Page:The Economics of Unemployment.djvu/146

adjustment between production and consumption, for the higher consumption thus attained might be accompanied by a more than corresponding rise in production. But there is reasonable ground for holding that the breakdown of long-established habits of low conservative consumption achieved by migration to a new and more progressive environment, together with the greater capacity for collective bargaining and political assistance in securing higher standards, has enabled the working-classes to obtain a larger proportion of the product, the real income of the economic world, than they had heretofore. This tendency is doubtless offset in some measure by increasing opportunities for the temporary exploitation of new immigrants into industrial countries and of backward peoples in their own countries by profiteering capitalism. But since the necessary implication of such exploitation of weaker groups is to stir in them new demands which crave economic satisfaction, it seems likely that the general result is some movement towards equalisation of incomes, in the sense that the surplus available for automatic accumulation forms a smaller proportion of the world income. This, of course, is by no means certain. It might be that the Western civilised Powers would, by separate or conjoint policy, fasten upon the undeveloped countries and their unresisting populations so rigorous an economic domination as would draw from them a surplus real income large enough, not only to buy off by private concessions and public subsidies class discontent within their borders, but to retain upon the wider scale that inequality of income which