly ten thousand persons paid taxes on incomes of from $100,000
to $1,000,000 year each, two hundred and twenty-eight on incomes
over $1,000,000, and fourteen on incomes of over $5,000,000 each, we
begin to wonder whether the masses are getting quite their share of
the benefits of mass-production. It is evident that however great the
“national” wealth may be, there is something very queer about its
distribution, and that the gulf between the average man and the rich
man has widened with appalling rapidity.
We are not here concerned primarily with that point nor with the
average person “gainfully employed,” whose income is evidently not much
above $2000, but we may glance a moment at the condition of the latter
in order to get some standard of income measurement. In 1917 the street
railway employees in Seattle submitted a minimum budget for living in
a dispute with their company over wages. They figured that $1917.88
annually for a family of five would allow, among other things, $12 for
the education of the children, $30 for reading matter of all kinds, and
$120 each for insurance and old-age savings. The company was able to
reduce this to $1505.60 by eliminating all reading matter, including
newspapers, reducing education from $12 to $11, old-age savings from
$120 to $100, and insurance from $120 to $30. Carfare was reduced to
$35.70 annually, with the somewhat ironical result that the members
of the families of the men engaged in running the street cars were
allowed only enough to use a car themselves on an average of once every
six days! As $5 a year per person was allowed for “recreation” and $4
for all “miscellaneous,” we need not linger over the average man in
our total population who is “gainfully employed” when considering for
the moment the high standard of living. We are here concerned with
the persons between those and the ultra wealthy—the persons who both
suffer from and enjoy factors in that standard.
One of the outstanding features of life to-day is its frightful and
steadily increasing cost. Apart from taxation, it is much higher in the
United States than in any of the other ten countries in which I have
spent longer or shorter periods in the past few years. This is in part
due to the intentionally prohibitive tariff, in part to the terrific
increase in wages, and in part to the increase in the kind and number
of things we are supposed to have in order to be happy.
Those who defend the present wage schedules are forever telling us
that they do not increase the cost of living because of the increased
output per man and the increased savings in cost due to new machinery
and mass-production. Much of this, of course, is sheer bunkum. For the
housekeeper who pays a cook anywhere from $75 to $100 as compared with
$25 to $30 fifteen years ago there is a clear loss in the family budget
with no increased output whatever. The cook gets the full benefit of
all the labor-saving devices, and the mistress pays for these and the
advanced wages as well. When the other day I had some bookshelves put
up and paid two of the stupidest workmen it has ever been my luck to
encounter $12 a day each there was no compensating advantage whatever.
I am told I might have got it done for less had I taken the trouble
to find a “scab” workman out of work. In the first place I do not
know where to find one and in the second place it would not have been
necessary fifteen years ago. I could then have gone to any union shop
and had the job done reasonably. No, a factory may increase wages and
lower costs, but the ordinary householder cannot do so in all that
affects the running of his home and family. The increase of wages, in
many cases to prohibitive levels, is the heaviest single burden, except
rent, to the man of moderate means to-day.
But to a great extent the increase in living cost is due also to the
increase in the number of things. We live so fast and heedlessly that
we seldom consider how much of our present annual expense is made up
of costs incurred for things that few of us used fifteen or twenty
years ago. Of course the automobile bulks largest in this respect as
a single item. In the well-to-do New York suburb where I lived for
some years before the War, comparatively few people had cars. Most of
the commuters of the class then spending $8000 to $10,000 a year—the
equivalent of $15,000 to $20,000 to-day—always walked to and from
the station, taking a hack in bad weather. To-day there are over
twenty million cars in the country, or about one to every family.
If one examines the real-estate advertisements one finds that now a
small modern house will have its vacuum cleaner, its washing machine,
elaborate wiring with outlets all over the place, its cedar closets,
electric refrigerator, radio, automatic heat-regulator, its several
bathrooms, and a garage for one, and not seldom two cars, to mention
some of what are considered essentials. I do not question the comfort
and convenience of at least most of these things, but their steady
multiplication adds heavily to the burden of the man who has to pay
for them in order to maintain his family according to the “American
standard.” For all with incomes of from $5000 to $50,000 the burden
is almost equally felt, for standards of expense are in proportion to
income and annually mounting.
