Reason Magazine - Staff

Bluenose Blues

info@reason.com ( Martin Morse Wooster) — Wed, 01 Jan 1997 00:00:00 EST

The Pleasure Police: How Bluenose Busybodies and Lily-Livered Alarmists Are Taking the Fun Out of Life, by David Shaw, New York: Doubleday, 286 pages, $23.00

Most demographers will agree that life is growing less risky every year. But if you pick up a magazine or newspaper or turn on the nightly news, chances are you'll see at least one report warning of some previously unknown terror. Three drinks will make you an alcoholic. Most men are date rapists. Eating causes cancer.

Read or watch enough of these scary reports, and you'll want to spend the rest of your life in bed, living on bean sprouts, distilled water, and the occasional carrot. Today, you're a bold and daring iconoclast if you order a steak, a smoke, and a sherry when you go out for a night on the town.

Why do we live in such a repressive age? Why has the three-martini lunch become as retrograde as the smoking jacket or the hoop skirt? Those questions are addressed by David Shaw, the Los Angeles Times's media critic since 1974. In his first book, Shaw examines why the Stairmaster has become more fashionable than the seven-course dinner.

Much of what Shaw discusses will be familiar to readers of REASON, such as the foolishness of the war on drugs, the truth about cancer risks, or the real dangers of secondhand smoke. Regular readers will already know much of what Shaw has to say about public policy.

But The Pleasure Police isn't at its heart a book on public policy; it's the autobiography of David Shaw interlaced with analysis. Shaw never fails to present himself as a good liberal who just wants to be able to smoke a nice cigar or enjoy an issue of Playboy without being denounced by some prude. Despite his departures from '90s P.C. orthodoxy, Shaw is a '90s guy in his desire to reveal personal secrets many readers would rather not know: He tells us his 27 favorite foods, including his five favorite kinds of chicken. As a callow lad at a repressive Christian college, Shaw tells us, he referred to women's breasts as "oaklands." (To this longtime resident of the East Coast, his desire to use his book as a confessional seems very Californian.)

Still, whenever Shaw stops talking about himself, he has interesting things to say. He's at his best in The Pleasure Police when he criticizes the press. He argues that journalists primarily worry about people like themselves. As newsrooms restrict smoking, for example, journalists are prompted to write misleading stories about the alleged dangers of secondhand smoke. As journalists age and worry about preserving the remnants of their lost youth, they are more prone to write exaggerated stories about purported cancer-causing compounds. Shaw theorizes that many journalists have a hard time writing about sex because most editors seem "both suspicious and envious of those who eagerly indulge in pleasures of a sensual nature." As a result, Shaw says that "every time the media cover a story involving sex--be it about AIDS, child molestation, the William Kennedy Smith rape trial, or the sex lives of Bill Clinton or Gary Hart--they fuck it up."

Most of the time, Shaw shows, the press fails because journalists censor crucial details. In 1976, for example, when Ford administration Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz resigned after making loathsome comments about African Americans, only the Toledo Blade and the Madison, Wisconsin, Capital Times told their readers what Butz said. When the Federal Communications Commission in 1978 barred radio stations from broadcasting seven obscene words, only the San Francisco Chronicle reported what the words were. A recent New York Times story on why New York City is "the most foul-mouthed city in the nation" did not quote any foul mouths. And when the Los Angeles Times told the story of Frasier, a beast at Lion Country Safari who sired 30 cubs in six months despite being as old (in lion years) as a 75-year-old man, the newspaper's photography department airbrushed away Frasier's lionhood.

Shaw also amusingly skewers journalistic health scolds such as Jane Brody, the New York Times health columnist whose dour advice has frightened generations of Manhattanites. According to Brody, every season of the year is cause for alarm. Instead of plum pudding and goose for Christmas, she thinks it more appropriate to serve beans and whole-grain crackers. "If you obeyed all the strictures in Brody's weekly column," Shaw writes, "you'd never leave the house. Hell, you'd never get out of bed."

Shaw is not always as interesting as he could be. Many of his comments are banal. (A prudent editor would have cut his lengthy remarks on baseball or why California is a better place to live than New York.) And his liberalism leads him to misinterpret the nature of American puritanism.

Shaw would like to divide the United States into two classes: freedom-loving hedonists and dour Puritans. But, for Shaw, America is actually home to two types of Puritans: conservatives who don't like unmarried people having sex or consuming pornography, and liberals who don't like smokers, drinkers, or meat eaters.

According to Shaw, the two groups of Puritans are allied: "Now, however, we have the alarmists of the left joining forces with the Puritans of the right for the suppression of fun in American." Shaw has little evidence for his claim, though. Occasionally liberal and conservative Puritans form alliances, most notably in the 1980s, when radical feminists Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon united with some Christian conservatives in a failed grand coalition against pornography. Most of the time, however, the two groups of Puritans don't have much to do with each other. The Christian Coalition does not champion the efforts of Food and Drug Administration Commissioner David Kessler, and the Center for Science in the Public Interest does not worry about who buys Playboy.

This confusion about Puritanism across political divisions leads Shaw into some errors. For example, Shaw discusses how the idea of "heterosexual AIDS" was largely promulgated by gay activists who "learned the hard way that the only way to get government funding, scientific research, and media attention was to make AIDS seem a serious threat to heterosexuals as well." But he then argues that these AIDS activists were supported by "a most unlikely alliance," including "the nation's homophobes, Christian Fundamentalists, right-wing conservatives, and puritans of various stripes." Shaw offers no evidence that right-wingers support homosexual efforts to convince the public that AIDS would kill thousands of heterosexuals. Indeed, it's more plausible that the homophobic right would oppose the notion of heterosexual AIDS, since they believe AIDS to be a "gay disease."

Shaw displays similar confusion about the debate over funding the National Endowment for the Arts, contending that the agency's budget was slashed because prim censors wanted to block artists from creating sexually explicit work. Shaw doesn't address the serious challenges to the NEA, such as, why should government use tax dollars to support activities many Americans find offensive? Shaw also ignores the large class of people (like me) who enjoy Playboy and moderately smutty films but believe that the NEA is just another government welfare program, as ethically indefensible as subsidizing single mothers or giant corporations.

What can be done about American Puritans? David Shaw gives no answers; he is content to diagnose the problem, not proffer a solution. Part of the remedy is to reduce the budgets of federal agencies, such as the FDA, EPA, and OSHA, which feel compelled to frighten the public to convince Congress that they deserve a larger budget to fight off terrors which are much less scary than bureaucrats would like to admit.

The best way to counter bad information, though, is with better information. Despite its flaws, The Pleasure Police does a good job making the case that people who enjoy cigar smoking, drinking, making love, and fine foods are likely to lead happier lives than are people who believe government mandarins and their allies in the press who constantly portray life as dangerous, vicious, and terrifying.

Whither Welfare?

info@reason.com ( Martin Morse Wooster) — Mon, 01 Jan 1996 00:00:00 EST

Social Policy in the United States: Future Possibilities in Historical Perspective , by Theda Skocpol, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 312 pages, $29.95

If you want to figure out where to go, it helps to know how you got to where you are. Unfortunately, the current debate over the welfare state tends to gloss over how and why we got the welfare programs we have. The decisions madeand not madeby New Deal planners shape our world 60 years later. Why is Social Security, for example, considered by many Ameri cans to be a reward for a life of hard work while Aid to Families With Dependent Children is widely reviled for subsidizing sloth and indolence? Why are welfare policies set by the federal government but paid for by the states? Why didn't the New Dealers enact national health insur ance or European-style child allowances?

