<< Regrettable Idleness " MR. Hui - r's book is a noteworthy
essay in pure analysis. It consists of careful definitions of the different reasons from which resources come to be idle in a capitalist economy. The book is fruitful in so far as its painstaking method breaks down the too inclusive phraseology of accepted economics, and discusses the chief causes of " idleness " which are not necessarily socially " regrettable."
" Preferred idleness " and idleness for the sake of " avail- ability " arc two of the chief categories of non-regrettable idleness, whether of capital or of labour. Mr. Hutt expresses the view that casual labour may in some cases arise from the preference of labourers for intermittent labour ; he then hastens to add that such a preference is not necessarily to be condemned, since the right individual choice is the paramount consideration.
But Mr. Hutt's chapter on preference is sketchy and without relation to any social study. The motives and the behaviour of the unemployed cannot nowadays be usefully studied with weapons of analysis no deeper than introspection, any more than economics still consist wholly of truisms about an abstract economic man.
Mr. Hutt's doctrine of availability is also used to support unwarranted conclusions. " A good deal of plant in the industrial world," he writes, " exists because from time to time it will happen to be wanted. . . . Thus the plant of a salmon canning factory will not be working out of season but it will not be unproductive because of that. . . . Such regular, recurrent idleness can be confidently classed as pseudo- idleness." (Most of Mr. Hutt's classifications, whatever else may be said about them, are confidently made.) " It is a crude (although common) error," he adds later, " to suppose that . . . pseudo-idleness . . . is evidence of the wasteful use of resources." The term wasteful is however relative. No one ever supposed that to provide one petrol pump when it was needed one hour a day was " wasteful " ; but to provide twenty petrol pumps, each used an average of three minutes a day when one would, without outweighing inconvenience, have done, would be wasteful competition. Mr. Hutt would not admit that the " pseudo-idleness " of the pumps was evidence of waste.
Mr. Hutt's conclusions in fact are not based on his analysis, which is merely twisted to give some colour to his results ; they are based on beliefs which he hardly conceals but never defends. " Regrettable idleness " arises only when " private interest triumphs over social interest," or " in other words," says Mr. Hutt, when " our laws permit competition to be restricted." This dogmatic nonsense occurs on the last page of the book. It is a clue to the confusions of thought which at one moment puts private interest as the summum bonum, and at another degrades it below social interest. From such a muddled philosophy nothing can come. Nevertheless this is a serious contribution to economic writing since the verbal discussion does progress—it does not go round in circles like much of this type of writing. The ingenious classification may one day be turned to a more constructive use, and some of Mr. Hutt's anti-monopolistic points are well taken.
IAN BOWEN.
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