II
The demand for luxury even in the transaction of ordinary business
is adding tremendously to the overhead expense of doing it and so
to the cost of goods or services. A railway station must be as
magnificent as a Roman bath. Our shops must be housed in Renaissance
palaces on expensive streets. We are told that expensive office
furniture is the safest investment in the world. A “front,” whether
of clothes, furnishing, building, or location, must always be put
up so as to indicate wealth back of it all or the business may not
be considered sound, profitable, and “up-to-date.” Salesmanship has
become increasingly expensive. I was recently talking with a woman who
has an excellent salary (forming, of course, part of the overhead of
her department), in one of the supposedly less extravagant shops. She
complained of the expense she was under because of the high standard of
salesmanship demanded by her customers. Fifteen years ago, she said,
if she had dared to appear in the costly clothes the house now _makes_
her wear, she would have been promptly discharged. She has to go to the
theaters, know the latest plays and books, and be able to chat with
her customers, not about her goods, but socially by the half-hour. Her
sales are splendid—with prices according.
Fifteen years ago almost every physician, dentist, or oculist had his
office in a room in his own home and rarely had an assistant. Now
almost without exception they have to take an office in some apartment
house at rents of from $1200 to $3000 a year, and employ at least one
uniformed nurse in attendance—expenses which, of course, are borne
by the patients. To a considerable extent this is the fault of the
patients themselves. There is an instinctive tendency to feel if a
doctor still has his office in his home with only a maid to answer the
bell that he is either not up-to-date in knowledge or is unsuccessful
for some reason. I know of one very able medical man who has
deliberately done so and who has tried to keep down his professional
expense for the benefit of his patients, but several of these patients
have more than hinted to him that they would prefer to have a more
expensive car standing at their door when he makes his call!
To an incredible degree we have most of us unthinkingly adopted the
cost standard as the value standard. Some time ago a prosperous and
practical inventor disclosed some of his adventures with popular
psychology. He had invented a small article which, with fair sales,
could make a large profit when retailed at ten cents. He sent out a
number of street hawkers to sell the article, half of them with the
thing priced at ten cents and the other half with a twenty-five-cent
price. The latter sold immediately whereas few were sold at the lower
price.
Often the influence of this false standard is more insidious and
disastrous. I was discussing the matter the other day with an
internationally known scientist. He was at one time—but is no
longer—a professor in one of our leading universities. He said that
when his first child was born he was getting a salary of $2500 a
year. The leading obstetrician in the town charged $500 for a “baby
case”—one-fifth of my friend’s annual income. When the financial
situation was explained the doctor told him that his assistant was
just as able a medical man as himself and would charge only $100, and
that he himself would be on the telephone ready to come in a moment if
anything went wrong. My friend, after wrestling in his mind for some
time, decided to have the assistant, but he told me that he hoped never
again to go through such hell as he endured during the hours of birth,
when he thought that if anything went wrong with his wife he would feel
all his life that he had sacrificed her for the four hundred dollars’
difference. Yet I consider that this man has the sanest and most
balanced mind of all the men I know.
The situation outlined is a very real and, both financially and
psychologically, a serious one. When anyone we love is ill we feel
impelled to have the best attention for him, a half-dozen specialists
if necessary; and the standard of the best, more subtly than we
realize, is the cost standard. We have become hypersensitive, and this
sensitiveness is terrifically costly. I myself was born in New York of
a well-to-do family. My mother’s father was rich as things then went.
Yet it could not have cost at most $100 to bring me into the world.
There were no graduate nurses, no maternity hospitals, few, if any,
specialists. The ordinary family physician, at $2 a house visit, and
two women such as we call practical nurses did everything, in the home.
To-day, what with doctors, nurses, and the hospital charge, the cost
would run to about $1500 for a family of the same social grade, or
fifteen times the old cost, whereas the ordinary income has less than
trebled.
III
The increased cost of living from these and other causes is having
marked effects. It is, for one thing, largely destroying the old idea
of thrift and saving in the classes with which we are here concerned.
In the first place, there is the natural human desire to possess many
of the new things available for their own sakes, and often because Mrs.
