The Future-Its Problems and How To Face Them

A Nation of Economic Illiterates  
No Job at the Factory  
The Nightmare of No Teachers  
The Appalling Problem of Dropouts  
Your Health Isn't Free  
Our Obsolete Cities  
Our Industry Is Out of Date  
The Big Are Getting Bigger  
And the Small Are Getting Smaller  
Giantism in Farming  
The Problem of Recessions  
The Pocketbook Pinch   

In July 1959, shortly before President Eisenhower sent his first formal request to Congress to eliminate the forty-three-year-old interest rate ceiling on the sale of new United States Government bonds, a seemingly innocuous compromise amendment was tacked on to a House Ways and Means Committee proposal to achieve this end.

The compromise would have given the President authority to disregard the ceiling if he deemed this "in the national interest" —a rather silly subterfuge designed to shift public responsibility for the move from the Democratic-controlled Congress to the Republican President. It also would have expressed as "the sense of Congress " a tongue-twisting collection of phrases about "the primary mission" of the Federal Reserve System. The amendment was so fuzzy that to most lawmakers it was incomprehensible, but to experts in the Federal Reserve System and to thoughtful students of monetary policy in our nation and throughout the financial centers of the free world, it carried dynamite implications. For it was feared that it would open the way for a series of attacks on our central bank's independence. It was feared that sending a measure of this sort to the Senate would invite the "easy money" Senators to a Roman Holiday at the Federal Reserve's expense.

The judgment of objective observers was that if the amendment was meaningless, as some of its supporters claimed, it shouldn't be put in a bill of such importance, and if it had meaning, the meaning was dreadfully dangerous.

At the time this particular compromise was proposed, I was closely following every development and was deeply involved in the whole story. Curious to know the background of such a be­fuddling mixture of potentially destructive directions, I asked a congressman friend what was going on behind the closed doors of the House Ways and Means Committee sessions debating the amendment

"Isn't this a beaut!" said he in answer to my opening question. "Only thirty days ago, Yd never heard of monetary policy and all this stuff about an interest rate ceiling. Now we 'experts' are making world headlines deciding what shall be done."

"In thirty days you're an expert?" said I.

"Oh, sure" —and he said this seriously about himself—"I've been studying all about the subject and it's a lot more interesting than I thought. Now, Sylvia, what did you want to know?"

I submit this tale —involving a congressman whose name you would probably recognize—not in sardonic irony but in sadness. For it illustrates one of the great problems of America today and the future: our nation's economic illiteracy. It's easy for me to outline several of the basic economic problems we'll have to face in this decade and not too difficult to suggest some solutions. But will a nation in which so many are economically illiterate and indifferent to becoming more literate recognize the magni­tude of the problems, reach the right solutions?

Professor Ben L. Lewis, vice president of the American Eco­nomic Association, summarized it succinctly, I believe, in these words: "The affairs of government in large and increasing meas­ure are economic affairs. . . . The simple business of living in the United States in our age calls increasingly upon men to par­ticipate actively with other men, in the gigantic undertaking of collective governmental decision-making on a vast array of com­plex economic problems and issues. It is demanded of these men that they have economic understanding. The stakes, to put the matter bluntly, are the survival of democracy and human freedom.

A Nation of Economic Illiterates  
No Job at the Factory  
The Nightmare of No Teachers  
The Appalling Problem of Dropouts  
Your Health Isn't Free  
Our Obsolete Cities  
Our Industry Is Out of Date  
The Big Are Getting Bigger  
And the Small Are Getting Smaller  
Giantism in Farming  
The Problem of Recessions  
The Pocketbook Pinch