The people primarily interested in welfare history these days are feminists and leftists, many of whom see the history of welfare as a branch of women's history. Despite their political biases, however, the best of these historians provide valuable information. For example, Univer sity of Wisconsin historian Joan Gordon's Pitied But Not Entitled (1994) is full of useful information on the ideas and principles of early-20th-century welfare reformers, once the reader takes into account Gordon's prejudice that every champion of expanding the welfare state is a hero.

Theda Skocpol, a Harvard sociologist, is also a writer whom both friends and foes of welfare ought to read. Her 1992 book Protecting Soldiers and Mothers has already become one of the standard histories of the origins of welfare programs. And Social Policy in the United States, a collection of articles from scholarly journals, asks questions about welfare its foes ought to answer.

Skocpol is a social democrat who would prefer the United States to have welfare programs as large and intrusive as the wealthier nations of Europe. She supports a national job-listing service, withholding child support from workers' wages, and Canadian-style national health insurance. She is, however, a very good historian. Although Skocpol's dry prose is often a chore to read, Social Policy in the United States is worth reading for insights she provides into parts of the history of welfare that are undeservedly forgotten.

Her best chapter is on the history of Civil War pensions. We tend to assume, Skocpol argues, that 19th-century Americans were rugged individualists who disdained government handouts. But she shows that given the opportunity, our great-grandfathers were as eager to accept welfare as their descendants.

The growth in Civil War pensions was a consequence of the principles of the 19th-century Republican Party. Until Woodrow Wilson's election in 1912, the Republicans tended to be the big-government party, favoring high tariff barriers to help corporations. But because the federal government was very small, Republicans kept generating budget surpluses. Instead of cutting tariffs or other taxes, they thought up new things for the federal
government to do with the extra money. The Civil War pension program was one result.

Pensions were first provided to Civil War veterans injured during their service. But in 1879, Congress passed a law that authorized one-time lump-sum arrears payments to any veteran who was deemed qualified for a pension but who had not yet applied. These arrears payments were quite large; they averaged $1,000 in an era when the average annual wage was $400. So claims for the pension program swelled from 1,600 a month to over 10,000 a month. As Eugene V. Smalley trenchantly observed in an 1884 article in Century Magazine, the effect of the arrears payments was to "stir up a multitude of people to apply for pensions who had never thought of this matter before. In one year 141,466 men who had not realized they were disabled until the Government offered a premium of a thousand dollars or more for the discovery of aches and disabilities, made application." Also emerging was a class of pension attorneys who, when not receiving payments from veterans, spent their days lobbying to make payments more generous.

Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans, Skocpol argues, were eager to cut the pension program and alienate potential voters. So pension payments grew and grew until, by the early 1890s, they consumed over 45 percent of the federal budget. In the 49th Congress (18851887), 40 percent of the bills passed by the House and 55 percent of those passed by the Senate were private bills adding to the pension rolls constituents who had been denied benefits. (Most of these bills were passed on Friday evenings, which quickly became known in Congress as "pen sion night.") The Pension Bureau, with over 2,000 employees at its height, became the biggest bureaucracy created up to that time. Only when pensioners began to die off in the late 1890s did the pension budget begin to shrink substantially, though veterans' benefits remained a major part of federal spending until the New Deal.

For Skocpol, the Civil War pension story is an example of a "precocious social spending state," since it was an important antecedent to later welfare spending. But given the wealth of detail she provides, it's easy to draw another conclusionthat the Civil War pension program could have told New Deal planners that entitlement programs, however small at first, inevitably grow, generating red tape and a class of beneficiaries demanding even larger subsidies.

Skocpol's other chapters deal with 20th-century history, particularly the New Deal era. They remind the market-oriented reader that, however bad FDR's welfare plans were, they were compromises. If the Democratic Party coalition of the 1930s had not included a large number of relatively conservative Southern Democrats, the New Deal could have resulted in even larger and more intrusive social welfare programs than were ultimately created.

A paper co-written with Edwin G. Amenta compares the ideas of social planners in Britain and America during World War II. British planners, led by William Beveridge, helped lay the intellectual framework for the massive expansion of the British welfare state that followed the Labor Party's triumph in the 1945 elections. But similar expansive plans were also hatched in America. In 1940, President Roosevelt convened a National Resources Planning Board, which was asked to formulate "national social and economic policies for the postwar period."

The board's report, issued in 1943, called for nationalizing welfare and unemployment compensation programs, extending Social Security to cover the disabled, and substantially expanding the federal health budget (though the board stopped short of recommending national health insurance). New Dealers in Congress were also active; a bill introduced in 1943 by Sen. Robert Wagner (D-N.Y.) and Rep. John Dingell Sr. (D-Mich.), father of the current Michigan congressman, would have boosted the welfare budget and provided for national public-works programs to ensure a (government) job for every American.

But while British social planners achieved their planned massive welfare state, their Ameri can counterparts failed. The Democrats in the 1940s were "not a functional equivalent of the Labor Party." Conservative Southern Democrats increasingly allied with Republicans to ensure an end to some New Deal programs, such as public-works jobs programs in 1942. For the New Deal to have been expanded after 1945, Skocpol and Amenta argue, "Americans would have had to elect a left-wing Democratic president and a majority of urban Democrats to Congress." The coalition that had ensured the New Deal had permanently shattered,
and was only partially reconstructed by Lyndon Johnson during the 196468 era.

Skocpol also provides valuable insights into the origins of Social Security, the role women played in creating the American welfare state, and the differences between British and American labor unions. She concludes with several recent policy analyses which, because they lack histori cal analysis but include heavy helpings of arguments for making the welfare state fatter and more oppressive, are eminently skippable.

Still, if the American welfare state is ever to be dismantled, we need to know why it was created and what the planners of bygone eras were thinking. While Skocpol's conclusions will not persuade foes of the welfare state to change their minds, her dispassionate and thoughtful analysis of the origins of American social policy ensures that Social Policy in the United States ought to be read by anyone interested in welfare reform.

Russia's Roaring Twenties

info@reason.com ( Martin Morse Wooster) — Thu, 01 Dec 1994 00:00:00 EST

When the Soviet empire was at its zenith, a common joke among Sovietologists was that however mighty and imperial the Soviets seemed, at its heart the USSR's economy was so feeble that it was little more than "Upper Volta with rockets."

