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aged, investors all clamoring for swift and effective aid and the landfilling up again with messiahs and their easy evangels?About this time a group of young men published a little book—An Economic Program for American Democracy (Vanguard, 1938).It got little enough attention at the time. Its authors styled themselvesSeven Harvard and Tufts Economists. It proclaimed boldlythat the capitalist system as we have known it was done and that,instead of balancing budgets, the government should adopt the unbalancedbudget as a permanent institution; that the only salvationof the nation was in a greater and ever-expanding program of nationalexpenditures met with revenues raised by borrowing.Completely unknown at the time, these men were actually announcingin this small book the theories that had been worked overby John Maynard Keynes in England and Dr. Alvin H. Hansen inthis country. But they were by no means the inventors of them.They had already had a vogue in Germany under the republic, whichindeed had been influenced by them in its fiscal policies.Their theory, very briefly stated, is as follows:The present capitalist system is no longer capable of functioning effectively.The reasons for this are as follows:The dynamic element in the capitalist system is investment. Since millionsof people save billions of dollars annually, these billions must bebrought back into the stream of spending. This can be done only throughinvestment. When private investment is either curtailed or halted, thesesavings remain sterilized or inert and the capitalist system goes into adepression. Nothing can produce a normal revival of the capitalist systemsave a revival of investment.Private investment cannot be any longer revived on a scale sufficient toabsorb the savings of the people. Hence recovery through private investmentis hopeless.Private investment cannot be revived because there are no longer opento savers adequate opportunities for investment.Opportunities for investment are not open any longer for three chiefreasons: (1) because the frontier is gone, with its opportunities for territorialexpansion and the discovery of new resources; (2) because populationincrease has slowed down to a snail's pace; (3) because technologicaldevelopment has matured. That is to say, there is no longer in sight any such180