United States Steel Corporation

Statistics adequate to measure accurately the physical growth in this productive
and useful wealth do not exist; and this renders all controversies over
percentage rates of economic growth, whether at home or abroad, quite
academic. Only fragmentary information is available. The American Iron and
Steel Institute has, for example, estimated that the accumulated total of steel
products installed and daily serving the nation is over 1 Yz billion tons - more
than 8 tons per person. There is also, among the more accurate data, the long
record of this country's annual steel production out of which additions to
accumulated wealth are fashioned. During this century, as may be noted in the
chart on page 25, there has been a majestic upward sweep in steel production.
In recent years production has been nine or ten times what it was at the turn
of the century - an average increase of 3 Yz to 4 per cent per annum compounded.
The comparable population growth rate was about 1 Yz per cent.
As a measure of the increasing economic usage of steel, production figures
are significantly deficient in one respect. With the passage of the years, and
as a result of intensive research, steel has changed and become better. In
numerous instances a ton of steel today can and does serve purposes that
formerly required more than a ton - in some instances nearly two tons. New
steels can and do, moreover, serve useful new purposes that neither steel nor
other materials formerly could practically serve. Steel's contribution to
economic growth has increased more rapidly than registered by the tonnage
data. Because steel quality improvements have not been adequately quantified
it interestingly follows that steel price increases have not been adequately
qualified. A part of additional price is assignable to additional quality.
Because of this nation's great wealth in the form of installed steel products,
it can on occasion refrain without great hardship from adding thereto. In
wartime, for example, industrial capacity is diverted to armament production
and the existing peacetime durable goods are made to last a little longer. There
are other occasions. For example, in the 1930's per capita steel production
averaged only three-fourths as much as it averaged in the "new era" 1920's.
In the 1950's when economic growth reflected the world-wide "catch-up"
demand caused by the war, per capita steel production averaged more than
double that of the prewar 1930's. The fact that the "catch-up" demand may
now have been satisfied renders considerations of economic growth of particular
interest to steel producers at this time.
ECONOMIC GROWTH
Although economic growth is so important to a steel producer, mere growth in
terms of just producing an ever bigger pile of goods is unacceptable as an
overriding American objective. It leaves out too many other popularly
cherished notions. If, for example, the maximum possible production were all
that was desired there would be no restrictions on the weekly hours of labor;
there would be fewer or no restrictions on the labor of youth; costly and timeconsuming
"higher" education would be restricted to those of demonstrated
talent the more quickly to add the less talented to manual labor forces; unem-
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