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To get a fill-in on these phenomena, he and his friend, University of Chicago's Vice President William Benton (now C.E.D.'s vice chairman), had planned a meet-the-professors business round table just before Pearl Harbor stopped such extracurricular activities.
As war news brightened and postwar planning became respectable, Hoffman's and Benton's plans merged with those of Secretary of Commerce Jesse Jones's Business Advisory Council. Jones and B.A.C. had also begun to worry about industry's place in the peace. Hoffman was already vice chairman of B.A.C. When C.E.D. was set up last September, he was almost automatically head man.
C.E.D.'s Program. Paul Hoffman likes to tell people that he is "a simple-minded man with simple objectives." Baldly stated, C.E.D.'s objective is simple: In 1940 there were 49,000,000 people in the U.S. who were gainfully engaged—in & out of Government—in turning out $98 billions of goods and services. Today there are some 62,000,000 and the gross national product is around $150 billions a year. After the war, even assuming that the Services, Government and large-scale public works can employ as many as 8,000,000 men (and that some 4,000,000 men & women stop working), U.S. private industry, including agriculture, will have to find useful jobs for some 50,000,000 men & women, to avoid "intolerable" unemployment. The postwar breadline may run up to 15,000,000 if the U.S. merely returns to where it was in 1940.
Says Hoffman: to the extent that U.S. industry does not achieve this goal (which requires a 40% increase in gross output over 1940), the U.S. public will rightfully insist that the U.S. Government achieve it—"expansion is the one idea we have to sell America." He also says that "when you get a businessman in a tight enough corner, he reluctantly starts thinking his way out of it." Thus C.E.D. was set up with a Field Division to help each U.S. employer think about how to expand his own business.
The Research Division was formed to help him think about the "climate" favorable to the expansion of U.S. business as a whole.
The Field Division, under Marion Folsom, treasurer of Eastman Kodak, has a relatively short-term objective: to get more people more jobs fast when war ends. By last week it had twelve regional chairmen, 130 district chairmen and 667 community chairmen (v. a final goal of 1,000). Though autonomous, each chairman was supplied with a voluminous "package of know-how" from C.E.D.: to show individual companies how to "plan boldly."
The Research Division's job is tougher. It must explore the whole spectrum of postwar economic problems—and also find a way to persuade the business community to put its conclusions to good use.* Its agenda ranges from the immediate problems of conversion to peace to the long-term question of business incentives.
Research Committee head is Ralph Flanders, who heads Vermont's tool-building Jones & Lamson Co. Chief Research Adviser is Harvard's top-drawer Economist Sumner Slichter, famed for his conventional ideas on Government spending (as contrasted with Harvard's other renowned economist, Spender Alvin Hansen).