In so far as the present economic life was planned, it was planned locally, by the directors of one industry, by the chamber of commerce of some city, by a far-sighted banker or financier who insisted upon thinking in terms of the coming business generation. For the most part the system grew, however, like stalks of corn in a field, each stalk drawing its own nourishment from the soil and making what progress it could along its own path toward the zenith.
Another serious drawback in the growth of the present economic system is that much of it was developed as an underground organization. Even had they decided to do so, individual business men have not been free to plan ahead and work out a business policy in the light of day. On the one side were the jealous competitors, watching every move and eager to profit by any bit of information that they could secure with regard to the plans of their rivals. On the other side was the government, with its conspiracy laws and its anti-trust laws, ready to swoop down on the business director who planned too broadly or thought too far into the future. Then, too, there was an ever-growing force in a public opinion that was suspicious of profiteers, no matter what their professions. With competitors on the watch here, and government officials yonder, there was nothing for it but to work in secret, to shadow the new policies in mystery and to get as far as possible without being found out.
Far-reaching changes have taken place, of late, in the type of men who have held the reins of control over industry. During its early years the economic machinery was constructed by men who had worked at their trades; men who had begun at the bottom and climbed into a place of authority; men who had a first-hand knowledge of the processes underlying their industries. Latterly, however, with bankers and other professional manipulators in control of economic life, the engineers, with their intimate knowledge of forces and processes have been pushed into the background, and the actual work of direction has been shifted from producers to money makers.
Again, the present economic system, built for the profit of the builder rather than for the welfare of the community, represents, not the science of organization for production and use, but the science of organization for exploitation and profiteering.
These are some of the reasons why the economic life of the modern world has grown at haphazard. Each industrial director put his own ideas into his business, and as it grew in response to them, the various businesses differed as much in shape, size and character as did the early factory buildings.
The time seems to have arrived when a new working plan of economic life may be adopted. The faults and failures of the old are glaring and the clamor for the new is reasonable and insistent.
The construction of factory buildings has been evolved into a science. Why cannot the same thing be done with the whole scheme of economic organization? Men no longer erect factory buildings according to personal whim or to the chance ideas of some budding architect. Instead they consult scientists in factory construction who have devoted years to the study and to the practical supervision of the detail of factory building. Can less be demanded of the community which hopes to build its economic life soundly and solidly?
A modern steel plant, like that at Gary, Indiana, is carefully planned before a sod is turned. The organization of the works is thought out, sketched, drawn in detail, blue-printed, so that each group of workers that participates in the construction is given a blue print that specifies what is to be done, and where and how. When all of the tasks are completed a steel plant has been called into being. But suppose that each of the eighty gangs of workers, busy on the plant, had followed the lines of its fancy or of its own special interest! The result would resemble the helter-skelter of modern economic society.
Economic life has been haphazard in the past. In the future it will be one of the most scientifically built of all human institutions. It is so vital a part of the social life, and it yields itself so readily to structural co-ordination that the best structural minds will turn to it perforce, as the logical field for their activities.