Page:The Economics of Unemployment.djvu/143
the rich, so far as it was effective in securing a better application of the national income, it could not sensibly diminish the depressions which are brought upon us by world-gluts and price movements. Though a country tolerably self-sufficing for production and investment might find substantial relief from the liability to trade depressions by a better internal adjustment of production and consumption, this could not be the case for any country largely dependent upon world markets and foreign investments. For a country like Great Britain, accustomed in recent times to invest as much as half its annual savings overseas, no merely national solution is feasible, and the same reasoning applies to most great industrial countries with an ever-increasing pressure. At present the violence and the uncontrolled nature of external movements of commerce and finance are driving most nations to seek the shelter of tariffs, subsidies and other barriers against economic internationalism. But this emergency policy cannot long prevail against the forces which make persistently and ever more powerfully for international co-operation. This signifies that no sound solution can be found for any of the great economic problems affecting standards of production, distribution and consumption, except by a policy which is in effect if not in express contrivance international. Applying this criticism to the large problem here 1set out — the better correlation of rate of production and rate of consumption by means of better distribution of the product — we have to ask how far a tendency towards such improved distribution can be discerned in the world-economy. I have already cited some