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Show MacltincH and Men Trying to figure onl, .some way of solving the unemployment unemploy-ment problem hart provided a sharp headache for more than fun; American in the last i'ew years. Usually, witli furrowed brow, the I'igurer lets it go by referring to what looks like a perfectly undeniijble fact I hat. if we could only get general business activity back to the level of l'.)28 or lirji) the. unemployment problem would lake care of itself. Wow, however, il develops that oven this loophole may be closed. Fortune Magazine, afcer a survey of the whole field, declares bluntly that a painful and critical unemployment problem is going to be with us even after good times have returned. The arch-villain, it finds, is that peculiar spectre, technological unemployment the kind of unemployment 1 hat conies not because times are bad but because machinery does the work that men used to do. "Even though prc-depression production were resumed on Jan. 1, 1933," remarks Fortune, "there would still remain an unemployed population variously estimated at four to six million." Nor is this the worst of it. The magazine predicts that the mechanization of industry will continue, with even more striking displacement of human labor, in the future. If 70 workers today do the work that 100 men did in 1910, in 1947 the same work will be done by 40 workers. Here, as Fortune points out, is a problem that exists quite independently of the depression; a problem that will grow progressively more acute in years to come, and that will be vexatious long after this depression has passed into history. It may be, indeed, "the fundamental problem of our civilization," civ-ilization," more vital even than the tripartite conflict between be-tween democracy, communism and fascism. And -so far we have hardly so much as glanced at it. We are reaching the end of a long epoch ; something new and terrifyingly strange is about to begin. It is time we devoted our best thought and energy to the question how we are going to meet it. |