Now that the Soviets have disappeared (along with Upper Volta) it seems that Russia isn't just a Third World nation with rockets; it's just the Third World. Consider the following:

The August Reader's Digest reprints an item from the Financial Times that reports that the Russian air force is now selling joy rides to anyone with hard currency. For $12,000, you can ride a top-of-the-line MiG fighter; for $40,000, you can engage in a mock dogfight with another fighter and receive a souvenir helmet (apparently in English) proclaiming you a "Top Gun."
A Department of Energy report summarized in the June Atlantic Monthly charges that 3,000 Russian officers have been disciplined for "questionable business practices" and that 46 officers were going to be court-martialed for corruption.
In the September Post-Soviet Prospects, the Center for Strategic and International Studies's Keith Bush reports that, according to official Russian statistics, industrial output in that nation between January and August 1994 was 24 percent below 1993 levels, and the Russian gross domestic product was predicted to shrink by between 16 percent and 18 percent. Since 1989, Bush says, industrial output and GDP has fallen in Russia by 50 percent, "a steeper drop than was registered during the Great Depression in the United States during the early 1930s."
Also in the September Post-Soviet Prospects, Robert Ebel reports that in the first half of 1994, Russian crude oil production had fallen by 14 percent compared to the equivalent period in 1993; during the same time, coal production had fallen by 11 percent and electric power production by 7 percent.

When magazines write about Russia, their pages tend to be filled with similarly gloomy reports. Lenin may have been smashed by the iconoclasts, but at first glance it seems far too many Russians are prepared to venerate Al Capone.

Perhaps the most alarming stories about Russia are those dealing with the rise of the "Russian mafia." In a cover story in the June Atlantic Monthly, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh charges that Russia is being taken over by criminals and gangsters. "The exponential growth of organized crime in Russia is not only an issue of personal safety and economics," Hersh writes, "it is becoming an issue of national and international security. The criminal element in Russia is now in the process of hijacking the state, and is threatening to erode the government's control" of nuclear weapons, plutonium, and uranium.

In his very long article, Hersh cites no evidence that any Russian has sold nuclear material (though since Hersh's article appeared, there have been signs that plutonium may be escaping from Russia into the world market). But he reports that in early 1993 Literaturnaya Gazeta writer Kirili Belyaninov, conducting an undercover investigation, was offered what he was told was a warhead from an SS-20 missile for $70,000. Nor does Hersh find any evidence that Russian mobsters have seized control of any major portions of the Russian economy.

What Hersh does discover is that a great many mid-level bureaucrats in Washington are prepared to give up on the Russian economy. Various unnamed sources compare today's Russia to the Wild West, Roaring Twenties Chicago, the American "robber barons," and the Alaskan gold rush. According to Hersh, some unnamed "Clinton Administration experts on Russia" are predicting that Russia is a second Weimar Republic, a tottering, feeble democracy about to succumb to totalitarianism.

Since readers of Hersh's article have no idea to whom Hersh spoke or what their qualifications are to comment about Russia, we don't know how accurate their predictions might be. But Russian observers willing to put their thoughts on paper are more optimistic. Russia may be going through a very hard time, but it is far from certain that the nation is doomed.

Hersh never defines what, exactly, a Russian "mobster" might be. As the Financial Times's John Lloyd notes in the August 27 Spectator, if a Russian mobster is someone who hires bodyguards, routinely pays protection money, and avoids taxes, then, as Lloyd notes, most of the honest entrepreneurs in Russia are mobsters. While the people they are paying protection money to are genuine mobsters, the honest businessmen still outnumber them.

The collapse of communism, Lloyd reports, left the wealth-seeking Russian in a world without rules. Most of the newly rich Russians are not, in fact, ethnic Russians. Many are from Georgia and Armenia, and some are Jewish, and are thus the targets of envious racist anti-capitalists. Many fear that they will meet the fate of parents or grandparents slaughtered by Lenin and Stalin. And Lloyd, summarizing the research of Academy of Sciences sociologist Igor Bunin, reports that most members of this enterprising class would prefer not to live according to the law of the jungle; "they prefer to live in an environment where rational and trustworthy transactions are honored within a stable and secure framework."

Moreover, Alexei Bayer reports in the September 12 Insight, some of the "crimes" these "mobsters" commit are not the result of force or fraud, but simply the consequences of angering an inspector who then chooses to enforce an arbitrary and ill-conceived rule. Foreign exchange accounts can be blocked at any time, and a recent presidential decree limiting corporations to one bank account harms firms whose banks are inefficient and unreliable.

Yet the Russian economy, says the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's Anders Aslund in the September Foreign Affairs, is not doomed. "The Western caricature of Russia as a destitute country on the verge of either collapse or falling into the hands of fascists could not be more wrong," Aslund writes. "Russia has undergone fundamental changes and appears to be on the right track."

Those changes, Aslund observes, are primarily due to Viktor Chernomyrdin, a secretive man who has been Russian prime minister since November 1992. When Russian voters in their December 1993 election replaced the Supreme Soviet with the State Duma, most news reports focused on the 24 percent of the vote given to Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a fascist thug. But the more important story, says Aslund, is that the Russian system of government was radically revised, with power flowing away from parliament and toward the presidency, in a system of government similar to France's. This shift ensured more stability and enabled Prime Minister Chernomyrdin to fight inflation and battle the deficit. The result: Inflation is now down to about 100 percent a year, and the Russian budget deficit is being slowly reduced. Shops are gradually filling with goods, and arms factories that considered it beneath their dignity to produce goods that consumers actually needed "now scramble to produce whatever they can sell for a profit."

Aslund advises his readers to question scary statistics about falling production. In the era of five-year plans, Soviet plants routinely overstated production to fulfill quotas; now Russian factories understate output to fool the tax collector. A more accurate measure of the health of the Russian economy, Aslund believes, is electricity consumption, which fell by only 6 percent in 1992 and 5 percent in 1993, suggesting that the Russian economy is not in terminal decline. And, while workers in many Russian professions (coal miners, professors of Marxism-Leninism) face diminishing demands for their labor, more enterprising Russians have more money to buy cars, homes, and television sets.

As for crime, Aslund suggests that while Russian big cities have become more dangerous, they're still safer than American cities of similar size. And as Russia slowly adopts the rule of law (jury trials, for example, have been held for the first time since 1917), mobsters who made their fortunes selling goods made artificially scarce by price controls or monopolizing licenses have found their fortunes undercut by deregulation.

Noting that only 5 percent of Russians tell pollsters that they are interested in politics, the September 3 Economist observes that "the fire has gone out of Russian politics. While Russia will always have the capacity to deliver nasty surprises, after nearly nine months of relative political calm, it is hard now to conceive of anyone shelling parliament or seeking to overthrow the president, or of anything else that could persuade hundreds of thousands of people to demonstrate in the streets."

As Russia shows signs of slowly becoming a country as bland and stable as the advanced democracies of the West, American cries to spend billions to save the Russians from themselves have weakened. But some saber-rattlers still call for a larger NATO to combat the Russian army if it threatens to revive. Today, the jingoists contend, the Russian Army will reabsorb Belarus and Ukraine; then they will march into Riga and Warsaw; then the hungry Russian bear will restore the evil empire in its thirst for warm-water ports in Turkey and the Persian Gulf.

But this scenario, warns analyst Walter Russell Mead in the Summer World Policy Journal, is highly unlikely. While American forces should still defend its borders against potent Russian intercontinental missiles, he contends, such neocontainment fantasies will "weaken NATO, increase the prospects of war in Europe, increase American defense spending without enhancing American security, sharpen the threat to American security posed by Russia's still formidable nuclear arsenal, and create serious problems in regional diplomacy for the United States in both Europe and Asia."

