Recession (Continued)
In 1949, just the reverse was true. Farm prices
skidded more than 20 percent, but the post-war
boom in new cars skyrocketed automobile produc
tion and prices more than 30 percent.
And here's a contradiction within a contradiction:
automobile production now is off about 35 percent,
yet some of the highest-priced cars of all Cadillacs
and Thunderbirds are selling as well as ever.
More contradictions: while millions continue job
less, many large working groups including postal
workers and members of the Armed Forces are
getting substantial pay hikes. Prices aren't coming
down noticeably, and the cost-of-living index keeps
going up steadily.
Co "it ain't necessarily so" that everyone suffers
during a recession, although it's inevitable
that some must. That's the nature of things.
But even those who don't suffer are inclined to
forget that, despite temporary setbacks, the basic
economy is still healthy. It has had a long record of
growth and expansion, and there is every reason
to believe that, after readjusting or pausing to get
its breath, it will go right on growing and emerge
healthier than ever because of the readjustments.
The current unemployment figures are not even
percent in both cases.
Compare this with 1933, when nearly 13 million
about 25 percent of the working force had no work.
And in 1941, when we were presumably well out of
the depression, nearly six million about 10 percent
still had no jobs.
What this means, of course, is that, in spite of un
employment, there are more jobs today about 15
million more than in 1939 and a greater percent
age of people filling them than during many of our
previous periods of prosperity. And further, we now
have cushions under us price supports, steady
Government spending, more savings, unemployment
benefits that make any recession easier to take and
any depression harder to make.
On the positive side, it's no secret that our stand
ard of living has increased steadily over the years.
The average family, after taxes and taking into ac
count the change in prices, has 60 percent more to
spend today than it did during the boom days of
1929, and it has much better products to spend it on.
Electronics, chemistry, automation, and medicine
are only a few of the fields that have created alto
gether new products and industries in the last 20
years, spending millions of dollars and employing
hundreds of thousands of people. Electronics alone
housewive's chore almost a push-button operation,
creating so much leisure time that it has produced
a whole new concept in social thinking.
Woman's role, in fact, has changed so drastically
in a generation that today millions of them have
flooded the labor market, filling jobs that didn't
exist for their mothers and grandmothers. This fact
is often overlooked in unemployment statistics.
But perhaps this whole business of the recession
and its relationship to the basic health of the econ
omy is best summed up in a current joke. During
the depression, so the story goes, people walked
miles to stand in bread lines. Today they drive their
own cars to pick up unemployment compensation.
But enough of that. The future of the economy is
more relevant than any Monday-morning
quarterbacking about its past or present. And
frankly, I can't see anything ahead but more ex
pansion. In fact, I feel it's not only a certainty, but
a necessity. Perhaps this requires explanation.
Let's first take the factors that make it a certainty.
They're fairly well known, but would bear repeating.
Our population is continually growing, and at a
continually accelerating rate. It has doubled in the
last 50 years, and last year we recorded more births
m imVo a if matt
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NEW lJWIEmBMWIE CAPRI MARK III
as serious as many think. At worst, we've had
slightly more than five million persons out of work.
Again, this is no consolation to the five million, but
actually it's not as bad as it sounds. At the peak of
the 1949 recession, for example, we had slightly
more than four million out of work. Yet, because
our population has grown, the percentage of un
employed was about the same, approximately 7
has been responsible for the phenomenal television
boom, the mushrooming hi-fi industry, and the pre
dicted growth of FM-radio. All this in addition to
its remarkable contributions to defense weapons.
Closer to home and with a brief pause to allow
housewives from coast to coast to cry aloud in pain
modern improvements in household equipment,
with nearly everything automatic, have made the
(4,302,000) than any year in our history. Add to this
the fact that we're a healthier people, thanks to
medicine, and aren't dying off as fast as we used to.
By 1960, our population will be close to 180 million;
by 1970, we'll be over 200 million!
With population, of course, comes more demand.
In America this has always meant more pro
duction, more jobs, more income. Our prosperity
Employed
38,760,000
58,710,000
62,311,000
50,350,000
X, JMtf,,.,."c
14 O Family Weekly. July 27. 19M
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