THE NATURE OF A PROBLEM
1
Somewhat in the spirit of Descartes, let us begin by supposing that
your whole experience were confined to one glimpse of the world. There
would be, I think, no better or worse in your sight, neither good men
nor bad, patriots nor profiteers, conservatives nor radicals. You would
be a perfect neutral. From such an impression of things, it would never
occur to you that the crest of a mountain endured longer than the crest
of a wave, that people moved about and that trees did not, or that the
roar of an orator would pass sooner than the roar of Niagara.
Lengthen your experience, and you would begin to notice differences
in the constancy of things. You would know day and night, perhaps,
but not winter and summer, movement in space, but little of age in
time. And if you then formulated your social philosophy, would you not
almost certainly conclude that the things you saw people doing then
it was ordained they should do always, and that their characters as
you had seen them that day would be thus and so forever? And would
not the resulting treatise pass almost unnoticed in any collection of
contemporary disquisitions on the nations, the races, the classes or
the sexes?
But the more you lengthened the span of your impression, the more
variability you would note, until at last you would say with Heraclitus
that all things flow. For when the very stars and the rocks were seen
to have a history, men and their institutions and customs, habits and
ideals, theories and policies could seem only relatively permanent. And
you would have to conclude that what at first glance you had called
a constant turns out after you had watched it longer merely to be
changing a little more slowly than something else.
With sufficiently long experience you would indeed be bound to
conclude that while the diverse elements that bear upon the life of
men, including the characters of men themselves, were changing, yet
they were not changing at the same pace. Things multiply, they grow,
they learn, they age, they wear out and they die at different rates.
An individual, his companions, his implements, his institutions, his
creeds, his needs, his means of satisfaction, evolve unevenly, and
endure unevenly. Events do not concur harmoniously in time. Some hurry,
some straggle, some push and some drag. The ranks have always to be
reformed.
Instead of that one grand system of evolution and progress, which
the nineteenth century found so reassuring, there would appear to be
innumerable systems of evolution, variously affecting each other, some
linked, some in collision, but each in some fundamental aspect moving
at its own pace and on its own terms.
The disharmonies of this uneven evolution are the problems of mankind.
2
Suppose a man who knew nothing of the history of the nineteenth century
were shown the tables compiled in the _Statistical Abstract of the
United States_ for the period from 1800 to 1918: He would note that
the population of the world had multiplied two and a half times; its
total commerce 42 times; its shipping tonnage more than 7 times; its
railways 3664 times; its telegraphs 317 times; its cotton production 17
times; its coal 113 times; its pig iron 77 times. Could he doubt that
in a century of such uneven changes men had faced revolutionary social
problems?
Could he not infer from these figures alone that there had been great
movements of population, vast changes in men’s occupation, in the
character of their labor, their wants, their standards of living,
their ambitions? Would he not fairly infer that the political system
which had existed in 1800 must have altered vastly with these new
relationships, that customs, manners and morals appropriate to the
settled, small and more or less self-contained communities of 1800 had
been subjected to new strains and had probably been thoroughly revised?
As he imagined the realities behind the tables, would he not infer that
as men lived through the changes which these cold figures summarize
they had been in conflict with their old habits and ideals, that the
process of making new habits and adjustments must have gone on subject
to trial and error with hopefulness over material progress and yet much
disorder and confusion of soul?
3
For a more specific illustration of the nature of a problem we may
examine the problem of population in its simplest form. When Malthus
first stated it he assumed, for the purposes of argument, two elements
evolving at different rates. Population, he said, doubled every
twenty-five years; the produce of land could be increased in the same
time by an amount “equal to what it at present produces.”[18] He was
writing about the year 1800. The population of England he estimated
at seven millions, and the food supply as adequate to that number.
There was then, in 1800, no problem. By 1825 the population, according
to his estimate of its rate of increase, would have doubled, but the
food supply would also have doubled. There would be no problem of
population. But by 1850 the population would stand at twenty-eight
millions; the food supply would have increased only by an amount to
support an additional seven millions. The problem of excess population,
or, if you like, of food scarcity, would have appeared. For while in
1800 and in 1825 the food available for each person would be the same,
in 1850, owing to the uneven rate of growth, there would be only a
three-quarter ration for each person. And this altered relationship
Malthus rightly called a problem.
Suppose, now, we complicate Malthus’s argument a bit by assuming
that in 1850 people had learned to eat less and felt more fit on the
three-quarter ration. There would then be no problem in 1850, for the
adjustment of the two variables—food and people—would be satisfactory.
Or, on the contrary, suppose that soon after 1800 people had demanded a
higher standard of living and expected more food, though the necessary
additional food was not produced. These new demands would create a
problem. Or suppose, as was actually the case,[19] the food supply
increased faster than Malthus had assumed it could, though population
did not. The problem of population would not arise at the date he
predicted. Or suppose the increase of population was reduced by birth
control. The problem, as Malthus first stated it, would not arise.[20]
Or suppose the food supply increased faster than the population could
consume it. There would then be a problem not of population but of
agricultural surplus.
