Chapter VII

THE NATURE OF A PROBLEM

1

Somewhat in the spirit of Descartes, let us begin by supposing that your whole experience were confined to one glimpse of the world. There would be, I think, no better or worse in your sight, neither good men nor bad, patriots nor profiteers, conservatives nor radicals. You would be a perfect neutral. From such an impression of things, it would never occur to you that the crest of a mountain endured longer than the crest of a wave, that people moved about and that trees did not, or that the roar of an orator would pass sooner than the roar of Niagara.

Lengthen your experience, and you would begin to notice differences in the constancy of things. You would know day and night, perhaps, but not winter and summer, movement in space, but little of age in time. And if you then formulated your social philosophy, would you not almost certainly conclude that the things you saw people doing then it was ordained they should do always, and that their characters as you had seen them that day would be thus and so forever? And would not the resulting treatise pass almost unnoticed in any collection of contemporary disquisitions on the nations, the races, the classes or the sexes?

But the more you lengthened the span of your impression, the more variability you would note, until at last you would say with Heraclitus that all things flow. For when the very stars and the rocks were seen to have a history, men and their institutions and customs, habits and ideals, theories and policies could seem only relatively permanent. And you would have to conclude that what at first glance you had called a constant turns out after you had watched it longer merely to be changing a little more slowly than something else.

With sufficiently long experience you would indeed be bound to conclude that while the diverse elements that bear upon the life of men, including the characters of men themselves, were changing, yet they were not changing at the same pace. Things multiply, they grow, they learn, they age, they wear out and they die at different rates. An individual, his companions, his implements, his institutions, his creeds, his needs, his means of satisfaction, evolve unevenly, and endure unevenly. Events do not concur harmoniously in time. Some hurry, some straggle, some push and some drag. The ranks have always to be reformed.

Instead of that one grand system of evolution and progress, which the nineteenth century found so reassuring, there would appear to be innumerable systems of evolution, variously affecting each other, some linked, some in collision, but each in some fundamental aspect moving at its own pace and on its own terms.

The disharmonies of this uneven evolution are the problems of mankind.

2

Suppose a man who knew nothing of the history of the nineteenth century were shown the tables compiled in the _Statistical Abstract of the United States_ for the period from 1800 to 1918: He would note that the population of the world had multiplied two and a half times; its total commerce 42 times; its shipping tonnage more than 7 times; its railways 3664 times; its telegraphs 317 times; its cotton production 17 times; its coal 113 times; its pig iron 77 times. Could he doubt that in a century of such uneven changes men had faced revolutionary social problems?

Could he not infer from these figures alone that there had been great movements of population, vast changes in men’s occupation, in the character of their labor, their wants, their standards of living, their ambitions? Would he not fairly infer that the political system which had existed in 1800 must have altered vastly with these new relationships, that customs, manners and morals appropriate to the settled, small and more or less self-contained communities of 1800 had been subjected to new strains and had probably been thoroughly revised? As he imagined the realities behind the tables, would he not infer that as men lived through the changes which these cold figures summarize they had been in conflict with their old habits and ideals, that the process of making new habits and adjustments must have gone on subject to trial and error with hopefulness over material progress and yet much disorder and confusion of soul?

3

For a more specific illustration of the nature of a problem we may examine the problem of population in its simplest form. When Malthus first stated it he assumed, for the purposes of argument, two elements evolving at different rates. Population, he said, doubled every twenty-five years; the produce of land could be increased in the same time by an amount “equal to what it at present produces.”[18] He was writing about the year 1800. The population of England he estimated at seven millions, and the food supply as adequate to that number. There was then, in 1800, no problem. By 1825 the population, according to his estimate of its rate of increase, would have doubled, but the food supply would also have doubled. There would be no problem of population. But by 1850 the population would stand at twenty-eight millions; the food supply would have increased only by an amount to support an additional seven millions. The problem of excess population, or, if you like, of food scarcity, would have appeared. For while in 1800 and in 1825 the food available for each person would be the same, in 1850, owing to the uneven rate of growth, there would be only a three-quarter ration for each person. And this altered relationship Malthus rightly called a problem.

Suppose, now, we complicate Malthus’s argument a bit by assuming that in 1850 people had learned to eat less and felt more fit on the three-quarter ration. There would then be no problem in 1850, for the adjustment of the two variables—food and people—would be satisfactory. Or, on the contrary, suppose that soon after 1800 people had demanded a higher standard of living and expected more food, though the necessary additional food was not produced. These new demands would create a problem. Or suppose, as was actually the case,[19] the food supply increased faster than Malthus had assumed it could, though population did not. The problem of population would not arise at the date he predicted. Or suppose the increase of population was reduced by birth control. The problem, as Malthus first stated it, would not arise.[20] Or suppose the food supply increased faster than the population could consume it. There would then be a problem not of population but of agricultural surplus.

