All who might help lift our economy to a higher and more natural level were once children. What happened to them then? How did that affect their later behavior, judgment, and ability to listen, think and feel?
Yale University was the first to build a dome, of such wonder that a child placed inside could be watched by note-taking scholars outside; the child did not see these watchers, and could not even see the dome. So, he behaved without the disturbance of outside influence.
Computers now on the drawing board will tell more about children's' reactions, but we don't have to wait for them. Sensitive individuals of all faiths have for thousands of years sneaked their consciousness inside other beings, including children, and monitored their thoughts and feelings partly by ignoring their own. Mothers have been the greatest of such sensitives, or mystics, without even knowing these words.
So, we have a solid base of knowledge about the child and its mind. First of all, we know that each one is different, unique. After this admission, we may list what appear to be "general trends".
Our scientific community loves to ask questions of grown-ups and children and arrange the answers in graphs and matrixes. Foundations love to grant funds for such research. Mothers who delve into their children's minds, and some yogis and Sufis who can memorize and relive, their entire lives from earliest childhood, look with some distaste at these simplistic and oblique statistics, the kind of questions asked, and the acceptance of the answers they receive as valid responses. Why do not these investigators supplement their statistics with a bit of warm, living memory of their own? Anybody can recall at least some of their past if they try.
Children are supposed to be so awfully happy, but I recall my own childhood as the hardest and most frightening time of my life though I had the best possible parents and always enough to eat. But my parents' problems weighed heavier on me than on them. My father's constant fight against a hierarchy that placed an Army man as head of hydrographic work made me forever distrust hierarchies. Their influence, I thought, was insincere, deadening.
What do children of unemployed workers feel and think? What kind of mind and heart are built into them? Can anyone blame them if they determine to wage war on a community that treats its members that way? Oh, I know all about foreign conspiracies. I have lived and worked in Russia, East and West Germany, China and Japan. I know of the schemes to destroy America. These would have no effect whatever if we kept our own house in order. Actually, we should treasure the schemes directed against us. They are necessary awakeners. Without them we would decay and rot. To be surprised at the increase in crime and sabotage, when we keep eight million unemployed, is a worse hypocrisy than I thought my countrymen capable.
I sent an earlier version of this book to Dr. Jule Eisenbud, former Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia. Dr. Eisenbud is not just a psychiatrist, but an awake psychiatrist. He replied,
"I read your book with much enjoyment. Too bad there aren't more of your kind in Washington, D.C., although I can well understand why there are not."
Later I sent him some similar chapters from an other book, on the environment. To that he replied,
"I had great pleasure and admiration reading your truly farsighted and humanistic chapters. I would like to look forward to being able to do the type of freewheeling thinking you do when I am at your age, but I sometimes wonder if I have sufficiently escaped the gravitational pull of my built-in (or rather educated-in -- programmed) aberrations (as you have it). Perhaps, if I could once have the type of out-of-the-body experience you describe having had, I could continue to keep my thinking fresh and creative. Perhaps we should all periodically 'stop the world' as Castaneda put it.
"Anyway, I admire your continued interest in 'teaching the world'. Long may you keep at it. With all good wishes of all seasons."
Returning now to the reply to my plea for full employment by the Chairman of the Council for Economic Advisors through his Assistant, John Davis, quoted on the last page of the previous chapter, my reply to Mr. Davis was:
"Your good letter of October 9 was very much appreciated. I sent a copy to Dr. John H.G. Pierson, hoping he might reply. Instead, he gave a talk to the people in Greenwich, Connecticut, 'Full Employment as a Means of Combating Inflation'. The point is, his or Wernette's plans are not something to apply after inflation has been licked, but a means to combat it, and possibly one of the most necessary means. Observing the market place, the nation as a whole, isn't it pretty clear that unemployment is a contributing cause for inflation? And we cannot have either full employment or stable prices except through a guarantee, by such a body as Congress, for example. It is well within the economic power of the United States to guarantee an adequate level of consumer spending along with virtually full employment.
"I really have no doubt that the able economists on the Council of Economic Advisors know this, but have reservations about recommending politically precarious solutions. But proposing a professionally correct solution may serve your party, as well as the nation, better than submitting to an obsolete political climate.
"This letter is written to you and also to Dr. Greenspan, to whom I trust you will show it."
Naturally, there was no further response. With my penchant for Chairmen of Councils of Economic Advisors, I sent an earlier version of this book to Dr. Leon Keyserling, President Truman's Council of Economic Advisors' Chairman. Dr. Keyserling responded,
"I appreciated very much the letter and materials you sent me on December 31, 1972, and am returning the materials herewith. I would have replied sooner, but for many distractions.
"Needless to say, I am entirely in accord with your general thesis and its development. Keep up the good work.
