Economic Insecurity
In spite of our program of so-called “social security,” both personal and economic insecurity are usual in our time. Few people can be sure of continued employment. In many cases one can not be sure that the business that employs him will be in existence a year from now. Often, one can not be sure that the type of work for which he has been trained will be in demand next year. Automation is eliminating hundreds of thousands of jobs each year in the United States.
We are quite ingenious in building factories that can turn out enormous quantities of television sets, automobiles, refrigerators, toothbrushes, packaged foods, etc. But we wouldn’t dare let these factories run full time because they would produce more goods than we could sell. So we have idle factories some of the time with large numbers of people in need all of the time. Paradoxically, it seems that only when we’re fighting a war are we able to keep our industrial machines operating at full capacity. Although much of our population can use better clothing, better housing, and better food, our techniques in distributing the bounty of mass production are bogged down by economic diseases that go under the names of “overpopulation,” “unemployment,” and “lack of purchasing power.”
Dr. Ralph Linton has observed:
As the disharmonies within the culture become increasingly pronounced, more and more of the society’s energy and resources have to be expended on makeshift adjustments until the period of rapid change gradually grinds to a halt. Our own society would seem to be in such a period at the present time. Its tremendous and still accelerating development of science and technology has not been accompanied by an equal development in social, economic, and political patterns ... We are now ... only beginning to explore the potentialities which it offers for developments in our culture outside technology, particularly in the social, political, and economic fields. It is safe to predict that even two or three centuries from now, such social inventions as modern-type Capitalism, Fascism, and Communism will be regarded as primitive experiments directed toward the adjustment of modern society to modern technology.
Linton, The Tree of Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959), pp. 47–48.
Our Polluted World
Although this is the only world we have, we’re certainly not taking good care of it. We’ve already exploded enough atomic bombs to contaminate the atmosphere with strontium 90 and other radioactive elements. According to Hathaway and Leverton of the U.S. Department of Agriculture:
Strontium 90 ... may become a health problem. Its radioactivity is slow to disappear, and its accumulation in the body could be dangerous. ... Strontium 90 was first detected in animal bones, dairy products, and soil in 1953. It now occurs in all human beings regardless of their age or where they live.
Milicent L. Hathaway and Ruth M. Leverton, “Calcium and Phosphorous,” Food, The Yearbook of Agriculture, 1959 (United States Department of Agriculture, Washington, D.C., 1959), p. 117.
Atomic bombs are not the only means we use to pollute the air we breathe. The exhausts of automobiles, the excretions of industry, and the burning of coal, oil, and garbage are also busy contaminating the air. Today air pollution affects in some degree more than 7,000 urban areas inhabited by 115,000,000 Americans. When bituminous coal and low grade fuel oil are burned, sulphur dioxide gas and smoke are released. A five-day killer smog hit London in 1952 and killed 4,000 people. Air pollution has been linked with the common cold, asthma, pneumonia, tuberculosis, influenza, chronic bronchitis, pulmonary emphysema, and lung cancer.
Those who are not overly worried about human beings might well ponder other costs of air pollution. Sulphur dioxide has been shown to disintegrate nylon stockings. It reacts chemically with moisture to form sulphuric acid, which eats away roofs, eaves, downspouts, and other exposed metals. It even affects stone buildings and the proud statutes of military heroes in the parks.
Air and water are the most immediate physical necessities of life. Lest we neglect the latter, it may be pointed out that our largest river is well polluted with oils, phenols, ammonia and toxic metals, blood, refuse from hospitals and undertakers, and acids from mines. For example, in the St. Louis area there have been times when the chicken feathers, viscera, and offal collect in patches too thick to drive a motorboat through. The 300,000,000 gallons of sewage a day coming from St. Louis and East St. Louis contain 460 tons of solid garbage and 165 tons of ground garbage. In the part of the Mississippi from St. Louis to New Orleans, a mouthful of water contains half a million coliform bacilli, which come largely from untreated sewage. Nor does the United States have a monopoly on polluted water. Throughout the world about five million children die each year before their first birthday from diarrhea or dysentery through drinking unclean water.
Ephemeral Machines
The pleasure of living in the twentieth century is somewhat tarnished by the constant deterioration of the machines and gadgets we use. They are, unfortunately, designed for a short life—both style-wise and function-wise. It is possible to build a washing machine or television set that would probably not need service during a ten-year period. It is possible to design an automobile that may remain trouble-free for a ten-year period and to give it an attractive design that would be appreciated even longer. Instead of designing for longevity and service, automobile designers rack their brains for ways to make next year’s car so appealing that we’ll trade in this year’s car. Gerald Piel informs us:
According to the standard practice of our durable goods industries—always with the aim of perpetuating scarcity in the face of abundance—the automobile is designed for 1,000 hours of service, to be traded in at 40,000 miles or less.
Can you think of any electrical or mechanical device in your home that
