The Scarcities of Plenty

Out of the white heat of U.S. steel mills last week rolled 2,413,000 net tons of steel, 100% of the biggest steel capacity in the nation's history. Despite this massive output, builders, manufacturers and processors all over the U.S. shouted for more and more steel. On building sites, in laboratories and around the plants of the steel users, there were more engineers on the job, at higher pay, than ever before. Nevertheless, employers were using every enticement from fine wines to fancy titles in an effort to lure more engineers onto their payrolls.

For the next two years, predicted General Electric's Ralph Cordiner last week, the growth of the U.S. economy will be hampered, not by any lack of markets, but by shortages of raw materials. To help fill the expected demand for his own products, Cordiner announced that G.E. will spend $500 million to expand in the next three years.

Steel and engineers are only the most dramatic examples of shortages in man-made materials and man-trained men. There are not enough highways, schoolrooms, railroad coal gondolas, high-quality bed sheets, houses, parking places, ladies' electric razors or Lincoln Continental Mark IIs (there is a waiting list in Houston, where the delivered price is $10,700). There are shortages of scrap metal, aluminum, copper, newsprint, canned salmon, seats on airlines from Manhattan to Miami, and selenium.* There are too few salesmen, secretaries, schoolteachers, diemakers, loom fixers, machine-tool operators, mechanics, household servants.

Positive Pressures. In the past, scarcity has more often than not gone hand in hand with negative forces--the depressing weight of poverty or the destruction of war. The scarcities that bother the U.S. today are born of the positive forces: population and prosperity.

Since 1940, the population of the U.S. has gone up 26%, from 132 million to 166 million. In the same period, the annual gross national product has been pushed up 286%, from $101.4 billion to $391.5 billion. Such a massive increase in goods and services might seem to be enough to take care of the increased population, but a third factor makes a difference. Since 1940, personal income in the U.S. has risen a spectacular 293%, from $78.3 billion to $307.5 billion.

A Sellout. The push to find more and better methods of producing more and better products is a major factor in the current demand for engineers. Georgia Tech's placement bureau, which will be sold out of 1956 graduates by May, is already taking orders for the class of 1957. The demand has led to a story of the civil engineer who, tired of using a transit for the state highway department, went to work for a major oil company. Three months later he was back asking for his old job. The new job had been fine, he said, "but I couldn't stand having those talent scouts from the aircraft industry and the chemical plants follow me home every night."

The shortage of qualified personnel is by no means confined to such technical men. There is also a shortage of good salesmen and secretarial help. Said an employment-agency executive in Dallas: "It's hard to locate just the kind of jobs these young ladies seem to be looking for these days. Either the pay's too low, or the boss of their section is already married, or the company cafeteria serves lousy food, or there's only two weeks' vacation after one year."

If it continues to flourish, the U.S. economy can gradually eliminate many of the shortages of 1955. As part of the effort to solve its awesome shortage of highways, New York state last week opened a new, three-mile bridge across the Hudson River's Tappan Zee, 18 miles north of Manhattan, bringing near to completion the longest single express highway in the world, the 427-mile, $1 billion Buffalo-to-Manhattan thruway. Even the shortage of highways may some day be solved, impossible as that may seem.

But a growing, progressing economy, solving one shortage, will produce others in the process. By the time the selenium shortage is whipped, there may well be a scarcity of some new ium, not yet discovered.

* A nonmetallic element that is a byproduct of electrolytic refining of blister copper, used by the electronics industry to coat rectifiers and for photoelectric cells.

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