Changing Structure of the Western Economy

The counterpart of this lengthening of the time-span of life was, according to Whitehead, the shortening of the time-span of change, owing to the great and spectacular contributions of science and technology to man's con- quest and utilization of resources. [...] They are bound to have an increasing influence in the years immediately ahead, particularly on the rate of growth; on the pattern of investment and development as between the public and private sectors of the Western economy; on the conscious allocation of resources to the provision of power, fuel, and transport, and on the conservation of water as a vital resource; on the development of education [...] As regards the third, the pursuit of a fiscal policy in the form of a credit squeeze, it is designed deliberately to check the rate of growth in order to reduce the impact of the so-called inflationary influences on the economy as a whole. [...] With the rise of the communist economy to a vigorous force in the world and the efforts of the D2 countries to adapt their ancient economies to modern industry, agriculture, transport, and power, the public sector in the West is inevitably on a much greater scale than in the heyday of the free Western economy at the turn of the cen- tury. [...] On the contrary it should mean less, especially if the plan embraced the task of co-ordinating the operations of all the public authorities, local and central, and gave more emphasis to the place of the public or statutory corporation in the public sector.