Business Faculty Members Decry Outmoded Weapons

Readiness through increased productive capacity rather than more stockpiling of soon-outmoded weapons must highlight America's mobilization policy, according to 18 Business School faculty members. In an article prepared for the January issue of the Business Review, the group analyzes this country's economic capacity for the present crisis.

The report is largely the work of Malcolm P. McNair, Lincoln Filene Professor of Retailling, Edmund P. Learned, professor of Business Administration, John V. Lintner, Jr., associate professor of Finance, and Edward C. Bursk, associate professor of Business Administration.

This country can support armed forces of six million men and annual military expenditures of $84 billion without "serious impairment" of the civilian economy and for "as long a period as may be necessary," the article states.

"The existing draft law as currently administered does not go far enough," the report report says later; "it needs to be more drastic, possibly in respect to the utilization of men hitherto classified 4F. Also we should at once make provision for universal military training."

Psychological Danger

The basic preparedness problem is to fully prepare "at the same time maintaining economic health," and a chief danger is psychological--public reaction to a cold war, as opposed to a hot war, can "most profoundly affect hours of work, rate of productivity, extent of voluntary savings, wage demands, strikes and labor slowdowns, and general public attitude toward controls and restrictions."

Earlier in its preface, the report said, "Ours is not merely a problem of having a given number of troops and a quantity of weapons available at any given moment, but of maintaining the basic capacity for whatever military operations may develop; nor is it so much a problem of peak effort and a swift culmination as of sustained readiness over a period of unknown and perhaps unknowable duration."

The group points out that "thus far leadership has been most conspicuously lacking in making clear just what the equitable distribution of burdens must be among us all in our various guises as businessmen, workers, fighters, and consumers."

The report terms "startling" the potential disruptive effect of inflationary pressures and points to a shortage of goods for civilian consumption resulting from stepped-up war production as "the essence of the 'inflationary gap'."

In an article yesterday in the New York Times, Sumner H. Slichter, Lamont University Professor, outlined four ways to curb inflation and at the same time reduce consequent inequalities. They are: 1) cost-of-living wage adjustments under social security; 2) corresponding pension adjustments under social security; 3) rent control permitting at net incomes of landlords to rise as much as the consumer's price index; and 4) opportunity for savers to buy securities that will automatically depreciate in purchasing power as prices rise