MUST SCIENCE RUIN ECONOMIC PROGRESS? 579 
that sense science may ‘ ruin’ economic progress, and the world might be 
better served in the end if scientific innovation were retarded to the maxi- 
mum rate of social and economic change. Civilisation went through a 
long period when the limiting factor to progress was the scientific, but is now 
passing through a stage when the limiting factors are non-scientific. The 
lack of identity in the tempo of change creates new problems, tending to 
offset scientific advantages, of three types. First, for example, the utilisa- 
tion for essential or competitive purposes of rare minerals, the need for which 
becomes general, but the distribution of which is particular and accidental, 
sets up great political strains, and we have invented no means of adjusting 
the international effects of accidental monopoly of essential elements. 
Second, the problem of scope, where the scale of production upon which, 
for example, a chemical innovation can be made to give its real economic 
advantages, is a scale inconsistent with the size of markets freely open in 
a nationalistic world. Here strains are set up in the international machine, 
and the balance of trade, which may gravely jeopardise economic progress, 
and dry up the juices of commerce. Third, for example, where the innova- 
tion is absorbed most easily for offensive purposes in a military or naval 
sense, it may create rivalries and changes of balance of power inimical to 
economic security, and compel new economic sacrifices outweighing the 
direct economic advantages of peaceful uses. It is open to question whether 
the innovation of aircraft has yet become, on net balance, economic 
progress. 
Inasmuch as all economic production creates real vested interest in a 
location or a skill devoted to it, and every scientific innovation alters the 
centre of gravity of collective demand, every such scientific change disturbs 
an economic equation. That equation for human life may often be richer 
ultimately, but the pain or waste of disturbance has to be debited to the 
gain, before the net balance is progress. For the time being, the balance 
may be net loss, the price paid for to-morrow. If to-morrow is continually 
postponed, because it, in its turn, is redisturbed, and the economic to- 
morrow never comes, it is literally jam yesterday, jam to-morrow, but never 
jam to-day. Wastes of absorption will be at a minimum in certain con- 
ditions, which are related to the wearing life of existing assets and places, 
and to the rate of flow of new skill into new directions. The orderly ab- 
sorption of innovation into economic progress, apart from improvements 
in the non-economic factors of such progress, depends upon two kinds of 
balance. The first is the balance between two classes of scientific discovery, 
that which accelerates or makes easier the production of existing economic 
goods, and that which creates new kinds of economic satisfactions—the 
derivative and the direct. Let us suppose that in static society a million 
people are employed making boots, and the gramophone has not been 
invented. Then let a labour-saving device be invented, such that the same 
quantity of boots can be made by half the workers, and boots are half the 
price. Assuming that the demand for boots is quite inelastic, and no more 
are wanted, there is potential unemployment for half a million people, and 
the whole population has now reserve unspent purchasing power, saved on 
cheaper boots. The gramophone is introduced, employing the potentially 
unemployed, and absorbing the reserve or released purchasing power. ‘The 
progress of the past hundred years has been essentially of this order, and 
innovation has enabled purchasing power to be released for new spending— 
first, upon far more of the same article at the reduced price ; second, upon 
more of other existing goods; and, third, upon entirely new kinds of satis- 
faction, bicycles or radio sets. In this connection it must be remembered 
that an old article may be so transformed in degree as to be equivalent to 
