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374 Jean Bourgeois-Pichat
Payments effected by collectivities
63. Those persons who are cut off from the labour force and remain outside the
flow of money distribution in the form of interest on capital present problems
of a different nature. Collectivities, and more particularly the State, must look
after them and laws must be introduced enabling them to receive the money they
need in order to live. No country has so far succeeded altogether in setting up
the proper machinery to meet the case, and the persons concerned are, generally
speaking, unfairly treated as compared with the other population categories.
In most cases this is not due to insufficient production. The goods and services
exist in the places where these persons are living, but they do not have the
necessary money to pay for them, and the spectacle of unused goods and services
in the face of palpable need is one of the most distressing paradoxes at the
present time.
The lowering of the death rate as a result of the progressive disappearance
of the endogenous causes of death should soon render the problem so acute
that society will be obliged to find solutions.
In exactly the same way as for the procedure based on capital income, doubt-
less the distribution of income by collectivities can not exceed a certainthresh-
old. Rightly or wrongly, the worker has the feeling that what he produces
belongs to him, and the proportion deducted from such production cannot be
indefinitely increased in order to distribute it among those who do not form
part of the labour force. It is clear that social demographic data concerning
these classes of persons are indispensable for the planner. He must know the
number of persons to date in each class and also the rate of increase through
the years. Thus one comes up against the need for new perspectives, no longer
related this time to consumption rates but to the way in which persons acquire
the money they need in order to live. It is not difficult to imagine who those
persons are: the aged no longer in employment, widows with children to bring
up, orphans, unemployed persons, the sick, ‘outsiders’, etc. All the demogra-
phic history of these groups remains to be studied. How does one begin?
and where? How is one to solve the difficulties? It will be the demographer’s
task in the coming years to discover the laws governing all such phenomena.
Planners must also know what characteristics are likely to induce these persons
to become reincorporated in the labour force: desire to remain active, possibili-
ty of attending a refresher course, finding a help for the household, undergoing
a readaptation course, especially in the case of the disabled, etc. Socio-demo-
graphic researches alone can provide the answers to these questions.
The international market
64. There is a special type of money which all countries are very interested in
possessing - the type which can be exchanged on the international money market
and which countries obtain by means of a variety of international operations
(trade, tourism, loans, gifts, etc.).
The goods and services offered to the population of a country are never
used to the fullest extent, especially the services. Thus there are often vacant
seats in theatres, cinemas, museums, trains, aeroplanes, etc. The economic