Under Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko, the Soviet Union was an evil empire. The Russia of Boris Yeltsin is not imperial and not wicked; it is a struggling, somewhat democratic, somewhat capitalist society that appears to be slowly becoming more free and more civilized. The best thing America can do to aid Russia is buy their goods, disarm their nuclear bombs, and leave them alone.

Urban Renewal

info@reason.com ( Martin Morse Wooster) — Tue, 01 Nov 1994 00:00:00 EST

We all know what cities used to be for. In our parents' and grandparents' time, they went downtown to shop at a department store, to take in a movie, to visit the latest exhibits at the local museum, to go to a concert, or to go see a game at the stadium. Most people, even when they lived in the suburbs, commuted downtown to work.

Most of those rationales for cities have faded. A rising number of people have their jobs, as well as their homes, in the suburbs. There's no need to go to the picture palace downtown when there's a multiplex at the mall. Though many of the old museums are still downtown--besieged by decay, degradation, and political correctness--they face a rising number of competitors in the suburbs. And a sports complex these days is as likely to be in Auburn Hills or Landover as in Detroit or Washington.

Today, far too many cities--particularly older Northeastern metropolises--are home only to the wealthy few able to afford their rehabilitated townhouses and to the downtrodden poor who can't afford to go anywhere else. A recent article by Robert S. Guskind predicts dire consequences from that trend. In the year 2016, Guskind foresees, America's cities will be divided into a few wealthy enclaves being slowly swamped by the rising underclass.

In the 21st century, Guskind writes, a million soldiers will patrol the ghettoes, and a million urban convicts will rot in a huge prison in the Arizona desert. He envisions a Washington where the wealthy live in terror: K Street lobbyists have to pass through checkpoints and barricades; rich Georgetown residents enter their townhouses through secret tunnels; and The Washington Post has fled its urban stronghold for a secure harbor in the suburb of Loudoun County, Virginia.

Guskind's article did not appear in a thunderous organ of the nationalist right, but in the June 18 National Journal, the influential Capitol Hill weekly. No doubt his tale gave nightmares to the pinstripers who can afford the Journal's hefty subscription fee.

A more telling (and more plausible) sign of urban decline appeared in the July 23 Economist, which reports that Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley has called for banning public telephones in his city, calling them "outdoor offices for drug-dealers and criminals."

So our cities are losing the old-fashioned luster of the bustling, exhilarating metropolis. They are increasingly bleak places where you can't find nightlife or even a telephone. In a search for solutions to the many fiscal and managerial problems plaguing America's older cities, many mayors are privatizing. Surprising items are for sale: In New York City, Nick Gilbert reports in the June 21 Financial World, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani is considering selling two or three of the city's waste treatment plants, which could net New York $800 million. Giuliani also might sell the entire New York City water supply system, which could add $9 billion to city coffers. (Like many cities, New York once had a private water supply; the "Manhattan" part of what is now Chase Manhattan Bank was originally a private water company.)

Most mayors, however, are proposing more timid reforms. The conventional wisdom among mayors these days is "public-private partnerships," in which business and government unite for the common good. "A bipartisan consensus is being built in the heart of America," the July 11 Business Week editorialized. "Mayors and governors of both parties are quickly moving toward a centrist economic and political program that calls for entrepreneurial-minded governments to actively help companies grow."

Seasoned magazine readers know that whenever Business Week discovers a vital center around which reasonable Republicans and Democrats can coalesce, it's time to grab your wallet and check your change. Instead of reflexively praising public-private partnerships, it's better to ask if such "partnerships cause the state to grow or shrink.

Many times, of course, such "partnerships" bloat governments. Sports stadiums are a case in point. Liberals in particular should be outraged by new stadium construction. Such facilities take money away from the poor through increased sales taxes or lottery tickets and reward wealthy players, very wealthy skybox patrons, and extremely wealthy team owners. Plus, there's no evidence that stadiums generate new wealth for a city, since most people attending sports events are simply diverting money that they might have spent on other entertainments.

In Cleveland, Rondo Bartomile reports in the June Progressive, the city asked voters in 1990 to approve $275 million in new taxes for the Gateway Center, a complex combining a stadium for baseball's Cleveland Indians and an arena for basketball's Cleveland Cavaliers. Advertisements promised that the new facility would provide 28,000 new jobs, new housing for the homeless, and $15 million for schools in return for government's 50 percent ownership of the project.

It has been four years since the new taxes were approved. None of the money for social programs has appeared, the stadium was $43 million over budget, the arena is currently $49.2 million over budget (and isn't finished), the city has provided an additional $12 million in transportation subsidies, and the state of Ohio has spent $31 million on the Gateway project and loaned the venture an additional $17.4 million. This remarkably poor "investment," Bartomile writes, is evidence that "Jesse James and Al Capone working as partners couldn't do a better job of cleaning out your city treasury than a major-league sports entrepreneur."

Another dubious effort at "partnerships" is in telecommunications. In at least 50 cities, Herbert Lindsay reports in the July American City & County, municipalities buy telephone lines and then rent them to businesses and homes. Those cities (notably Anchorage and Fairbanks, Alaska) argue that because they own hundreds or thousands of telephone lines, they can get a better deal from telephone companies than individuals can. Thus, they can not only save their residents money, but can earn more revenue.

But cities don't always manage their lines as efficiently as private interests. The telephones in New York City's World Trade Center, Lindsay reports, earn the center's landlord, the Port Authority of New York, $12.4 million each year, while Cheyenne, Wyoming, which has about the same number of telephone lines, earns only $136,000 each year from US West, that city's monopoly telephone company.

Some effective "public-private partnerships," however, do reduce government by privatization and contracting out. Some of the reform-minded mayors who are shrinking the state, such as Milwaukee's John Norquist and Philadelphia's Ed Rendell, are Democrats. But many of these principled politicians are a relatively new phenomenon-- Republican mayors, as Rob Gurwitt reports in the February Governing. Republicans traditionally controlled such Sunbelt cities as Dallas and San Diego. But crumbling Democratic machines allowed Republicans to extend their control to several big cities for the first time in a generation. Los Angeles was ruled by Democrats for 36 years until Richard Riordan's triumph in 1993; New York City had Democratic mayors for 22 years until Rudolph Giuliani's victory (or even longer if you argue that party-switching John Lindsay wasn't really a Republican).

Gurwitt profiles Indianapolis Mayor Stephen Goldsmith to highlight the changes these mayors are making. Indianapolis has a long tradition of Republican rule, but Goldsmith's immediate predecessors were big-government men. Richard Lugar (now a senator) annexed the surrounding suburbs, and William Hudnut built scores of facilities, most notably the Hoosierdome, the home of the NFL's Indianapolis Colts. (See "Competitive Instinct, August/September 1993.)

Goldsmith, by contrast, appears to be committed to shrinking the state. Sometimes he has privatized, as in selling the city's golf courses. Other times he has contracted out services, such as trash collection and some road maintenance. But most promising is his call for devolving power to neighborhood associations and local community development organizations, a process Goldsmith calls "municipal federalism." He foresees those local associations ultimately being able to control their own parks and repair their own streets. "Such devolution is an example of the innovative thinking necessary if our cities are to be saved. The federal government can also encourage this process by deregulation, most notably of "unfunded mandates"--regulations Washington creates and then asks cities and states to pay for. As William Tucker reports in the August 1 National Review, the Environmental Protection Agency is the most enthusiastic supporter of those mandates, forcing cities to pay $3.6 billion just to comply with the Clean Water Act. According to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, unfunded mandates will cost cities $54 billion between 1994 and 1998--money that will have to be collected from the taxpayers or diverted from more useful purposes.

