According to Coyle

David Cushman Coyle has three reputations--engineer, eccentric, economist. As engineer, he designed the Washington State Capitol, worked on the New York Life building, served as technical adviser to PWA. As eccentric, he omitted heating facilities from the second floor of his Bronxville, N.Y. home because he believes people should sleep in cold rooms. As economist, he attended the famous dinner at which Dr. William A. Wirt later said he had heard that Roosevelt was a U.S. Kerensky and that a flock of Reds were waiting to take over the Government; then, with a series of 25-c- and 50-c- pamphlets (Brass Tacks, Uncommon Sense, Waste), of which he has sold over 1,000,000 copies, he proved himself a persuasive, new-fangled economist, but no Red. At present he works for the National Resources Board in Washington. Franklin Roosevelt has often espoused Coyle theories but met their author only once.

Since he is a widely read economist in the U.S., the appearance last week of his first full-length book, a lucid, easy-reading summary of the Coyle philosophy, was news. Certain cobblestones in Roads to a New America* were carefully placed to jolt those who drive too far to the right; others, to jounce left-siders.

According to Coyle, U.S. society is in the grip of a growing "organization of scarcity"--not because of actual productive lack, but because the oldtime concept of thrift has been subverted into a modern concept of saving. He points out that investors, in their desire to save, have pushed far more money into capital markets since 1919 than business could profitably employ. Rather, they should buy goods and services. (An old Coyle saying: "Saving for a rainy day only makes it rain.")

Author Coyle is against both economizing in a small way and centralizing in a big way. On centralization, he says: "We should remember the mighty race of dinosaurs that thundered across the earth, with their vast bulk, armor-plated hides, long teeth and peanut brains. When the climate changed they had no ideas....The best we can hope is to have as little big business as possible, and to keep the disadvantages of bigness as small as possible...." So New Dealer Coyle favors Government regulation of bigness by yardsticks, taxes, control of money, discouragement of too much capital investment.

With a few detours into blind alleys, David Coyle thus blithely and optimistically charges down the middle of his road to a new U.S. His moral is that business should be encouraged, not dismayed, by signs of CONSTRUCTION AHEAD. "The middle-of-the-road doctrine, adopted in this book," he explains, "is that the common theory of capitalism is not an iron law, but that capitalism is flexible enough to escape and go on."

* Little, Brown & Co. ($2.75)

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