Abstract
EXPERIENCE has indicated that some of the economic and social activities of a nation cannot safely be left to unguided individual initiative or interest. Education has long been reckoned as such a social activity, and most of the effort required to supply the essential needs comprised in the idea of the social minimum and embodied in what has been described as a new Bill of Rights for the citizen might be placed in the same category. Mr. Geoffrey Crowther, editor of the Economist, in an article in the American periodical Fortune, goes so far as to suggest that all activities connected with the supply of the nation's food, including production, as agriculture, and distribution and processing, should be planned and controlled by the nation in order that the new standards of nutrition, etc., may be secured. The magnitude of the problem suggests at once that it is by no means easy to draw a line beyond which the profit motive should not be permitted. It may be conceded, for example, that public health is definitely a matter for purposeful organized effort on behalf of the community and cannot be left to the operation of the profit motive. The implications of such a policy, however, are far-reaching and not all obvious. National health is the product of many factors, and some of them, not the least important, owe their primary stimulus, not necessarily, indeed, to the motive of profit or private gain, but certainly to that element of freedom which Mr. Crowther suggests should in theory be excluded from the social field.
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SCIENTIFIC ORGANIZATION OF SOCIAL ACTIVITES. Nature 149, 119–121 (1942). https://doi.org/10.1038/149119a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/149119a0