Page:The Economics of Unemployment.djvu/149

The following summary of the argument contained in these chapters may be useful in helping readers to form a clear judgment upon its validity.

The existence of a normal tendency for the rate of industrial production in the world to outrun the rate of consumption of commodities, i.e. the existence of a limited market, is attested by common experience in the business world. This belief is admittedly a chief cause of restriction of output, as practised by workers and by capitalist combinations, and furnishes the chief support of protective tariffs and imperialist policy. This normal failure of consumption to keep pace with actual and potential production is manifestly responsible for the periodic gluts, stoppages, under-production and unemployment, which precede and constitute cyclical depressions. Misapplication of productive power, as between one group of industries and another, one area of industry and another, though responsible for much waste, will be a fairly constant factor in the complex world-economy, and cannot be regarded as a chief cause of the accumulating general gluts which usher in cyclical depressions. Nor is there any reason to suppose that meteorological fluctuations, affecting world-harvests, are competent