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PARTISAN REVIEW
production, not because we want the extra goods, but to provide the
incomes of the extra workers.
I am not wholly convinced of the existence of the evil, still less
of the desirability of the cure. It has yet to be definitely proved that
we cannot run a full employment economy without inflation. I myself am
moderately hopeful that we can, given certain not impossible conditions.
But at the very least the evil remains unproven.
As for the cure, we must not forget that there are important ad–
vantages to running the economy at a full employment level of demand.
For example, you then allow people, for the first time, an area of
choice between work and leisure; and this I regard as a great enlarge–
ment of human freedom. You may sustain the unemployed worker's in–
come as fully as you will; but you are still depriving him of the choice
between working and not working. Similarly in other cases: a high level
of demand permits the worker a choice between overtime and free
week ends, the married woman a choice between going out to work or
not, the older man a choice between retiring or staying on at work. It
is not enough to compensate the lack of choice by bountiful pensions
or unemployment benefits; for people like to work for many other reasons
than the income. There are also other important advantages to running
the economy fairly hard; but for reasons of space I must omit them.
None of this means that I at all dissent from the major proposition
that additional output is now of much less urgency, and should
be
relegated to a lower position in our scale of values. It is only that I
would prefer to give effect to the altered scale of values, not by run–
ning the economy at half cock, but simply by giving-as Galbraith also
wants to do--a much higher priority to noneconomic relative to eco–
nomic values whenever the two conflict. Goodness knows that there are
plenty of opportunities, many of which Galbraith describes. We could,
for example, when arguing about taxation questions, the location of in–
dustry, labor mobility, and the status of the worker in his factory, instead
of treating efficiency always as the main criterion, give precedence to
social and psychological considerations. We could lighten the burden of
toil, make work more agreeable, and increase the possibilities of leisure.
We could spend more on education and the social services. We could
be more lavish with the arts and more generous to culture. And, not
least, we could release for more fundamental tasks some of the scarce
human talent which now has to fuss about incentives and the balance
of payments and higher productivity.
All this I find intensely sympathetic. In the United States, I wrote
some years ago, "it seems absurd to speak as though economic efficiency