Jones has them, and they belong to the new standard. But there are
more insidious forces at work. Mass-production requires an enormous
and steady output to be profitable. There is a saturation point for
nearly every article. Fresh vegetables are eaten up in a day or two,
but clothes or cars may last several years. There is no reason why
many of the mechanical contrivances we buy should not in themselves
last many years. From the standpoint of the producer there is always
the danger that the consumer may have enough of any particular article
unless he is made to want more. This is accomplished in several ways
in the technic which has been developed by psychologically trained
sales experts. The consumer is cleverly induced to want an article
that he had thought he could do without or could not afford. If he has
already owned one, as an automobile, the slogan becomes that every
self-respecting family should have two. The model is changed every year
and social vanity is played upon; or an appeal is made to the powerful
motives of fear, shame, and pride. In selling many of the mechanical
contrivances a more brutal method is employed. Manufacturers stop
making essential parts so as to require the owner to buy an entirely
new and perhaps only slightly altered model. Some years ago, for
instance, I bought at a cost of $450 a certain instrument. It was good
for a lifetime. I added steadily, as I could afford it, to the things
that were to be used with it, and without which it was useless, until
the whole investment was over $800. One day when I went to get more, I
was told they no longer made anything for that “model,” I would have to
get another and, of course, with a condescending tone that was almost a
sneer, “I must want to have the latest.” The new model, differing only
slightly from the old, cost, the salesman told me, as though it were a
trifle, $750. To accumulate the same things to go with it that I had
for the old would cost about $400 more. My old investment was rendered
worthless, and the salesman made it evident that he had no interest in
a person so cheap that he would not casually throw away $800 and spend
$1,000 more on a toy. His company did not have the least glimmer of an
idea of responsibility toward a public out of which it had made its
money and which had made, in the aggregate, a colossal investment in
its instruments. When other methods fail and you really have no money,
the advantages of the partial payment plan are glowingly placed before
you.
Again, we are told by leaders of the world of mass-production that
thrift is out of date. One of the greatest manufacturers in the country
recently wrote that “use” not “saving” should govern our ideas with
respect to our national and other resources. In another remarkable
pronouncement, this man, who is an idol of a large part of the people,
said that no boy had ever succeeded or would succeed who saved money
when he was young. Another leader writes that “one reason for America’s
prosperity and one reason, in my opinion, why that prosperity will
continue, is that we have committed ourselves to a standard of living
far beyond our wildest pre-war dreams.... We cannot make good except by
producing more wealth, and always a little ahead of us is advertising
with its alluring images of still other good things that work will buy.
Americans have passed out of the period where they care about petty
economies. They want convenience. They want action. They want comfort
and style. It is impossible to call Americans back to petty thrift, and
I personally am glad of it.... I live now in New York where everybody
expects to be overcharged and where nobody counts the dimes, much less
the pennies.... We have ceased to count our pennies in America, and I
certainly hope we never return to the days of the most graceless of all
virtues, a niggardly and penny-pinching thrift.”
One wonders just what spiritual joy there should be in being
overcharged. Also, most of us have still to count the dimes. The other
day I wanted a mere bite of luncheon in a hurry. Going into the only
business men’s restaurant in sight, I paid one dime to have my hat
checked, another to the boy who insisted on handing me a towel in the
washroom, and another for the cover charge; and I wondered what, over
the old days, was the advantage in paying at the rate of a hundred
hard-earned dollars a year for an ordinary snack of lunch without
getting anything to eat.
There are other factors at work to make thrift appear hopeless and so
to destroy the average man’s peace of mind as he contemplates old age
or possible long incapacity from illness. One is the fact that savings
do not seem to go anywhere when made from a modest income. Although the
cost of living has easily tripled in thirty years, the income from most
sound investments has not gone up at all. When one saves a thousand
dollars and contemplates the $50 or even $60 a year that that will
bring in income, and thinks how many fifties or sixties it will take
to support him and his family, he wonders whether it is worth while to
pinch for so meager a result. Moreover, owing to advancing costs and
the changing scale of living, there is no telling what the cost of
living may be not merely in one’s old age but even ten years hence.
