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Are there roadblocks ahead for all this expansion? Is it good for the long haul? Sáo Paulo's old support, agriculture, is in a decline. Lately, its industry's rate of productivity per worker has also slipped. Most important of all, its costs of production remain inefficiently high. That is mainly because Sáo Paulo's economy still operates on a high-profit, low-volume formula based on a haunting suspicion that the golden days might not last and the time to cash in is now. As long as São Paulo-made refrigerators sell for at least three times more than U.S. models, the structure of Sáo Paulo industry will have serious potential weaknesses.
With its fantastic ambition, prospects and profiteering zest, Sáo Paulo stands now about where the U.S. stood at the end of the Gilded Age. The time is ripe for a home-grown Henry Ford to show these new industrialists how to make really big money by paying productive wages, adopting the techniques of mass production, and selling more for less. On its record of communal resourcefulness, Sao Pau'o can and should produce the man to show the way.
* The title was conferred in 1917 by Victor Emmanuel III of Italy, in recognition of Matarazzo family charities.