conscious planning to the operations of each single business is everywhere recognised as essential to success, the extension of this process to the economic system as a whole has got no purchase on the business mind. Yet the adjustments between trade and trade in the national and world markets are as delicate as those between the departments in a single business and demand as much conscious care.
This refusal to apply reason to the conduct of the wider business life is closely related to the moral purblindness that accompanies all economic activities. Moralists have often exposed the selfish pursuit of personal gain as a degrading motive in the business life, but they have not shown its paralysing influence upon the production and enjoyment of wealth.
In this little book I seek to demonstrate how the determination of prices by economic force for personal gain operates through inequitable distribution of income and property to cause maladjustment in production and consumption with attendant unemployment, poverty, and waste. The blunting of moral perception and sensibility by the habitual acceptance of untrue notions about business operations is the chief obstacle to the reforms needed to secure the utilisation of modern productivity for the welfare of mankind, It is the moral basis of this reformation that I wish to lay in these chapters. With a brief indication of the desirable lines of reconstruction, I leave policy to those whom it concerns.
Hampstead
June 1931