Before the pace of living started on its now annually accelerated
speed, a man could forecast with reasonable certainty what income would
enable him to maintain his relative position in his stratum of society
for the fifteen or twenty years of life that might be left to him when
he retired. Now, apart from other factors, an invention one year means
a luxury on the market in another two or three, and that luxury becomes
a necessity, like the automobile, in another three or four. In a recent
study of the income and expenses of nearly a hundred families of the
members of the faculty of the University of California it is shown that
the average savings per family including life insurance are $360. The
annual cost of medical service alone among them is $325. A New York
professional man who considered this article, when read to him, unduly
pessimistic, admitted that although he lives on a scale indicated by
his rent of $2500 a year he is unable to save anything. The surprising
extent to which the hope and even the thought of providing for old age
has gone from the mind of the moderately well-to-do was still further
shown by this man’s comment that life insurance was the equivalent of
savings. Life insurance is excellent and essential, but only in its
more expensive forms does it permit the insurer himself to enjoy the
benefits of it, and straight life policies are not complete protection
for one’s own old age. Even if one insures against accident, sickness,
and death, there are many emergencies in life which can be met only
from one’s own saved money. Is it any wonder that there has been a
rush in the last decade for common stocks and speculation when the
newspapers continually tell of stupendous profits (and advance in
“values” of nearly two and a half billions in one month alone), when
business leaders decry thrift, and the cost of living gives us a kick
from behind? Even the President of the United States and the Secretary
of the Treasury encourage the people to speculate, and in the _New
York Times_ I read that the Mellon family made $300,000,000 in a year.
I know many men who have large salaries and many who have accumulated
fortunes but I do not know a single one who has accumulated more than
the merest competency except from gift, inheritance, or advances in
stocks. For some years the stock market may have been an ever-present
help in time of need to many, but stocks cannot continue to the end of
our lives to climb an endless escalator; and as one looks forward to
an eternal making of money to buy an endless succession of new things,
or even merely of new “models,” one wonders whether the “highest
standard ever attained” is really worth all it costs and whether if
Wordsworth could to-day see the richest nation in the world he would
not be more than ever convinced that “Getting and spending, we lay
waste our powers.” Yet still the high-powered sales forces urge “buy,
buy, buy and make yourselves and everybody prosperous by it.” We are
hearing a good deal about prosperity without profit. We may soon be
giving consideration to prosperity without peace of mind. It is a
fact not without its significance, perhaps, for social trends and
tendencies that when the disaster in Florida and Porto Rico occurred a
year ago, less than one person in a thousand in the richest city in our
country, a country formerly quick to respond to the call for help, has
contributed even one of those dimes we are told are so unconsidered in
New York.
IV
Let us turn to some of the other social effects of this high standard.
It is obvious that with a national income of even ninety billions, a
hundred and twenty million people cannot buy everything. Some things
have to go if we are to have new things constantly and pay double or
treble for the old. We are electing, in many cases perforce, to let
go the home. This is due partly to the cost of housing and partly
to that of servants as well as general costs. In the urban centers,
at least, gild the pill as we may, the people who fifteen years ago
had comfortable homes are by no means so comfortable to-day. The
New York papers advertise “beautiful one-room homes” consisting of
a room eleven by fourteen with a bath, a bed that folds up into the
wall, and a cooking shelf in a dark closet. The one I have in mind
costs as much in yearly rent as twenty-five years ago the dignified
three-story eleven-room house on one of the finest streets in town cost
my father—that is, $1200. Even if one succeeds in finding a five- to
seven-room apartment, with one or two of the rooms of good size, at
$2000 (which is by no means easy to do), one has only half the space
at about double the cost of two decades back, and nothing like the
dignity, quiet, or privacy. Moreover, the maid service, when it can be
afforded, is at two to three times the former cost.
In the pre-war days a good neighborhood was usually sufficiently large
to permit of extensive walks in it. To-day in New York even a very
expensive neighborhood is as frequently as not an oasis of a block
or two, or even an apartment house or two, in the midst of a desert
of dreary and depressing slums. The rookery quarters of a medieval
city may be picturesque. The slums of New York are merely drab and
sordid. To those accustomed to a house or even to the spaciousness
of a better-class Paris apartment the usual New York apartment seems
hopelessly cramped and lacking in all character and dignity. The rooms
seem almost to open into one another and the family to be always on top
of one another, whether taking their baths or entertaining guests. And
guests are infinitely more of a problem than they ever were. Overnight
guests are out of the question for most people of moderate means. It
is hard enough to get an apartment which affords decent living for
the family, not to speak of a guest room. The lack of service, the
dependence upon one maid, when any, instead of upon the invariable cook
and waitress of even the modest families of twenty years back, has made
entertaining a genuine and not seldom an insoluble problem for families
living on such incomes as before the War would have made hospitality
merely an easy and gracious function of household life.
