Page:The Economics of Unemployment.djvu/116

earned incomes and the larger estates, for the service of war debts, pensions, and other obligations, has probably absorbed in this country, as in Germany, Italy and the United States, most of the contribution which interest on war loans makes to the incomes of the well-to-do. Only in countries, such as France, where direct progressive taxation is notably inadequate and where the indirect taxes are largely borne by working class consumers, is there reason to conclude that the net result of war finance has been a worsening of the relative condition of the workers.

But there are other changes of class incomes—partly due to the war, partly to more general causes—which should be taken into account in considering how far tendencies favour a more equal distribution of income and a consequently improved adjustment between production and consumption. The damage inflicted upon the professional and salaried classes in most countries has been strongly marked. This has been partly due to weak organisation and personal ineptitude for bargaining, but chiefly to a numerical over-supply at a time when large bodies of consumers found it necessary to economise upon their less urgent needs, and many business firms to cut down their salariat. Large sections of the professional and employed middle classes have been reduced to poverty and want in Austria, Germany and other broken countries; and elsewhere, as in Great Britain, have suffered great damage to their economic status. Not entirely a war change, this dwindling of the economic strength of the rank and file of the brain-workers has been greatly accelerated by the war.