News

Harvard Quietly Resolves Anti-Palestinian Discrimination Complaint With Ed. Department

News

Following Dining Hall Crowds, Harvard College Won’t Say Whether It Tracked Wintersession Move-Ins

News

Harvard Outsources Program to Identify Descendants of Those Enslaved by University Affiliates, Lays Off Internal Staff

News

Harvard Medical School Cancels Class Session With Gazan Patients, Calling It One-Sided

News

Garber Privately Tells Faculty That Harvard Must Rethink Messaging After GOP Victory

New Novels of the Spring

AMERICAN PROSPERITY. Its Causes and Its Consequences. By Paul M. Mazur. The Viking Press. New York: 128. $2.50.

By P. H. T.

WHEN America's present posperity, and with it all its creations disappear? The question has often been asked, and as often found a new answer. Usually it is the economist who writes, but in this case a son of American prosperity, a Wall street banker, provides an answer which, perhaps because of its very non-scholarly writing, will attract the business man.

To explain this country's wealth, Mr. Mazur adduces the well-known causes--natural resources, large-scale production, efficient marketing and distribution.

Three dangers he sees, turning from the past to look into the future. First, he finds that the cost of high pressure distribution is beginning to offset the saving of mass productions. In the second place, mass production is threatened by hand-to-mouth buying, fostered by the need for rapid distribution and the consequently developed habit of rapid "style-change". And in the third place, Mr. Mazur sees danger to our prosperity from a change in the European trade balance.

But in none of these cases is the danger without its remedy. To each of the problems, Mr. Mazur has his answer, simple, based on common sense, without a flaw in the logic that any business man could detect: but perhaps because if its very clarity not entirely to be trusted by the scholars in economics.

Want to keep up with breaking news? Subscribe to our email newsletter.

Tags