SCIENTIFIC HAPPINESS

The millenium is at hand. Happiness is to be produced, like toothpicks, by scientific, large-scale methods. The Personnel Research Federation recently organized in New York announces that science and business are to be united in its study of "the human factor" in industry. "To weed misfits from American industry, and to make its millions of workers happier, more efficient, and more productive," is the ingenious wording of its purpose.

No doubt the Personnel Research Federation can increase the efficiency and productiveness of workmen. But it is a naive assumption that by so doing it will also increase their happiness. Strange as it may seem, and irrational as it undoubtedly is, happiness does not follow from efficiency perse.

A happier creature than the Southern negro of the old type does not exist Carefree, without a thought of the morrow, his is the perfect joy of the eternal child. Yet his inefficiency as a workman defies all comparison. One never hears of a negro committing suicide. "But taint strange, Boss," says Rastus. "When a nigger gits into trouble, and starts thinkin, he just naturally goes to sleep." His childish joy is the product of a mind that does not function.

Obviously improvement in human efficiency implies advance in intelligence. And as intelligence increases, capacity for unhappiness increases. Men who are capable of high efficiency rebel against spending their lives screwing on bolt 13 or hammering nail 127. A thinking man is happy if he is working toward some goal which he can reasonably hope to attain. The prospect which greater efficiency holds out to the intelligent worker is the possibility of becoming a more nearly perfect cog in the system which he already hates. By what strange stretch of the imagination, can one call this making workers happier? Indeed, for the Personnel Research Federation to say it is investigating "the human factor" in industry is a misnomer. It would be better to call it "the flesh and bone factor." There is nothing human about it.