Moreover, within the family itself, the close quarters of the modern
apartment afford infinitely more opportunity for friction of tempers
and temperaments than the old homes. A third-story front bedroom as
an escape from the family sitting-room two stories below had almost
the aloofness of a mountain peak. The unsatisfactory character of the
new homes, or the unsatisfied natures of their tenants, are proved
beyond dispute by the restlessness engendered. Last October (1928) in
New York alone a hundred thousand families, involving at the lowest
estimate three hundred thousand people, moved from one apartment to
another. What memories can cluster about his “childhood home” for a
child who is thus annually dragged from one set of rooms to another
by parents in search of cheaper rents or the latest installations in
the way of electric iceboxes or garbage incinerators? Perhaps sunshine,
air, quiet, spaciousness, decency of neighborhood, dignity, privacy are
aristocratic requirements, vestiges of a now lost mode of comely and
gracious living. At any rate, they are now the most expensive “things”
to acquire, when they can be acquired at all, in a great modern city.
Yet two decades ago even in New York and Brooklyn they were readily
obtainable on such modest incomes as $3000 or $4000 a year.
V
What has been the effect on the professional and intellectual classes?
Of course where they have linked themselves to big business or made
their work fit into mass-production they have weathered the storm
of the high standard very well. No one need worry about the general
counsel of a motor-car company, the artists who draw the syndicated
comic strips, or the movie stars. But there are whole classes who do
not or cannot thus fit in. A nationally known trust company officer
recently wrote that most of those who disliked the present situation
and who were given to dire comment or prophecy were merely those who
had had comfortable incomes before the present high standard hit us and
who had been unable to adjust themselves to it, that is, make _large_
incomes. But according to the present modes of dividing the national
income, how _can_ these classes thus adjust themselves except by
abandoning their work and going into business?
Our glance at the minimum wage budget prepared by the street railway
men has shown us what can be done on $1900 a year: $12 a year for
education, $30 for all reading matter (one-third of which would
be consumed by one daily paper), and $12.20 for tobacco and all
recreation. The average pay of all clergymen throughout the United
States is $735 a year. Even if this frequently includes a house, how
are they to adjust themselves? To attain even to the minimum budget of
the street railway worker they would nearly have to more than double
their income, that is, to give approximately one-third of their time to
the work of their ministry and two-thirds to making money solely. Even
if they could do so, what would they get as their share of the “high
standard”? We have seen that even the street railway company had to
cut out all reading matter, even newspapers, from the homes of its men
if they were to live on $1505. Yet under the high standard the country
allows its clergy scarcely half that sum and complains that the church
is failing in leadership.
Let us turn to another class, which is great numerically and should be
great in influence, and which we shall consider more particularly in
a later chapter. The average pay of teachers throughout the country
districts of the Middle Atlantic States, including that manufactory
of millionaires, Pennsylvania, is $870 a year; in the villages it is
$1244. Let us bear in mind the bleak budget of $1900 of the street
railway men and remember also that the conductor of a railway freight
train gets about $3750 a year and the engineer about $4700. What
are the opportunities and prospects for a man of scholarly tastes,
attainments, and pursuits? The average pay of over eleven thousand
members of college faculties is less than $3000 a year, and, although
in rare institutions a comparatively few men may attain to $8000 or
$10,000, a man is fortunate indeed who gets from $5000 to $7000. How
are these men to adjust themselves? Most of them do do extra work to
earn money as, in forty per cent of the cases, do the wives also.
In the days before the “high standard” a vacation was a vacation, a
period in which the professor, fagged from nine months’ drilling of
immature minds, could rest and catch up on his professional reading,
get fresh points of view and prepare for the next nine months’ bout
with inquiring or resisting youth. Now, we read, one-third of the
faculty could take no vacation at all; 40 per cent took less than two
weeks, and 60 per cent less than four weeks; yet yesterday the men
in the building trades in New York laid down their demand for every
Saturday off on full pay, equivalent to six and a half weeks’ vacation
from purely physical work requiring practically no mental preparation
or recuperation. Is it any wonder that a professor at Berkeley on $3000
a year goes into business at $20,000 a year, that a professor from
an Eastern university on about $6000 a year becomes president of a
business company with $75,000 a year drawing account, and that another
turns from teaching history to writing advertisements, to mention the
three who occur first to me?
