CONSTRUCTIVE REMEDIES NEEDED 249

would be lessened, and a better opportunity afforded for
altimate coordination and stabilization.
“ProFITLESS PROSPERITY”

In addition to the unemployment problem, another menace
 of the new industrial revolution, which affects both
capital and management as productive factors, has been
the tendency through mass production and competitive
selling to reduce the margins of profit. The concentration
of industrial management upon greater output and lower
costs has in many cases gone so far, and attention has been
so focused upon these points, that the element of profit
has been neglected. This tendency has developed in many
branches of industry, the output of which has expanded
In a remarkable way, to a point where there has been little
if any profit, relatively speaking, and has led to the satirical
comment that our industrial revolution is rapidly approaching
 a stage of “profitless prosperity.” The declaration has
also been frequently made that labor, because of the decline
in prices and advances in real wages, has been enjoying
an unprecedented status of well-being, while much-vaunted
American management has brought about an era of unparalleled
 industrial expansion, but at the same time has
reduced the margins of invested capital to such a low
point as to arouse apprehension as to the future.
This situation, which began to attract serious attention
in the spring of 1928, was very briefly but effectively expressed
 by the Guaranty Trust Company of New York
in its monthly review for May of that year :2

1 “American Prosperity: Its Causes and Consequences,” by Paul M. Mazur:
The Ying Press, New York, 1928; also articles by the same author in the
American Review of Reviews for May and June, 1928, entitled respectively
“Mims Production—Has It Committed Suicide?” and *““After Mass Production
— at?”
2 The Guaranty Survey, May 28, 1928, Vol. VIII, No. 2, pp. 5-6.