"I have a few reservations, which I can state only very succinctly. In my view, you give too much credit to Samuelson and Burns. Burns is now obsessed about holding down expenditures and about as worried as to where the money is coming from as anyone could be. Samuelson is much better, but even he is expressive of very much of the conventional viewpoint. One of the biggest difficulties, to which little attention is being paid, is the outmoded views of the great preponderance of well-known and other economists. I do not believe that there is any solution to monetary control along appropriate lines, short of much greater responsibility of the Federal Reserve System to the President and the Congress. There is no more reason why it should be entirely independent as a practical matter than why tax policy or price-wage policy, when we have it, should be independent of public control. I do not share the view that the Employment Act was a weak statute. Its very virtue was that it conveyed plenary authority without limitation, and the trouble is that the responsibility has not been assumed. You are much too favorable to the Kennedy years. Its policies were inadequate and its central policy, in the form of massive tax cuts for the wrong people (enacted under Johnson), was wrong and damaging for a variety of reasons which I have repeatedly set forth. I do not agree that full employment produces more inflation, and I am enclosing a copy of my 1971 pamphlet which covers this subject and also covers many of the other matters in which we are mutually interested. While there were frustrations and shortcomings while I was Chairman of the CEA, I think your treatment is too negative. Actually, we made a better average record on employment, growth and price stability than any administration since, and I reviewed this in articles in the New Republic on October 3 and October 24, 1970. I am surprised that you credit Galbraith with a way toward full employment. In THE AFFLUENT SOCIETY, his basic thesis was that we should surrender our national commitment to full employment, on the spurious ground that this was necessary to avoid inflation. His pronouncements since then have moved in both directions.
"Thanks for the opportunity to comment, and I look forward to hearing from you again. With all good wishes..."
When I read and re-read this deeply satisfying response from a former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors to a President, I feel like repeating what Dr. Jule Eisenbud, Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia, wrote me, "Too bad there aren't more people like you in Washington, D.C."
In the above letter Dr. Keyserling refers to 'Samuelson'. This is Dr. Paul A. Samuelson, the Nobel Prize winning economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I had an interesting response from Dr. Samuelson to my own letter to him of 26 November 1970:
"The author of Chapter 19: Fiscal Policy and Full Employment Without Inflation ('Economics: An Introductory Analysis') received a letter May 4, 1966. John H.G. Pierson offered in that letter the fusion of two able minds and so influential, together, that they could have saved the United States from dropping into a secondary role and leaving the world confused, without alternatives.
"I am trying to figure out why you did not answer. Did you feel Congress was not yet able, at that time, to understand that there was an economic basis for guaranteeing insured full employment and a level of consumer spending? Or were you even in doubt that such a basis existed at that time? But you could not doubt that it exists now, today? And there is no doubt that several 'Congressmen understand this and would sponsor such a bill if so advised by a panel of well- established economists? Whether such a bill would be passed by Con. gress is another matter, about which we have no responsibility. Nothing has ever been achieved without a willingness to try, against odds.
"This is written, not to try to involve you in any activity or publicity, at least not at this time, only to point out the great similarity between your above chapter and Dr. Pierson's plans, or for that matter, the related full employment plans of Dr. John Philip Wernette, the Harvard man who went to Ann Arbor, and Dr. Leon Keyserling, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors to President Truman. Melville Ulmer's articles in the New Republic could be included.
"As you know, our scientific developments in vital areas have practically been stopped. We are already far behind, and our friends in other countries are bewildered and sad. We can still regain our lost lead, but we may not have more than 2-3 years grace, so any awakening must begin now, ten minutes ago and not three seconds late. We are now, today, technically and economically able to lift ourselves to a level where our ecology, our feeding, our ocean resources and defense needs may be satisfactorily solved. Urban developments would follow. Only economic superstition and a few worse sentiments are temporarily stopping us.
"Who am I? Unlike John Maynard Keynes, I realized before starting college that economics, as taught, was irrelevant so I majored in engineering (which I found also rather irrelevant). I made a I. (best available) in economics by answering questions tongue-in-cheek (as I knew they wanted the answers). Through the years I have read and experienced more economics than most. I helped the 'Young Turks'; the Norwegians (in remaking a wrecked economy after World War II). I went to Tunisia on behalf of the United Nations and wasted the time of important J. F. Kennedy administration officials.
"Your 1951 book is better than anything offered today in College or University economics courses."
Dr. Samuelson answered, per I December 1970: "I have no wish to criticize Pierson's view. But I am not prepared to make them mine."
A beautiful sensitivity is shown in this answer, by a superb teacher in a democratic country. However, when one considers the striking similarity of the two views, one would have hoped that fruitful public discussion would have ensued, resulting possibly in action, rather than delicate neutrality and no action.
A young college student pointed out to me this similarity.
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