The federal government also plays its part in ensuring urban degradation. Ideally, the best way to reduce crime in central cities is to encourage job-creating enterprises, but the failure of Jack Kemp's efforts during the Bush administration shows that Washington isn't any good at pushing people to become enterprising and entrepreneurial. However, the federal government can fight crime in the ghetto by reducing or eliminating barriers to entrepreneurship such as mandatory benefit packages, punitive Social Security taxes, and the Davis-Bacon Act. Repealing mandatory minimum sentencing programs for non-violent offenders and decriminalizing drugs also would free up space in jails for the hardened criminals--violent muggers, armed robbers, murderers, and rapists--who deserve to spend a long time in prison.

Mayors cannot blame all their problems on Washington, however. The failure of the urban renewal programs of the 1960s is a sober reminder that neighborhoods can be destroyed but not created. Pharaonic politicians can spend billions on stadiums, "festival marketplaces," and amusements, but inevitably those ventures will turn into white elephants when sports teams lose or the people's appetite for tschotskes is glutted. The quirky, eccentric, and charming aspects of urban life are best preserved by allowing them to grow organically, through lower taxes and less regulation, not by egotistical politicians eager to turn their city into a casino or a mall.

Crime Time

info@reason.com ( Martin Morse Wooster) — Sat, 01 Oct 1994 00:00:00 EDT

Crime has become the most hotly contested social policy issue of the 1990s, but the debate is decidedly overheated. Statistics issued by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department suggest that if you live in an area that isn't infested by drug dealers (and, of course, if you don't happen to be a drug dealer), your odds of being a victim of violent crime are about the same as they were 10 years ago.

How has crime fighting become such a prominent issue without a growing group of victims of crime? The most important reason is a gradual change in the attitudes of the Democratic Party. Until 1985, it was easy to tell the difference between Democrats and Republicans on crime issues. Democrats were the namby-pamby, goo-goo eggheads who thought hardened criminals could become good citizens with plenty of Prozac, hugs, and herb tea. The Republicans were the tough-as-nails types who delighted in tossing people in jail and throwing away the key, even if the jails didn't have keys.

But in the early '90s many Democrats became what Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne called "Kojak liberals," trying to show that they were as tough on crime as their Republican rivals. As a result, far too many campaigns hinge on how eager the candidates are to send people to jail.

As president, Bill Clinton continues the effort he began as governor of Arkansas to be a no- nonsense crime fighter. This concern is due in part to his other failures. Ruth Shalit reports in the July 18 New Republic that high-ranking Clinton staffers were convinced that, if other administration proposals failed, the crime bill could be, in the words of a senior Justice Department aide, "the major domestic accomplishment of Clinton's first term....If health care doesn't work, if welfare reform doesn't work, this [crime bill] is going to be the thing."

While one branch of the government says it's fighting crime, other government agencies are turning previously law-abiding citizens into "criminals" by creating more punitive regulations. As James V. DeLong observes in the March American Enterprise, many activities that were not illegal 10 years ago now are. Landlords can have their buildings seized if tenants are found using drugs. People who don't properly fill out forms required under the Clean Air Act can go to jail. Employees of corporations can be considered criminals if they can't tell the courts what a petty cash fund was used for, or why a particular investment doesn't appear on company books.

DeLong observes that what he calls "the New Criminalization" has both economic and spiritual consequences. Corporations have to spend countless hours gathering permits and obeying bureaucrats, and even then they may unwittingly commit crimes; two-thirds of corporate lawyers surveyed by the National Law Journal in 1993 said their companies, due to the uncertainty and complexity of the law, had violated an environmental statute. (See "Crimes Against Nature," December 1993.) The result is an erosion of our sense of what is right and what is wrong. "Under the New Criminalization," DeLong observes, "with its technical complexity and often arbitrary provisions, no one can rely on an internal moral compass or on common sense as protection. The `reasonable person' standard is obviated."

Even as people are sent to jail for minor crimes, high-profile defendants appear to be set free due to technicalities in the law or to variants of the insanity defense. The average American, flooded with reports about the Menendez brothers, the Bobbitts, the trials resulting from the Los Angeles riots, as well as the guests on salacious talk shows, might well conclude that anyone can finagle his or her way to freedom with a sad story and slick attorneys.

That analysis is only partially true, reports Stephanie B. Goldberg in the June ABA Journal. Not many defendants use variations of the insanity defense, and three states have abolished insanity defenses entirely. Some "victimization" defenses, most notably battered woman's syndrome, are grudgingly accepted by the courts. But the requirement that battered women prove that they were in imminent danger of harm before they maimed or killed their husbands limits this defense. State University of New York at Buffalo law professor Charles P. Ewing says jurors are often skeptical about this defense because "99.9 percent of battered women don't kill their abusers."

More esoteric defenses are less successful. "Battered children's syndrome" may have helped free the Menendez brothers, but according to attorney Paul Mones, author of When a Child Kills, when children kill their parents, 95 percent of the time the youths are convicted and go to jail. The courts rarely allow defenses based on premenstrual syndrome, alcoholism, compulsive gambling, "black rage," or "urban stress syndrome" (which Milwaukee defense attorney Robin Shellow claimed had compelled her teenage client to kill another teenager for her leather coat).

Post-traumatic stress syndrome is recognized by some courts, though, and isn't just a defense for troubled Vietnam vets anymore. But in a 1993 study by the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, only 28 out of 8,163 defendants surveyed who had tried to claim insanity said they were suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome, and those defendants were no more successful in getting off by convincing the courts that they were insane than other defendants who used more common defenses.

What may be true is that juries are less reliable and impartial than they used to be. In the July Washington Monthly, Daniel Franklin, in a review of Stephen J. Adler's The Jury, cites some alarming trends about the decline of juries. Well-educated people can usually exempt themselves from jury service nowadays. In New York, for example, lawyers, clergy, doctors, sole business proprietors, podiatrists, Christian Scientists, and embalmers can all exempt themselves. And many defense attorneys, through "peremptory strikes," can exclude people who may have read news articles about a particular case, in favor of people who know nothing about the defendants.

As juries are increasingly dominated by the less educated and trials become more complex, jurors become more confused. Adler's book cites a 1989 case in which tobacco manufacturer Liggett and Myers sued its rival, Brown and Williamson, for violating the Robinson-Patman Act, which prohibits companies from implementing "predatory" pricing schemes designed to drive competitors out of business. After seven months of testimony, one juror asked what, exactly, the Robinson-Patman Act was.

So the law these days is messy and confused, with courts clogged with arcane trials, "criminals" who victimized no one, and politicians demanding that sentences be lengthened and judges be "tougher." Given this morass, it may well be that the best thing the Clinton administration can do to fight crime is to rein in its regulators (particularly at the Environmental Protection Agency). Congressional Republicans who are properly skeptical of the federal government's efforts in social policy ought to extend their caution to crime- fighting activities. The failures of the government to improve American education or to reduce welfare dependency are well-documented. If the federal government can't improve our schools or cut the welfare rolls, how can we expect the feds to cut crime rates?

