Analyzing Character: The New Science of Judging Men; Misfits in Business, the Home and Social LifeBlackford, Katherine M. H. (Katherine Melvina Huntsinger)
Science
Analyzing Character: The New Science of Judging Men; Misfits in Business, the Home and Social Life
Blackford, Katherine M. H. (Katherine Melvina Huntsinger)
Characters and characteristics; Success
Recently we made a study of a large corporation. Amongst other things, we
found it required ten thousand dollars capital to provide the building,
machinery, help, tools, advertising, selling, and other necessities of
that business for every employee on the payroll. It also required unusual
organizing ability and unusual selling ability to gather together the
means for manufacturing the product and getting it into the hands of the
consumer. It also required considerable genius to collect the money for
the product and apply it to the needs of the workers in the form of
payroll. These services of the fat man are often forgotten by those who
work under his direction.
In order that huge industries may be built up and employment secured for
hundreds of thousands of men, large bodies of capital must be gathered
together. This is a work for financiers. Go down into Wall Street, in New
York; La Salle Street, in Chicago; State Street, in Boston, and look over
the financiers there. A considerable number of them are fat men. Because
thinkers and workers cannot appreciate financial value, many of them
complain loudly because the fat man sits in an easy chair and reaps the
profits from their efforts. They restlessly agitate for an economic system
which will yield them all the profits from their ideas and labor. They
want to eliminate the capitalist--to condemn the fat man to a choice
between scholarship or working as they work and starvation. They know
human aptitudes so vaguely that they want to turn the corpulent into farm
hands or philosophers and the great mass of lean and bony into financial
rulers.
There is a prevalent notion among the unthinking that capital takes about
four-fifths of the products of labor's hands and keeps it. A committee of
the American Civic Federation, after three years of careful investigation
in industries employing an aggregate of ten million workers, found that
this idea is based upon the assumption that capital gets and keeps all the
gross income from production except what is paid to labor. It leaves out
of account the cost of raw materials, the upkeep of buildings and
machinery, and miscellaneous expenses. When these are subtracted from
gross income, the committee found, labor receives two-thirds of the
remainder in wages and salaries, capital one-third for interest, upkeep of
capital, and profit.
FINANCIER AND JUDGE
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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