DEAN DONHAM'S SPEECH

Yesterday Dean Donham of the Harvard Business School suggested in a radio address two methods of attacking the economic distress of the country. Unemployment the Dean would sweep away by dividing available work among all the men fit for positions. The basic cause of business depression, maladjustment, would be taken care of by a permanently established national planning board. These ideas are not new, but they have hitherto been considered radical, indeed socialistic, and it is a surprising indication of the progress of the times to hear them from the Dean of a Harvard graduate school.

Wider distribution of available work is a very specific remedy for employment problems, but it is doubtful whether it would help general conditions greatly. Many who are at present employed full time would find their incomes greatly reduced for the benefit of those returned to work by this plan. As a result less money may be spent for luxuries, and a great deal more for necessities, than has been in the three years of depression. Such disarrangements of industry cannot be considered lightly.

The second suggestion appears on the surface more immediately applicable and popular. A commission to exert control over industry is generally admitted to be necessary if financial tangles are to be avoided in the future. The national economy is now mature and developed to the point where control would not mean constriction. At the same time there is ever increasing need to end the operation--of the Jay Goulds and promoters of the present who make a good thing of tinkering with American industrial and financial machinery.

If better times are to return permanently, and employees are to be assured of their jobs, rational planning of the type recommended by Dean Donham should be adopted. The madcap antidotes to end depression tried in the past three years, the buying campaigns and bonus crusades, are symptoms of the irrational attitude toward the crash. Neither witchcraft nor behavioristic psychology cured economic ills. Since this depression is largely the result of factors which could have been brought altogether under control, the suggestion that a national planning board could restore prosperity is attractively rational.