It may well be that the best way to fight crime is not to throw money at police departments, but to use existing funds more efficiently. In the Summer Policy Review Bret Schundler, the Republican mayor of Jersey City, complains that union regulations prohibit him from assigning more cops to street duty or reducing wages so that more police can be hired. While his city's per-capita income is $10,000, Schundler writes, the average Jersey City police officer, with salary, overtime, and benefits, earns $90,000 a year.

Rather than getting more money from the federal government, Schundler says, he could do a better job improving police assistance if he had more freedom to push officers out from behind their desks and into squad cars and hire new officers at more reasonable wages. "Bill Clinton's crime bill," he says, "in the finest Democratic party tradition, does little more than throw additional money at the crime problem while shifting the cost of policing from the local to the national taxpayer."

In the March Governing, Penelope Lemov reports on another useful reform that was recently adopted by the North Carolina legislature. In North Carolina, like many states, the cost of running and building prisons has soared, while irresponsible politicians ranted about imposing ever-stiffer sentences. So a bill was passed that requires any North Carolina legislator who introduces a bill lengthening a sentence for a particular crime to report how much the longer sentence will cost the state. "The idea of being able to stand up and be tough on crime without worrying about how to pay for it has got to stop," North Carolina Superior Court Judge Thomas W. Ross told Lemov.

Journalists can also do a better job informing the readers about what police actually do. Teachers are very articulate about the problems they face in their classrooms, and some social workers and sociologists have done a good job in describing the mind- numbing life of the welfare caseworker. But police officers do not do a good job in telling the public what they do, and the result is that far too many citizens, engorged by "reality" shows on the networks, believe that police spend their days kicking down doors and blasting away at Uzi-toting drug lords.

But, as George Kelling and Catherine Coles observe in the Summer Public Interest, many of the useful things police do to improve communities--asking tenants to turn down noisy stereos, suggesting that loiterers move on, detaining aggressive panhandlers--do more to help citizens feel safe and secure than SWAT teams or other flashy efforts. But such low- key, low-cost activities are hardly likely to win support from career politicians.

Long-term, local, incremental efforts will most likely do more to fight crime than any national effort. The proper response to any Washington-based solon's speech about crime is to take the cynicism one normally has for politicians--and double it.

Unsentimental Compassion

info@reason.com ( Martin Morse Wooster) — Mon, 01 Aug 1994 00:00:00 EDT

Unsentimental Compassion

By Martin Morse Wooster

The Homeless, By Christopher Jencks, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 122 pages, $17.95

Northwestern University sociologist Christopher Jencks has always been an interesting, iconoclastic liberal. In the 1960s, he was the left's leading advocate for school choice, championing ideas very similar to those promoted 20 years later by John Chubb and Terry Moe. Over the past two decades, Jencks has shifted his interests from education to welfare, but his intellectual independence and his incisive, powerful style remain unchanged.

Now Jencks directs his attention to homelessness, drawing on resources unavailable to most writers. A Rockefeller Foundation grant enabled a research assistant to spend "hundreds of hours at his computer terminal analyzing Census surveys." And the Russell Sage Foundation not only gave Jencks a one-year fellowship but even sponsored a conference at which various experts gave Jencks advice about his manuscript.

These grants, and his independent mind, ensure that Jencks has a fresh take on homelessness. While liberals will be comforted by Jencks's conclusion--that the government should spend a great deal of money on the homeless--they are less likely to be soothed by the substance of The Homeless. In closely scrutinizing the available data, Jencks neatly demolishes nearly every argument made by homeless advocates.

Here are some of the claims refuted by Jencks:

* America is suffering from an epidemic of homelessness, with nearly 3 million homeless people on the streets. Jencks documents that homeless advocate Mitch Snyder made up his numbers and cites a Nightline interview in which Snyder told Ted Koppel that his estimates of millions of homeless people "have no meaning, no value."

Using Census Bureau data and studies by the Urban Institute and the Columbia University School of Social Work, Jencks estimates that America had about 125,000 homeless people in 1980 and between 300,000 and 400,000 homeless people in 1987. Since 1987, Jencks says, the number of homeless people has either stayed constant or declined slightly. "Estimates above 500,000," Jencks says, "are considerably harder to reconcile with the available evidence unless one believes that the `invisible' homeless are very numerous indeed."

* The homeless are people just like you and me who happen to have a streak of bad luck. No, they're not, Jencks argues. Homeless people are more likely to be male, single, alcoholic, drug-addicted, and black, and more likely to have limited job skills, than the population as a whole. Homeless people are also more likely to have come from troubled families and to have spent some time in their childhood with foster parents. "If bad luck were the main cause of homelessness," Jencks writes, "most people would be homeless occasionally, but few would be homeless for long. In reality, most people are never homeless, a sizeable number are homeless briefly, and a few are homeless for long periods."

"The homeless are indeed just like you and me in most respects," adds Jencks. "But so are saints and serial killers." Ignoring the differences between homeless

people and Americans who have homes, he suggests, "is to substitute sentimentality for compassion."

* Reagan administration budget cutters caused the rise in homelessness in the early 1980s by slashing low-income housing programs. Jencks freely admits that housing subsidies rose, not fell, during the Reagan administration; all the Reaganites did was to slow the rate of increase in spending for these programs. "The slow but steady growth of low-income housing subsidies under Presidents Reagan and Bush was one of the few liberal success stories in a generally conservative era," Jencks writes. "Federal outlays for low-income housing rose faster than outlays for either social security or defense."

It is only in the last chapter of The Homeless that Jencks, having shown the fallaciousness of most of the arguments put forth by homeless advocates, joins his liberal colleagues in calling for more tax dollars to end homelessness. He suggests that perhaps as much as $18 billion each year might be necessary to ensure that the homeless have shelters and jobs.

Consider the most common types of homeless people: single mothers and their children, and childless adult males. Workfare is not an effective solution for single mothers, Jencks argues, because unless a job pays at least $7.00 an hour, a single parent won't be able to afford day care, transportation, or work clothes. So he feels the government has to subsidize rents, day-care fees, food purchases, and health insurance for these mothers until they are able to establish themselves in the work force.

As for underclass men, Jencks says their chief problem is the inability to find steady work, so he proposes that the government create large numbers of cubicle hotels, establishments consisting of many small, windowless rooms. To fill these hotels, the government would also sponsor day-labor markets in which private employers could hire homeless people for a day. If there weren't enough private-sector jobs available, then the government would offer jobs, paying with vouchers redeemable for a cubicle and three cheap meals a day in return for doing about four hours of work. More work could earn more vouchers that could be used for better food or cashed in for an apartment. Ultimately, homeless men could build good work records that would prepare them for private-sector employment.

These ideas are interesting but fundamentally flawed. Jencks, for instance, never discusses the chief obstacle to federal jobs programs: public-sector unions. These unions, unlike their private-sector counterparts, are still powerful, and they will do everything they can to guarantee that any government jobs for the homeless are marginal, trivial, and demeaning. While Jencks's solution might be better than existing welfare programs, it is neither practical nor attainable.

