Prophet of Gloom

No boom, a depression.

19,000,000 unemployed.

Big business getting bigger; small businesses shrinking, some businesses dying off entirely.

No income-tax relief for the plain citizen; considerable tax relief for big business, which will be ineffective in warding off a collapse.

Labor, especially the C.I.O. in full retreat.

"Greater political discussion, more pressure groups, more government by bloc."

Dangerous cleavages between ex-servicemen and civilians, white and black, Jew and gentile, business and labor.

"War will be difficult to prevent for more than a generation. In some forms and in some places this war will not really have come to an end."

Such, in broad outline, are some of the gloomy predictions made in a book that began to make talk in the U.S. last week. The book: The Rest of Your Life (Doubleday, Doran, $2.75). The author: Leo Cherne, young (31), curly-haired boss of Manhattan-famed Research Institute of America, Inc. Researcher Cherne has specialized in casting the U.S. business horoscope. His predictions have frequently been such flesh-creepers that New Yorker once dubbed his Institute "Cassandra, Inc."

Cassandra Cherne predicts that the U.S. will wind up with a possible 19,000,000 unemployed unless it raises its economy to a higher productive level than 1940's. He sees little chance of raising U.S. economy to such a point. For, says he, the expected roaring postwar boom will not occur; spotty prosperity will make some industries hum and others lag, while unemployment increases.

He believes that the "excess profits tax is doomed; it may not even survive the final stages of war itself." Government, in a frantic attempt to keep the economy running at high speed, will give business every tax inducement, inducement-piling on individuals the estimated $300,000,000,000 national debt.

Is there no hope for a postwar boom in the $100,000,000,000 which U.S. civilians have tucked away in savings? No, says Prophet Cherne. "Everything will compel you to hold on to your money rather than spend it. ... There will be termination [of war contracts], unemployment . . . take-home pay will fall because of the reduction in hours and overtime. You're going to wait for prices to come down . . . for new products. . . . Most important, the war economy didn't tighten your belt too uncomfortably. . . . You haven't been starved enough so you'll want to rush out madly and buy. People won't be letting go." In effect he dismisses the everyone-will-buy-a-helicopter kind of talk by implying that there won't be helicopters for sale, and if there were, you couldn't afford one, because you'll be filling your stocking for the big depression.

But many a cheerful hardhead, remembering some of Prophet Cherne's previous misfires, will empty the saltcellar on these predictions. Cassandra Cherne has been wrong before: notably when he erred by some $32,000,000,000 in his gloomy foreboding that war would cut the U.S. standard of living 25%. And some of Cherne's "startling" facts are not so startling e.g., that one-fifth of the nation's land (long in the public domain) is owned by the Federal Government, that this is somehow a threat to private enterprise. And even pushovers will wonder how Cassandra Cherne reaches his last-chapter reversal. He concludes : "America will hit the shoals of unemployment and free itself. It will rub along the reefs of depression and then reach new levels of production."

The answer to Cassandra was the same as it had always been: there was something in what she said about Troy's parlous position, but it was her kinsfolk who went on to found Rome.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.