Postwar Planning and the Rural Urban Balance

Abstract

/M OST thinking about a desirable postwar employment pattern assumes that the way to prosperity in the future will be the same as it has been in the past. It assumes, in other words, that we shall have a constantly greater expansion of urban industry than of agriculture, with a corresponding further shift of population from the country to the town. Not back to the land, but forward to yet more factories, must be the watchword. Full employment in say 1950, as the United States Department of Agriculture envisages the matter, will occupy about 55 million full-time workers, some 8 million of them on farms and the rest in nonagricultural occupations. That number of workers will be required to produce a national income of 150 billions of dollars, which is about the lowest figure compatible with full employment and at the same time with maintenance of our living standards. But the distribution of these workers between farms and factories will be different from what it is now. It will involve the transfer of many hundreds of thousands from rural to urban jobs, and also provision for a steady continued transfer of workers in the same direction. In this general form come all workable plans for postwar full employment, with no exception whatsoever. Necessarily, however, the proposed greater increase of farm than of factory production presupposes markets. On this head the formulations up to now are vague. Obviously, the markets must be either foreign or domestic; but beyond this truism the analysis falters, for a reason which to be sure we must acknowledge to be formidable. If the market for an increased industrial output is to be sought in foreign trade, it must be exclusively a one-way proposition; it must involve additional exports but not additional imports. As a means of absorbing more production than would otherwise be absorbed, this foreign trade must be strictly an outlet and not an inlet. How to contrive, or even to justify such an arrangement, has economists baffled. On the other hand, the provision of a market at home for the desired increased industrial production obviously raises problems in income distribution. No wonder the dilemma persists. It should be resolved, nevertheless, in