Jencks argues that job programs are necessary because, while few Americans feel that the government should give everyone who asks food and housing, "most of us do feel an obligation to help people who cannot help themselves or are trying to do so and simply need an opportunity." While this is certainly true, the natural compassion of most Americans is deadened every time a healthy stranger thrusts a cup in their face and demands money or a politician calls for boosting taxes to help the homeless. As Marvin Olasky has shown, church-based groups do a much better job than government agencies in helping the homeless become responsible and productive. But Jencks conspicuously ignores the role religious groups and other private associations play in fighting poverty and homelessness.

While Jencks's conclusions do not stray far from liberal orthodoxy, his analysis of the nature and persistence of homelessness is fresh and interesting. Jencks does a great service in showing that many debating points used by homeless advocates to advance their agenda are either untrue or misleading. The Homeless won't end the debate about homelessness, but it could very well reshape it.

Information Please

info@reason.com ( Martin Morse Wooster) — Tue, 01 Mar 1994 00:00:00 EST

To consider the enormous changes that have affected communication in the last decade, think back to 1980. Only a few wealthy Americans owned VCRs. Only big businesses used faxes. Only a few homes received cable television; the rest of us were limited to the three networks, public television, and whatever old movies were on the independent station. Computers were large, punch card-fed, and frightening.

What futurologist could have predicted today's world, with affordable faxes, personal computers with power unimaginable to a James Bond villain, and cheap videocassettes sold over the counter at McDonald's? And the information world of 2008 is as unforeseeable to us as today's information highway was in 1980. Will we watch television on our computers or run software on our TV sets? Will we still buy books--or go to a movie theater or a library?

Conventional wisdom holds that the large number of choices will result in our brains' bursting with "information overload." Every time I hear this phrase, I imagine it to be the mental equivalent of sticking your finger in an electrical socket. We'll be so burdened with knowledge that our brains will bulge and our hair will look like the bride of Frankenstein's.

Philip Elmer-DeWitt expresses these standard fears in the October 25 Time. In a bad piece of science fiction, Elmer-DeWitt predicts a future in which everyone will spend evenings slouching in front of "teleputers," agonizing over which one of the 500 channels to choose from. Will Americans in the 21st century spend their evenings watching interactive soap operas? How about "laser-print coupon clubs"? Or electronic classifieds? Or video dating services?

"The only people who weren't plugged in were those pointy headed people who never owned a TV set in the first place," Elmer-DeWitt writes. "I saw one of them the other day, walking outside, making a fuss over the flowers. Hey, I'm no lowbrow. I used to go to the movies!"

Whatever the future holds, two things are clear: There will never be exactly 500 channels to choose from, and no one will ever need to read Time. (Since no one needs to read Time now, of course, the second prediction is not particularly daring.) Moreover, the possibility of hundreds of different things to do on your television set does not mean that people will become TV zombies. No one reads all the magazines on a newsstand or tries to watch every show on cable TV. Given more choices, people will probably watch the shows they like and skip the ones they don't. People won't spend more time in front of their televisions in the future-- they'll just be more selective.

The magazine Wired provides a more plausible view of the future of information. This bimonthly is a general-interest magazine about the future of information that combines meditations on the future with reports about current techno-logical advances. Once I got past the exceedingly loud graphics (the page numbers are fluorescent and illegible), I found it quite informative. The September issue, for example, reports that Singapore is trying to become the world's first "infor-mation island" and gives a list of new words that future technophiles ought to know. (To "cut steel," reports Gareth Branwyn, is to build a mold for a new product. A "knowbot" will be a software program that will act as a reference li-brarian helping users find the information they need.)

The most interesting thing about Wired is that it hires science-fiction writers to provide reports: The editors sent William Gibson to Singapore and Rudy Rucker to the set of Jurassic Park. Michael Crichton also spends several of Wired's pages discussing the future of information. But the best article is by Bruce Sterling, discussing what the "information superhighway" of the future might be like.

Sterling describes "Bob Smith," testifying before a congressional committee in 2015, a year in which, Sterling says, "living without the Net would be like living without electricity." The Net, Sterling says half-jokingly, will foster individual liberty. He predicts that "one of the most feared political organizations in the world is the multi-national anarchist libertarian group called the Students for an Utterly Free Society."

In Sterling's scenario, encryption will be commonplace, enabling programmers to thwart police and government agents. He portrays an FBI raid on an information node in South Dakota used by Iranians. After decryption, the Feds find that 80 percent of the files are pornography, 15 percent pirated videos and films, and 5 percent "text files in the Farsi language describing how to build, deliver, and park truck bombs in major urban areas."

Other "information entrepreneurs" won't even need homes, says Sterling. He describes how police in "North Zulch, Texas" arrest a scruffy biker and destroy a cigarette-pack-sized device which turns out to be the node for a bulletin board with 15,000 users, some of whom are wealthy moguls. The enraged users go to North Zulch, buy the town, pulverize it, and donate the land to the Nature Conservancy.

Another feature in the September Wired is an interview with George Gilder, who is working on a book on the future of the "telecosm." Gilder's views, however, are better expressed in an article in a recent issue of Regulation, dated only 1993.

Gilder predicts that, by 1995, there will be chips with 100 million transistors; by 2000, chips with 1 billion transistors will be easily available. Tens of millions of cellular phones and personal communication devices will make the nation's existing telephone web a costly anachronism. Fiber-optic cables will be superseded by "all-optical networks" of silicon fibers that "will make communications power virtually free."

These changes, says Gilder, will make the U.S. Postal Service a technological anachronism. It already costs only 13 cents to send a one-page fax coast to coast, compared to 29 cents for a letter; falling fax prices will check the Postal Service's ability to raise prices. Ultimately, Gilder argues, the Federal Communications Commission and state telephone regulators will lose their justification, since their raison d'être is that the electronic spectrum is scarce and therefore needs the firm hand of government to ration the finite airwaves and oversee such "natural monopolies" as the local cable-television franchise and the local telephone company.

The increasingly specious argument for such "natural monopolies," Gilder contends, will become even more dubious when silicon cables enable photon-based messages to travel around the world at virtually no cost. But government can block this bright future by denying telephone- company competitors access to "dark fiber"--the one-third of the nation's existing fiber-optic network currently unused by the phone companies. Phone companies make 10 times as much money transmitting data as they do transmitting voices, and they don't want to lease the dark fiber to competitors without loading it with expensive--and, in Gilder's view, unnecessary--electronic enhancements.

Gilder cheers a recent FCC ruling that allows such competitors to the telephone companies as Electronic Data Systems, Shell, and McDonnell Douglas to buy as much "dark fiber" as they want. He feels this will stimulate a continuing fall in communications charges, which will encourage entrepreneurial drive and initiative.

"In a regime of boundless bandwidths and computational abundance, the key scarce resource will be the human mind," Gilder concludes. "Contributing the bulk of the value added and gaining most of the profits, human creativity will become ever more valuable and more highly rewarded. Slipping inexorably away into the trackless realms of human minds, economic activity will become ever harder to regulate, tax, or control."