Let us glance at writing under the high standard. Big incomes can be
earned by anything adapted for mass-production, such as best-selling
novels (with possible movie rights), articles for the mass-circulation
magazines, certain sorts of “syndicated stuff,” and so on; but that
sort of writing is not the most valuable for our national culture as a
rule. The cost of living is certainly from 200 to 250 per cent of what
it was in the decade before the War. “Index figures” are misleading.
It is of little importance to the average man whether pig lead is up
25 or 50 per cent. It is of prime importance to him that, as I can
show by my checkbook, a cook who cost $30 a month then costs $75 now,
that a suit of clothes which cost $28 then costs at the same store $74
now, and so on; to say nothing of all the new things to be bought. Of
course, the changes in wage schedules would differ from newspaper to
newspaper, but in one which gave me the figures for before the War and
now I find that editorial salaries have advanced 50 per cent, junior
reporters and book reviewers the same, poets 25 per cent, whereas,
rather oddly, space writers get actually 10 per cent less than before.
I am told that writers for the high-grade magazines get about double.
Comparing the flat price paid for scholarly volumes in two similar
works twenty years ago and now, I found that the scholars working
to-day were paid no more than before the War. On a royalty basis, owing
to higher book prices and larger sales, authors probably fare better
than fifteen years ago, though strict comparison for many reasons is
difficult. On the whole, taking the ordinary man of letters who lives
by his output and who writes books, articles, reviews, and does the
other various literary jobs, it would seem that in order to maintain
himself in the same relative position in the social and economic scale
he would have to increase his output very materially.
Business rewards are greater than ever for those who are successful,
but granted the social value of the business man’s services and
granted also the “dignity of labor,” it may well be asked whether a
standard of living is really intrinsically high which thus places
additional burdens on the shoulders of whole classes of the country’s
spiritual and intellectual leadership, its clergymen, its teachers,
and writers, in order to lighten the load of the carpenters, cooks, and
chambermaids. It may be truly said that Society has always expected
the intellectual classes to content themselves to a great extent with
rewards that are not pecuniary. That is so, but the tremendous advance
in the standard of living and the tremendously increased gulf between
the man of large income and the man of a moderate one has served to
depress these classes in the comparative scale far below the point of
two decades ago. I have every sympathy with labor, but its increased
share of the national income should come from the accumulating surplus,
the location of which is very clearly indicated from the income tax
lists, and not from mulcting the professional and clerical classes
scarcely a step now in the economic scale above labor itself. I cannot
see that the standard of life for the community as a whole is going to
be made higher by taking a vacation and a cook away from the college
professor and giving them to the conductor or the bricklayer, while the
rich business men get incredibly richer.
Before we leave this phase of the question, let us glance at some of
the office workers under the new standard. What mass-production methods
have done in the way of deadening routine for the factory workers is
too well known for repetition, in spite of much glossing over, but what
is going on in office work may be less generally understood. The new
idea of the relations between employer and employee in mass-production
is that the employer buys “production,” that is, “output,” from the
employee. Thus we read in a book on office technic how improvement was
made in an up-to-date office. Motion pictures were taken of the clerks
opening the morning mail. As a result of a study of these pictures,
the motions of the clerks were “reduced from thirteen to six and the
output increased from 100 pieces an hour to 200 an hour. A further
refinement in the manner of arranging the opened and unopened letters
on the table brought the rate to 250 an hour. Output was still further
increased by the use of a ‘motion-studied table’ to 300 an hour.”
Stenographers, of course, have been included in this speeding-up
process. We read that “in measuring production of this kind several
systems are in use. One is that of measuring production by the square
inch, with a transparent celluloid, but in most cases a cyclometer
is used, which is attached to the machine and records the number of
strokes.” Production is counted by “points,” each “point” being equal
to a certain number of strokes, and pay is given accordingly. 250
strokes are deducted for an ordinary error and 1275 strokes for an
error on the envelope. 10,000 strokes are added for “a perfect desk,”
that is one on which, every minute of the week, every implement is
so placed as to permit of the greatest speed. Medals and vacation
allowances are given for records, and contests are held—though, as to
these last, the expert admits that “as a general rule, office contests
are not to be recommended. Spurts of speed of any kind are bound to
have their reactions and the contest is _often succeeded by a certain
amount of lethargy after the goal has been won_. [Italics mine.] But
for clearing out an accumulation of work or to rouse the office force
they may be very effective.” One rubs one’s eyes and wonders whether
he is reading about America under the highest standard of living ever
attained or England at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
Stenographers share in the high standard to the extent of from $1250 to
$1700 a year.
