THE GREAT GOD WASTE .sx by John Hodgson .sx ( In the present series of articles Mr. Hodgson shows that our existing economic system must continually evolve new and vast methods of waste in order to survive .sx In his concluding article he will suggest ways in which it might be modified so that waste would be largely eliminated , and ample and endowed leisure made possible for all) .sx VI .sx OTHER MODERN WASTES .sx AN immense source of waste in our industrialist communities is the endeavour of almost all organised workers , whether they are doctors , lawyers , consulting engineers or Trade Unionists , to give the minimum possible service to the community for such monetary return as they are able to extract .sx Thus we have our obsolete legal phraseology and our all too complicated legal systems .sx The medical profession as a whole is so organised , especially where it deals with patients who are able to pay more the longer they are ill .sx It preys on the sickly sentiment that keeps hopeless cases lingering on for months and years , to the sacrifice and frustration of younger , healthier lives .sx As a profession it knows almost nothing about pre-natal and postnatal care either of mothers or children , with the result that children are all too frequently born imperfect , and the mothers unnecessarily injured while bearing them .sx It is disquieting to see one of the most self-sacrificing of professions thus insensibly driven in the direction where money profit lies .sx One could give similar examples of organised incompetence among consulting engineers , chartered accountants , and the other professional classes .sx A further source of waste in industrial communities is the provision of far too numerous and expensive manufacturing plants .sx Whenever any new method of employing labour that is capable of bringing in a profit to invested money isdiscovered , such as the development of coal mines or oil wells , or the manufacture of motor cars or artificial silk , far too many coal mines , oil wells , motor-car and artificial silk manufacturing plants are established ; so that until some of these go to the wall , the available market is surfeited with goods which have to be sold at a loss or at an unreasonably low profit .sx This scramble for profits has , at the present time , caused a surplus on the world's markets of such diverse commodities as wheat , whale-oil , mineral oil , coal , steel , rubber , cotton , tea , sugar , milk , tin , copper , shipping , boots and fertilisers .sx It has , since 1928 , forced down production in Great Britain by 13% , in the United States by 23% , and in Germany by 30% .sx But even the factories that survive are far too numerous for the actual needs of the market .sx In the first place they do not work at night , nor do they work during more than 5 days per week .sx They are used each week for 44 hours out of a possible 168 if no repair shift is worked , or out of a possible 112 if a repair shift is necessary .sx Owing to fashion changes , and generally to unstable and irregular demand , most factories have to be greatly enlarged to meet peak loads .sx A large amount of time is also lost each year through strikes and lock-outs .sx These facts taken together mean that the manufacturing capacity available to supply the actual markets that we have , is at least five times as great as is necessary .sx Fancy the cost to the community of quintuplicating its immense and costly manufacturing plants !sx The unnecessarily low intelligence of a large proportion of the community is an immense source of waste .sx Ten per cent .sx of our population are feeble-minded , mentally defective or insane , and a further twenty per cent are below any reasonable average standard of intelligence .sx The major portion of this insanity and feeble-mindedness , all of which is a continual drain on the community , could most certainly be avoided by more careful selection of those who are allowed to be parents and by better medical and social care of the children that are born .sx Another source of waste which the community has to endure is the unemployment of a large proportion of its skilled workers .sx In most industrial countries , nearly a third of these workers are now unemployed ; ten to fifteen million in the United States , three to four million in Germany , three million in France and over two and a half million in England .sx The magnitude of this waste can be visualised by the simple statement that the unemployed in England alone would , if stood with their wives and dependents around our 2,000 miles of coastline , more than cover it !sx Imagination boggles at this two thousand mile long line of living hopelessness and uselessness which , even at the present low average productivity per worker in the British Isles is capable of being organised to produce 500,000,000 of wealth each year , instead of costing at least one tenth of that tremendous sum .sx To this source of waste we must add the enforced idleness of many women and the appalling inefficiency of most home keeping .sx In Leeds or Sheffield the smuts from the numerous steel works keep thousands of women uselessly employed !sx Think of our squalid , smoke-begrimed cities , our ill-made and ill-designed furniture , our lack of adequate heat and power ; of the miserable clothes , boots , food and bedding of the mass of our people ; think of the bug-ridden East End , the lousy bodies , the stinking clothing , the lack of playing fields , the inadequate education and medical services !sx And then again visualise that two thousand mile long line of hopeless standing people who could create so much of wealth and beauty , forced into inactivity by the system which strives to snare us all within its paralysing grip .sx Immense sums are wasted in advertising , and in the production of articles that appeal to the cupidity , fear , vanity , curiosity and superstition of the masses .sx Think of the cosmetics , the trashy jewellery , the patent medicines , the correspondence courses on how to regain lost vigour , to develop muscles like an ox , to write stories , to become a high power salesman !sx Think of the exhortations to eat more bread , butter , meat or fruit ; to drink more milk ; to buy Empire products ; and of the numerous unnecessary things that clever