The Bogey of Economic Maturity
By George Terborgh
Since its organization in 1933 as a federation of trade associations in the industrial equipment field, the Machinery and Allied Products Institute has devoted itself to the study of problems of special interest to the capital goods industries, such as depreciation and replacement policy, the effects of technology on employment and living standards, the role of capital formation in business fluctuations, the impact of taxation, and the economics of saving and investment. The results of its studies have been embodied in a series of more than thirty pamphlets ranging over a wide field of capital goods economics.
Without listing these publications, I must mention one, of which the present study is a lineal descendant, Saving and Investment in the American Enterprise System. Published in July 1939, this pamphlet offered a systematic and critical analysis of the theory of economic maturity as expounded in May of that year by Administration witnesses before the Temporary National Economic Committee of the Seventy-fifth Congress.
The promptness with which the Institute responded to the public pronouncement of the theory reflected a deep concern over its implications for the capital goods industries and for the economy generally. Prepared in a matter of weeks, and necessarily of limited scope (75 pages), the pamphlet was the first general analysis of the T.N.E.C. testimony on saving and investment to appear, and rapidly won an honorable and important place in anti-stagnationist literature. It remained indeed for some years one of very few usable critiques of the doctrines with which it dealt. In time it found its way increas-
Hillary's Flawed Economics; Overall, Business Investments Are Directly Correlated with Higher Levels of Job Creation, Better Wages, Less Destitution and More Economic Security. That's a Basic Fact from Economics 101 That Shouldn't Be Hard to Understand. [Derived Headline] By Reiland, Ralph R Tribune-Review/Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, August 1, 2016