"Cheapskate" Counterpoint

Fortnight ago Mayor C. D. White of Atlantic City went off for a vacation in California. Before leaving, he closed Atlantic City's publicity bureau, apparently still convinced, as he once remarked, that the sort of visitor it attracted was a "cheapskate." Last week, in the opinion of most Atlantic City concessionaires and hotelmen, Mayor White was right about the most recent group of visitors. These were some 3,000 earnest folk assembled for the annual convention of the Allied Social Science Associations.*

What their convention missed in frivolity it made up in interest. Most of the leading U. S. economists were there and No. 1 topic was naturally the current depression. Against the full blast of such Governmental brasses in Philadelphia as Assistant Attorney General Robert Jackson (see p, 12), the murmurings of the economists in Atlantic City formed a quiet counterpoint.

President of the American Economic Association is famed Professor Oliver Mitchell Wentworth Sprague of Harvard, onetime adviser to the Secretary of the U. S. Treasury and the Bank of England. Declaring that a general reduction in prices and wages is needed to expand demand for capital goods, he remarked: "Certainly nothing in this direction can reasonably be expected so long as the policy of the various industries is precisely that of the less intelligent labor leaders--that of making adjustments to demand almost exclusively through reduced output."

Other economists' opinions:

Lionel D. Edie of Capital Research Co.: The prices of steel, automobiles, farm machinery will have to drop, and building materials will have to come down 15% or more; April 1 is the earliest possible time for a business upswing.

Col. Leonard P. Ayres, famed commentator of the Cleveland Trust Co.: Present conditions are "a crisis of confidence. . . . Electric utilities are the key log."

Columbia Professor Arthur David Gayer: "Those who find the source of all the trouble in Government spending and unbalanced budgets as such are spending too much time barking up the wrong tree."

Dr. Albert Gailord Hart of the University of Chicago: "Publicity about Government measures for the aid of business. especially if exaggerated, does a great deal of damage. . . . More building would be a very good thing and if building costs were lower there would be more. But if the Government comes out with an announcement that it aims to make building cheaper next season, it checks building and planning at the present, for people believe that they can save money by waiting."

In London last week famed Economist John Maynard Keynes, often quoted as President Roosevelt's economic patron saint, drew a distinction between the public-works program of the New Deal and that which Keynes is advocating in England. Said he: "President Roosevelt's policy, which was nevertheless very useful so long as it was pressed and saved the U.S. from grave disaster, was, of course, not a parallel case. It was largely devoted to improvising a system of relief and preventing a collapse of credit and general insolvency. Plans for increased capital expenditure on housing, public utility services and railroads were so completely unprepared that even today they are still in a state of preparation. And it is this unpreparedness which is the cause of the present setback in the U. S."

-American Economic Association, American Statistical Association, American Sociological Society, American Farm Economic Association, American Marketing Association, American Association for Labor Legislation, American Association of Teachers of Business Law, American Accounting Association, American Association of University Teachers of Insurance, Tax Policy League, Econometric Society.

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