In an absolutely static society there would be no problems. A problem is the result of change. But not of the change in any self-contained element. Change would be unnoticeable unless we could measure it against some other element which did not change at the same pace. If everything in the universe expanded at a mile a minute, or shrank at the same rate, we should never know it. For all we can tell we may be the size of a mosquito one moment in the sight of God, and of an elephant the next; we cannot tell if mosquitoes and elephants and chairs and planets change in proportion. Change is significant only in relation to something else.

The change which constitutes a problem is an altered relationship between two dependent variables.[21] Thus the automobile is a problem in the city not because there are so many automobiles but because there are too many for the width of the streets, too many for the number of competent drivers, because the too narrow streets are filled with too many cars driven too recklessly for the present ability of the police to control them. Because the automobile is manufactured faster than old city streets can be widened, because some persons acquire cars faster than they acquire prudence and good manners, because automobiles collect in cities faster than policemen can be recruited, trained or paid for by slow-yielding taxpayers, there is an automobile problem made evident by crowding, obnoxious fumes and collisions.

But though these evils seem to arise from the automobile, the fault lies not in the automobile but in the relation between the automobile and the city. This may sound like splitting hairs, but unless we insist upon it we never define a problem accurately nor lay it open successfully to solution.

The problem of national defense, for example, can never be stated by a general staff which draws upon its inner consciousness for an estimate of the necessary force. The necessary force can be estimated only in relation to the probable enemy, and the military problem whether of peace or of war lies always in the ratio of forces. Military force is a purely relative conception. The British Navy is helpless as a child against the unarmed mountaineers of Tibet. The French Army has no force as against fishing smacks in the Pacific Ocean. Force has to be measured against its objective: the tiger and the shark are incomparable one with the other.

Now a settled and accepted ratio of forces that might collide is a state of military peace. A competitive and, therefore, constantly unbalanced ratio is a prelude to war. The Canadian border presents no military problem, not because Canada’s forces and our own are equal but because, happily, we do not compare them. They are independent variables, having no relation one with the other, and a change in the one does not affect the other. In capital ships we are confronted now with no naval problem in the Atlantic or in the Pacific, because with Britain and Japan, the only two comparable powers, we are agreed on a ratio by treaty.[22] But for all types of ships not subject to the ratio there is a naval problem in both oceans, and if the Washington Treaty should lapse the problem which it settled would recur. It would recur because the synchronized progress of the three navies would be replaced by a relatively uneven progress of each as compared with the others.

4

The field of economic activity is the source of many problems. For, as Cassel says,[23] we include within the meaning of the word economic those means of satisfying human wants which are “usually available only in a limited quantity.” Since “the wants of civilized human beings as a whole are,” for all practical purposes, “unlimited,” there is in all economic life the constant necessity of reaching “an adjustment between the wants and the means of supplying the wants.” This disharmony of supply and demand is the source of an unending series of problems.

We may note at once that the economist does not claim as his province the whole range of adjustments between human wants and the means of satisfying them. He usually omits, for example, the human need to breathe air. For since the air is unlimited in quantity the human need of it is not frustrated, and the surplus air not required by men in no way impinges upon their lives. Yet there may be a scarcity of air, as, for example, in a congested tenement district. Then an economic problem is engendered which has to be met, let us say, by building laws requiring a certain number of cubic feet of air a person. The economist, in other words, takes as his field of interest the maladjustment between human wants and those means of satisfying them which are available, but only in limited quantities. In a world where every want was satisfied there would be no problems for him; nor any in a world where men had no wants; nor any in a world where the only wants men had could be supplied by a change on their part of their own states of consciousness. To create a problem there must be at least two dependent but separated variables: wants and the means of satisfaction; and these two variables must have a disposition to alter so that an antecedent equilibrium is disturbed.

In the measure, says Cassel, in which the economic system succeeds in securing an adjustment between the wants and the means of supplying the wants we speak of it as a sound economy. “This task may be accomplished in three different ways: first, by eliminating the less important wants and so restricting the total wants; secondly, by making the best possible use of the means available for the purposes in question; and, thirdly, by increased personal exertions.”[24]

Since the problem arises out of the disharmony of supply and demand, its solution is to be found by increasing the supply or restricting the demand. The choice of method depends first of all on which it is possible in specific cases to follow, and, second, granting the possibility, on which is the easier or the preferred. Either method will give what we acknowledge as a solution. For when two variables are in an adjustment which does not frustrate the expectations of either there is no problem, and none will be felt to exist.

FOOTNOTES:

[18] T. R. Malthus, _An Essay on the Principle of Population_, Chapter II.

[19] A. M. Carr-Saunders, _The Population Problem_, p. 28.

[20] Malthus himself recognised this in a later edition of his book.

[21] _Cf._ in this connection W. F. Ogburn, _Social Change_, _passim_, but particularly Part IV, I, on “The Hypothesis of Cultural Lag.”

[22] However, the controversy over gun elevation demonstrates how difficult it is to maintain an equilibrium of force where so many factors are variable.

[23] Gustav Cassel, _A Theory of Social Economy_, Chapter I.

[24] _Ibid._, p. 7.