VI
It would be possible to go on almost indefinitely listing our
by-products. For example, having everything from furniture to
buildings always of the latest is doing away with a whole range of
human emotions. When I was at Yale in 1898 I lived in a new dormitory
then one year old. Twenty years later when I went back to see what
memories the old place might bring to me, I found that the dormitory
had been torn down and replaced by a “modern” building. Our schools and
their furnishings, altered or rebuilt every few years, make an Eton
or a Harrow look painfully shabby perhaps and “unprogressive”; but
the boy who sits at the same desk where Shelley or Byron or Chatham
or Gladstone or Wellington sat, or lives in their rooms, will dream
dreams and gain an inspiration never afforded by the latest efficient
furniture from Michigan. It is the law of compensation at work, and
what is gained is not always better than what is lost. So far, what has
been gained under the high standard is mostly material and what has
been lost is mostly spiritual.
It might be thought that with a really high standard, the extra nerve
strain of life would be compensated for by extra opportunity for rest,
leisure, and quiet, but exactly the reverse is the case. There is less
leisure, except perhaps for the old poor and the new very rich, than
there was twenty years ago. It is also infinitely harder than it was
to find any quiet spot in the country at possible cost to which one
can retire to rest one’s tired mind and soul. The automobile offers
an instructive example of how an end can be defeated by its apparent
means. When there were few cars they afforded people a chance to get
away into the peace of the country, but now their very numbers have
ruined the quiet of the countryside. People motor out of the big cities
for quiet, only to find that they themselves, multiplied by thousands,
have killed the very thing they sought. Recently I inquired of a
surgeon who had gone to his house in the country a hundred miles from
New York if he had come back rested. He replied emphatically that he
had not, and that his place was ruined by people who raced their motor
boats with engines unmuffled and made it noisier than even his house in
town. As to what will be the condition when aeroplanes become really
common, one shudders to think.
Is it any wonder that as other by-products the statisticians tell us
that the age of marriage is steadily being postponed, with all that
that implies physiologically and psychologically, that the birth
rate is falling, that heart disease, divorce, and insanity are all
increasing? As we contemplate these and other by-products we may
well ask, what makes a high standard of life rather than of living?
Granted that we now have billionaires where even millionaires were
relatively scarce a generation ago, that labor has risen a little
farther above the subsistence level, and that science has given us
innumerable toys and conveniences, has not the gulf in comfort widened
infinitely between rich and poor? Are the great mass of professional
and intellectual workers and of moderate-salaried people as well off
in the things that really count as they were a generation ago? For the
common fund of our civilization has the advance, such as it is, in the
condition of the laboring class offset the comparative decline in the
great and almost forgotten middle class? Has the nation as a whole
gained or lost in contentment, peace of mind, assurance of the future,
rational enjoyment, and spiritual as well as material comfort? Is it
worth while to be continually driven to meet the rent, life insurance,
the installments on one’s purchases, in order that big business may
declare its billions in stock dividends?
There are evidences that a great change may be in prospect.
Mass-production requires a steady and enormous flow of sales. On the
one hand, the jaded buyers are showing signs of restiveness and of
becoming tired of wasting their lives in buying, buying, buying, and
paying, paying, paying. They have to be whipped into it by more and
more expensive salesmanship. On the other hand, office and sales forces
are getting tired of being speeded up as they compare their share in
the high standard with that of the men above them, and have to be
whipped by the most improved technical methods into greater and greater
activity. And all for what? That mass-production shall not falter or
fail. The overhead costs of distribution have become staggering. If
the public begins to economize and does not buy, then we are told that
mass-production will fall down and in the crash to follow no one will
have money with which to buy anything. Better than that, we are told,
is to buy what we do not really want or cannot afford.
There is no rest from the effort to make money in ever larger and
larger amounts. There is no prospect of comfortable retirement in old
age. For many who never thought of it in the old days there is the
ever-present spectre of illness or incapacity. As has been said, our
prosperity can be maintained only by making people want more, and work
more, all the time. Those, and they are many, who believe that our
recent prosperity has been mainly caused by the phenomenal expansion
of the automobile business tell us that it will soon be necessary to
find some other article which will similarly take the public fancy and
create billions of sales—and billions of expense to men already tired
of doing nothing but meeting new expenses.
“The highest standard of living ever attained in the history of the
world”?