"Albert Einstein. The world as I see it (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

interest in preventing such impoverishment. It will give what help it can in
the immediate crisis and reawaken that higher community of feeling, now
thrust into the background by national egotism, for which human values have
a validity independent of politics and frontiers. It will then procure for
every nation conditions of work under which it can exist and under which it
can bring forth fruits of culture.


Production and Purchasing Power

I do not believe that the remedy for our present difficulties lies in a
knowledge of productive capacity and consumption, because this knowledge is
likely, in the main, to come too late. Moreover the trouble in Germany seems
to me to be not hypertrophy of the machinery of production but deficient
purchasing power in a large section of the population, which has been cast
out of the productive process through rationalization.

The gold standard has, in my opinion, the serious disadvantage that a
shortage in the supply of gold automatically leads to a contraction of
credit and also of the amount of currency in circulation, to which
contraction prices and wages cannot adjust themselves sufficiently quickly.
The natural remedies for our troubles are, in my opinion, as follows:-

(1) A statutory reduction of working hours, graduated for each
department of industry, in order to get rid of unemployment, combined with
the fixing of minimum wages for the purpose of adjusting the
purchasing-power of the masses to the amount of goods available.

(2) Control of the amount of money in circulation and of the volume of
credit in such a way as to keep the price-level steady, all special
protection being abolished.

(3) Statutory limitation of prices for such articles as have been
practically withdrawn from free competition by monopolies or the formation
of cartels.

Production and Work

An answer to Cederstr†m

Dear Herr Cederstr†m,

Thank you for sending me your proposals, which interest me
very much. Having myself given so much thought to this subject I
feel that it is right that I should give you my perfectly frank
opinion on them.

The fundamental trouble seems to me to be the almost unlimited
freedom of the labour market combined with extraordinary
progress in the methods of production. To satisfy the needs of