salesmen persuade so many of us to buy !sx It is estimated that in the United States alone five million million linear miles of print enough to stretch half round the Solar System appear each year in useless , harmful and degrading advertisements !sx Each great daily paper , at least half of which is devoted to such advertisements , absorbs for pulp twelve thousand acres of virgin forest every week !sx There is a sky-sign on Broadway which boasts that it consumes as much current as would serve a town of thirty thousand people .sx This wasteful advertising in the United States diverts the productive labours of nearly a million men , and to these must be added the further millions who reply to the advertisements and also those whose lives are spent in fashioning the useless goods .sx Such advertising also impoverishes the real worker .sx Professor J. B. S. Haldane , the biochemist , has pointed out that for every pound which a scientist like himself can spend on publicity and research , the food-faking firms can spend a thousand in advertising their so-called " scientific " foods .sx Many forms of advertising are of course necessary in order that the community may be made aware of what goods are available for the satisfaction of its needs .sx But advertising which aims at foisting cheap , useless , unnecessary and degrading articles on the community is definitely wasteful , both in its object and in its results .sx We have the waste due to continually changing fashions and models , and to the artificial stimulus of the desire for useless luxuries .sx One can , if one desires to do so , pay five hundred guineas for a platinum and sapphire cigarette case , one thousand guineas for a simple clock mounted on carved crystal and tooled gold , two hundred guineas for a " cheap " mink coat !sx The organisation of betting , and the time and thought devoted to the making of bets , is another vast waste of endeavour in the modern industrial community , where men , divorced from the ownership of any of the means of production , and unskilled in any of the arts , crafts , or personal proficiencies , have to seek false excitements for the outlet of their inborn creative energies .sx Commercialised recreation , excessive eating and drinking , drug taking and excessive sexuality are further examples of the waste of human possibility that comes through hopelessness and the lack of any inspired purpose .sx Inefficiencies fostered by vested interests of all types are another immense source of waste .sx Thus a railway truck spends less than 3% of its seventeen years of life in usefully carrying goods and before the war the useful time worked was under 1% !sx This immense inefficiency of our railways , which could be eliminated by the establishment of a goods clearing house in London , by the abolition of private trucks and by other similar simple methods , is a concession to the vested interests which those who manufacture railway trucks hold in the community .sx Again , our railways are among the most comfortable and the speediest in the world , and yet to satisfy another group of vested interests it is at the moment proposed , quite unnecessarily , to electrify them ( for the alleged purpose of increasing their efficiency ) at a cost of over 300,000,000 .sx There are many other ways that 300,000,000 could be spent to the better advantage of the community , but among the vast wastes enumerated above , this 300,000,000 is a mere flea-bite which the community will scarcely notice .sx For similar reasons small local power stations are being scrapped in favour of great super-power stations which can never hope to rival in efficiency many of the smaller stations they displace and render useless .sx Referring again to transport , there are ships which carry German enamelled baths to England and on the return voyage convey English enamelled baths to Germany !sx Still more remarkable is the 6,000 a year spent in conveying English made hydrogen-peroxide to Germany , and in conveying German made hydrogen-peroxide to England .sx In this latter case the quality and composition of the two products are absolutely identical .sx The obstruction due to other vested interests causes millions of tons of high ash coal which could be cheaply mined and burned for power purposes to be left uselessly and irrecoverably in the ground .sx Around Sheffield , in one of the greatest industrial districts of the world , 50,000,000 cubic feet of coke oven gas each day is being allowed to burn to waste , and will continue so to burn until some arrangement is come to between vested interests and the local gas companies and the unvested interests of the newly arisen coke oven plants .sx There is much useless activity caused by the endowment of special chairs at the smaller universities for the glorification of some local magnate .sx Such chairs are seldom adequately endowed , and they frequently deal with socially useless subjects .sx Yet , once established , they have to be maintained , and their existence diverts activity from essential work .sx There are the similar wastes due to bequests and grants for special subjects , such as cancer research .sx The general body of scientific knowledge must grow as a tree grows .sx It is hopeless to ask for the flowers or the fruit before roots , stem and branches have been brought into existence !sx There are almost innumerable further forms of waste which one could enumerate !sx Our educational system is immensely inefficient .sx It stultifies the intellect by insisting upon the study and the memorisation .sx of detail .sx It avoids the consideration of general ideas which invigorate the mind and summarise the mental achievements of the race .sx For instance , because we see fit to represent the forty sounds in our language and their four hundred possible modifications by twenty-six letters only , a child has to memorise practically every word , and so takes years instead of months over the task .sx Further , when an adult comes across an unaccustomed word , the spelling gives no indication of its correct pronunciation or stress .sx All this difficulty could be avoided , while still maintaining the traditional spelling , by making slight modifications to the standard letters so that each letter might represent as many sounds as is necessary .sx