A Nation Can Afford Anything It Can Produce

Some Financial Lessons of the Second World War

Perhaps the major economic lesson of the war is one underlined by the International Labor Office at its 1946 convention in Montreal: "a nation can afford anything it can produce." The chief problem now, says the ILO, is not finding the money for any proposed capital expansion, but arranging the legal and administrative details. The ILO is undoubtedly correct for the long swing, but there is still a magnificent cultural lag to be overcome in the United States. The first problem here is neither financial nor administrative; it is cultural: how to make some powerfully placed Americans understand that what is physically possible is also financially possible.

--Stewart Chase, The Proper Study of Mankind: An Inquiry into the Science of Human Relations (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948)
p. 211.

Comment: In retrospect, no nation or the world at large could have afforded the net and the web. Yet it was produced. If you can produce it, you can afford it. Chase's 1948 view, based on war production, valid today, was that Keynes was right: If we want a magic terminal for every child (and adult) to encourage them to imitate Abraham Lincoln and learn to read, write, speak, build and prosper, we can afford it.