In an absolutely static society there would be no problems. A problem
is the result of change. But not of the change in any self-contained
element. Change would be unnoticeable unless we could measure it
against some other element which did not change at the same pace. If
everything in the universe expanded at a mile a minute, or shrank at
the same rate, we should never know it. For all we can tell we may
be the size of a mosquito one moment in the sight of God, and of an
elephant the next; we cannot tell if mosquitoes and elephants and
chairs and planets change in proportion. Change is significant only in
relation to something else.
The change which constitutes a problem is an altered relationship
between two dependent variables.[21] Thus the automobile is a problem
in the city not because there are so many automobiles but because there
are too many for the width of the streets, too many for the number of
competent drivers, because the too narrow streets are filled with too
many cars driven too recklessly for the present ability of the police
to control them. Because the automobile is manufactured faster than
old city streets can be widened, because some persons acquire cars
faster than they acquire prudence and good manners, because automobiles
collect in cities faster than policemen can be recruited, trained or
paid for by slow-yielding taxpayers, there is an automobile problem
made evident by crowding, obnoxious fumes and collisions.
But though these evils seem to arise from the automobile, the fault
lies not in the automobile but in the relation between the automobile
and the city. This may sound like splitting hairs, but unless we
insist upon it we never define a problem accurately nor lay it open
successfully to solution.
The problem of national defense, for example, can never be stated by a
general staff which draws upon its inner consciousness for an estimate
of the necessary force. The necessary force can be estimated only in
relation to the probable enemy, and the military problem whether of
peace or of war lies always in the ratio of forces. Military force
is a purely relative conception. The British Navy is helpless as a
child against the unarmed mountaineers of Tibet. The French Army has
no force as against fishing smacks in the Pacific Ocean. Force has
to be measured against its objective: the tiger and the shark are
incomparable one with the other.
Now a settled and accepted ratio of forces that might collide is a
state of military peace. A competitive and, therefore, constantly
unbalanced ratio is a prelude to war. The Canadian border presents no
military problem, not because Canada’s forces and our own are equal
but because, happily, we do not compare them. They are independent
variables, having no relation one with the other, and a change in the
one does not affect the other. In capital ships we are confronted now
with no naval problem in the Atlantic or in the Pacific, because with
Britain and Japan, the only two comparable powers, we are agreed on
a ratio by treaty.[22] But for all types of ships not subject to the
ratio there is a naval problem in both oceans, and if the Washington
Treaty should lapse the problem which it settled would recur. It would
recur because the synchronized progress of the three navies would be
replaced by a relatively uneven progress of each as compared with the
others.
4
The field of economic activity is the source of many problems. For, as
Cassel says,[23] we include within the meaning of the word economic
those means of satisfying human wants which are “usually available only
in a limited quantity.” Since “the wants of civilized human beings as
a whole are,” for all practical purposes, “unlimited,” there is in all
economic life the constant necessity of reaching “an adjustment between
the wants and the means of supplying the wants.” This disharmony of
supply and demand is the source of an unending series of problems.
We may note at once that the economist does not claim as his province
the whole range of adjustments between human wants and the means of
satisfying them. He usually omits, for example, the human need to
breathe air. For since the air is unlimited in quantity the human
need of it is not frustrated, and the surplus air not required by
men in no way impinges upon their lives. Yet there may be a scarcity
of air, as, for example, in a congested tenement district. Then an
economic problem is engendered which has to be met, let us say, by
building laws requiring a certain number of cubic feet of air a person.
The economist, in other words, takes as his field of interest the
maladjustment between human wants and those means of satisfying them
which are available, but only in limited quantities. In a world where
every want was satisfied there would be no problems for him; nor any
in a world where men had no wants; nor any in a world where the only
wants men had could be supplied by a change on their part of their own
states of consciousness. To create a problem there must be at least two
dependent but separated variables: wants and the means of satisfaction;
and these two variables must have a disposition to alter so that an
antecedent equilibrium is disturbed.
In the measure, says Cassel, in which the economic system succeeds in
securing an adjustment between the wants and the means of supplying the
wants we speak of it as a sound economy. “This task may be accomplished
in three different ways: first, by eliminating the less important
wants and so restricting the total wants; secondly, by making the best
possible use of the means available for the purposes in question; and,
thirdly, by increased personal exertions.”[24]
Since the problem arises out of the disharmony of supply and demand,
its solution is to be found by increasing the supply or restricting
the demand. The choice of method depends first of all on which it
is possible in specific cases to follow, and, second, granting the
possibility, on which is the easier or the preferred. Either method
will give what we acknowledge as a solution. For when two variables are
in an adjustment which does not frustrate the expectations of either
there is no problem, and none will be felt to exist.
FOOTNOTES:
[18] T. R. Malthus, _An Essay on the Principle of Population_, Chapter
II.
[19] A. M. Carr-Saunders, _The Population Problem_, p. 28.
[20] Malthus himself recognised this in a later edition of his book.
[21] _Cf._ in this connection W. F. Ogburn, _Social Change_, _passim_,
but particularly Part IV, I, on “The Hypothesis of Cultural Lag.”
[22] However, the controversy over gun elevation demonstrates how
difficult it is to maintain an equilibrium of force where so many
factors are variable.
[23] Gustav Cassel, _A Theory of Social Economy_, Chapter I.
[24] _Ibid._, p. 7.