AMERICA'S NEXT TWENTY YEARS
by PETER F. DRUCKER

HARPER & BROTHERS

PUBLISHERS NEW YORK


Questia Media America, Inc. //www.questia.com

Publication Information: Book Title: America's Next Twenty Years. Contributors: Peter F. Drucker - author. Publisher: Harper & Brothers. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1957. Page Number: *.

Contents

I. The Coming Labor Shortage 1
II. The Promise of Automation 17
III. The New Tycoons 35
IV. Will the Colleges Blow
Their Tops 52
V. America Becomes a
"Have-Not" Nation 71
VI. Coming Issues in American Politics 90

CHAPTER ONE
The Coming Labor Shortage

THE MOST IMPORTANT economic event of the last few
years has gone almost unreported in the newspapers. Few
carried any announcement that well over four million
babies have been born in this country every year since 1954
--the largest baby crops ever. Yet 1954, 1955 and 1956
should each have brought a record low in births rather
than a record high. For the young women who reached
marriageable age, married, and had their first child during
these years were born, for the most part, in the dark de­
pression years of 1933 and 1934, when the birth rate ran
30 or 40 per cent below the present figures. The number of
marriages since 1954 has indeed been smaller than usual,
but the total married population has had more than the
usual number of children.

Between now and 1975 the number of young people
reaching marriageable age will tend to increase. Since
romance is reliably constant, this means an appreciable

-1-


Questia Media America, Inc. //www.questia.com

Publication Information: Book Title: America's Next Twenty Years. Contributors: Peter F. Drucker - author. Publisher: Harper & Brothers. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1957. Page Number: 1.

CHAPTER TWO
The Promise of Automation

IN HIS PRESIDENTIAL address to the annual convention
of the CIO in 1954, Walter Reuther introduced an un­
gainly technical term into the headlines. He spoke of the
coming "Automation Revolution." Automation, Reuther
declared, is not in the future; it is already here.

Though the general public had not heard a great deal of
Automation before, Reuther of course was not the first to
interest himself in either the word or the thing it stands for.
The word was coined at least a decade before--by Del
Harder, Ford's manufacturing vice-president--and despite
its ugliness it is now firmly established in the business
language. For the past five or six years, in fact, Automa­
tion has become one of the most popular subjects of dis­
cussion at management association meetings; whole
three-day sessions are sometimes devoted to this single
topic. Two flourishing technical magazines deal with
nothing else, in addition to a substantial number of books.

There can be no doubt that Reuther was entirely right

-17-


Questia Media America, Inc. //www.questia.com

Publication Information: Book Title: America's Next Twenty Years. Contributors: Peter F. Drucker - author. Publisher: Harper & Brothers. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1957. Page Number: 17.

CHAPTER THREE
The New Tycoons

THERE ARE SOME one thousand companies listed on the
New York Stock Exchange. In about one quarter of these,
members of the founding family or of the present manage­
ment own effective control. In the great majority, how­
ever, the only large stockholders are institutional trustees
for other people's money: investment trusts, pension funds,
and banks. Together these fiduciary investors have effec­
tive working control of these companies‒that is, of the
commanding position in our economy. Their holdings
amount to almost one third of all the marketable common
shares of American business.

By and large, these enormous holdings have been ac­
quired in the past ten years. The pension funds only got
going after World War II; there were about two thousand
then, there are twenty thousand now. Ten years ago both
investment trusts and bank-managed personal trusts were
still insignificant. The shift of the center of security buy­

-35-


Questia Media America, Inc. //www.questia.com

Publication Information: Book Title: America's Next Twenty Years. Contributors: Peter F. Drucker - author. Publisher: Harper & Brothers. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1957. Page Number: 35.

CHAPTER FOUR
Will the Colleges Blow Their Tops?

IF YOU ARE a parent with two or three children, the
chances are that you will "buy" up to $36,000 worth of
college and university education--a full tenth or more of
your lifetime earnings. Even if you are childless, you will
still be stuck with a bill for other people's children--
through taxes and contributions. The financing of higher
education affects everybody's pocketbook. It is the central
problem of American education, and there is a great deal
more at stake than mere money and taxes.

The problem is a paradoxical one. We do not yet know
how to pay for the higher education we have, let alone for
the amount we must have a decade or two hence. Yet the
greatest weakness of our present system is that it attempts
to do "on the cheap" what can only be done by spending
a great deal more money.

College education in the United States is rapidly be­
coming "general" education. But in its economic founda­

-52-


Questia Media America, Inc. //www.questia.com

Publication Information: Book Title: America's Next Twenty Years. Contributors: Peter F. Drucker - author. Publisher: Harper & Brothers. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1957. Page Number: 52.

CHAPTER FIVE
America Becomes a "Have-Not" Nation

FOR THE LAST ten years, our ventures into international
economics have been the most imaginative, the most novel,
and the most effective part of America's foreign policy.
Now, however, they are becoming stale, obsolescent, and
ineffective. The Soviet countries, by a deft shift in cold war
strategy, are threatening to take the economic initiative
away from us all around the world--leaving us in the sterile
role of imitator and defender. Clearly it is time for a
change.

Fortunately the opportunity for a change is now opening
up before us. In the months just ahead, we shall have a
unique chance to start on a radically new foreign economic
policy--a policy which not only will satisfy the hopes of the
free world but also will fit the needs and ideals of the
American people. Indeed, the Suez crisis and its impact
demand such a new international economic policy for the
United States.

-71-


Questia Media America, Inc. //www.questia.com

Publication Information: Book Title: America's Next Twenty Years. Contributors: Peter F. Drucker - author. Publisher: Harper & Brothers. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1957. Page Number: 71.


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CHAPTER SIX
Coming Issues

in American Politics
WE HAVE REACHED a major watershed in American poli­
tics. Behind us are sixty years of great issues and constant
change--the sixty years from Mark Hanna to Walter
Reuther, from Booker T. Washington to the Supreme
Court decision outlawing racial segregation in the schools,
from Bryan Cross of Gold speech to today's slogan of
"People's Capitalism," from the electric streetcar to the
hydrogen bomb. During these sixty years the United States
has transmuted itself from an agrarian into an industrial
society and from isolation into leadership as a world power.

The issues and slogans of these sixty years were still
echoed, all but automatically, in last Fall's election cam­
paign, seemed indeed at times to dominate it. But rarely in
our history has campaign oratory fallen on deafer ears,
sounded flatter, or meant less. For if the four years of the
first Eisenhower Administration meant anything, they
meant that the New Deal, in which all these issues of the
past sixty years had culminated, finally passed into history,

-90-


Questia Media America, Inc. //www.questia.com

Publication Information: Book Title: America's Next Twenty Years. Contributors: Peter F. Drucker - author. Publisher: Harper & Brothers. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1957. Page Number: 90.


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