ABSTRACT
Men learn from experience, but, in the field of economic science, the experience which forces itself upon their attention and which calls insistently for explanation, is not the routine experience of uneventful years. It is that which takes us unawares or that of momentous changes into which we probe in order that we may learn from it. The economic changes which followed upon the World War were both sudden and momentous, and upon economic science there devolves the task of inquiring into them so as to explain them, to discover their meaning, and to extract from them the lessons which they hold for the future. First in importance among these new developments is the shifting of what might be called the center of gravity of the world’s economic life from Europe towards America,—a shifting which manifests itself in industry, commerce and finance. The war, it is sometimes said, ushered in the era of America’s industrial supremacy. The word “supremacy,” however, is badly chosen. Despite the attempts which nations make to gain economic advantage at the expense of other nations, and despite the hold which the notion of “international economic rivalry” has upon the imaginations of men, it is truer to say that the modern world is a world of international economic cooperation than to picture it as one in which some nations have industrial “supremacy,” others are economically subservient. “Primacy,” or “leadership,” is a better word.
