Our Complex Civilization and the Genius of Its Youth

Abstract

For fifty thousand years, more or less, man led a comparatively simple life. The community, if not the family, was economically independent. Each small group produced all necessary materials for food, clothing, warmth, and shelter. Division of labor only slightly developed. Then, only one hundred and fifty years ago, began the age of steam and electricity. Factories and mills were built; rapid communication and transportation drew the world together; the modern city sprang up. Specialization in production made each group dependent on various other groups. A strike among coal miners in the dead of winter came to imperil the lives of millions. When the board of directors of a corporation in one city decided to decrease its output, a machinist employed by another corporation three thousand miles away was thrown out of work, his wife was forced into industry, and his new-born babe died of malnutrition. The outstanding effect of the Industrial Revolution was to bring about unprecedented complexity of social and economic organization. Now, at the end of the Great War, the world is in chaos. Humanity seems impotent before a prodigious array of political, social, and economic problems. Famine is abroad in the world. In a large part of Europe dangerous radicalism is in control. Europe is economically disintegrating for lack of goods; the United States has the materials and the labor for manufacturing these goods, but seems unable to make the domestic and international adjustments