One need not agree with every point Gilder makes (particularly when he slips into techno-mysticism) to conclude that his basic ideas are sound. It's clear that computers have freed people rather than enslaved them, and that forthcoming changes in the information world will encourage decentralization rather than strengthen hierarchy. "Infopreneurs" may not be scruffy bikers, but they'll be as free to live in Louisville or Bozeman as in Silicon Valley or Manhattan. Indeed, one consequence of the information superhighway may well be an increased pride in regional identity; if there's no need to move to a big city to do your work, you won't have to live like a rootless urban sophisticate.

But one can never underestimate the power of government to ruin the future, so one must be wary of the Clinton administration's proposals for the information superhighway. It's hard to tell what these plans are, since they vary day by day. But there are certainly some questions about the information net that the Clintonites ought to address.

How, for example, will copyright laws be enforced in the electronic age? As Evan Schwartz notes in the November 22 Publisher's Weekly, some publishing firms are already putting works on the net, using "electronic bookstores" that can collect fees from users. At least one company, Wide Area Information Services, sells software that allows large users (Sun Microsystems, the Environmental Protection Agency) to post and retrieve large documents from the net and conduct keyword searches to find desired information. But without a reliable method of enforcing copyrights and ensuring that artists and authors get their royalties, there will be very little incentive for anyone to be creative.

And as Eliza Newlin Carney reports in the November 20 National Journal, nonprofits and liberal lobbyists (including such unlikely groups as the National Coalition on Black Voter Participation) have formed the Telecommunications Policy Roundtable, which Carney says wants to make sure that schools and the poor can get the information they need--or, as lobbyist John M. Lawson put it, to make sure that no one will "end up as `road kill' on the information superhighway."

These fears are misguided. The history of computing is a continuing saga of better goods being offered at lower prices. If trends continue, information may not be free, but it will certainly be cheaper than telephone service or cable television. If the government allows market forces to do their job, the information net will end up making Americans freer, happier, and more self-reliant than they were before computers became commonplace.

Magazines: Whistle While You Work

info@reason.com ( Martin Morse Wooster) — Tue, 01 Feb 1994 00:00:00 EST

Until recently, most management experts were in rough agreement about what the role of the worker in the American corporation was to be. In the 1940s, Peter Drucker taught in The Concept of the Corporation that the large American business, by offering generous benefits in exchange for a lifetime of work, would act as a private welfare state and ensure that America would never suffer from central planning or social democracy. In the '50s, John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society assured Americans that big business would use advertising to steadily seduce the masses into buying its products, thus ensuring rising profits, increased market share, and happiness for its workers.

This conventional wisdom has now been turned on its head. The optimism of the '50s has now been replaced by fashionable gloom. The workplace used to be thought of as the road to happiness; it's now seen by far too many pundits as the gateway to hell. Our parents spent 40 years toiling for a large business in return for a nice house in the suburbs and a generous pension; the baby boomers and busters will be lucky if their boss smiles before tossing them out on the street. Even if you manage to survive in your job, you'll have to do battle with your colleagues, some of whom may follow the management philosophies of the Marines, Joseph Stalin, or Attila the Hun. And in every large enterprise, there's always the mysterious man with a big black hood and an industrial vacuum cleaner, who sucks up your job and spits it out in Mexico or the Far East.

Some observers have even doubted that Americans know what it means to be middle class anymore. Our old notions of middle-class jobs, observes New School for Social Research sociologist Alan Wolfe in the Summer Wilson Quarterly, are "increasingly obsolete: yeoman farmer, small-town merchant, independent entrepreneur, male breadwinner, stay-at-home mom, hard-working school teacher, self-employed lawyer, family physician." Is Zoë Baird, with her $500,000 salary, in the middle class? How about an executive who's living on his wife's income while starting a new business? How about a Korean grocer? Or "an assistant professor of anything"?

Even the wealthy, notes Houghton Mifflin editor Richard Todd in the September Worth, are racked with insecurity and doubt. The confident, heroic entrepreneurs of the 19th century built grand homes that, when converted to museums, still delight Americans nearly a century after they were constructed. After they built their fortunes, they retired to lives of pleasure, leisure, and philanthropy. But now the rich aren't the leisure class; they're the frenzied class. Microsoft's Bill Gates, the modern equivalent of a Carnegie, Ford, or Rockefeller, has built a house mostly made up of tunnels, where he can hide from the world and spend his spare hours gazing at his "collection" of 100,000 paintings. Gates doesn't even own these paintings; he just bought the electronic rights so he can broadcast them on huge high-definition television screens. (And, presumably, incorporate them into multi-media software packages.)

"Stress, not bountiful ease, seems to be the lifestyle lesson that the upper-class models for the rest of the society," Todd writes. "Busy-ness is becoming our liturgy, if not our national religion." This is particularly true in Hollywood; Todd reports that the most fashionable accessory for the wealthy actor is a political consultant, who recites the latest gossip while a personal trainer makes her sweat.

All this activity, Yale emeritus professor Robert E. Lane notes in the Fall Public Interest, is unlikely to result in happiness. Most "quality of life" surveys, says Lane, report that people usually say they are happiest with (in order of preference) a strong family, close friends, and an enjoyable job. But there's no correlation between income levels and pleasure in the workplace: Lane recalls talking to a wallpaper hanger "who found his skill in handling corners a source of great delight."

Moreover, says Lane, relying on money as the measure of happiness might cause you to step onto what psychologists call the "hedonic treadmill," where you feel you would be happier if your income increased by 25 percent. Apartment renters would like to be able to get a house, homeowners want a larger house and a second car, and, if you're as wealthy as lawyer Arnold Becker on L.A. Law, you want a top-of-the-line Bentley. (If you're as smart as Becker, you'll have a happy client give you a Bentley.) Once you're on the hedonic treadmill, says Lane, it's very hard to get off, since it never ensures happiness; whatever you earn, you'll always want 25 percent more money. Lane suggests that a better way to live is to realize that "families and friends and a fulfilling job are the true path to happiness."

If you do insist on trying to beat the treadmill, don't think that having paid attention in school will help your effort. As the San Francisco Chronicle's Jona-than Marshall notes in the September Mother Jones, the connection between academic excellence and good wages is very weak. Economists at Harvard and MIT, Marshall reports, recently studied male 1980 high-school graduates who scored at the 84th percentile on a standard test of math skills. Six years after they graduated, these superior students earned only 60 cents more per hour than average students and earned less than 1972 graduates at the 50th percentile with compatible experience. "The notion that only fixing up skills will solve our problems is wrong," Harvard education professor Richard Murnane tells Marshall. "It won't solve the productivity problem or the low-wage problem."

What will improve American productivity, Marshall suggests, is for corporations to abandon traditional command-and-control management practices and devolve power as much as possible. The NUMMI joint venture between Toyota and General Motors, Marshall contends, is a highly productive enterprise not because of mysterious Asian practices but because the company allows workers to make decisions formerly handed down by management. When "forward-looking employers in high-tech fields" need workers to learn technical skills, Marshall argues, they should offer high wages and a less restrictive corporate culture--incentives that will do more to persuade workers to acquire new skills than any government program or subsidy.

But a flattened hierarchy means that the traditional goal of climbing the corporate ladder will no longer be desirable for many Americans. In the September 6 Fortune, Jaclyn Fierman notes that "in today's less vertical corporate world," many workers won't move closer to the executive suite with every promotion; they may move sideways, head for an exit, or even move down to a job "that may carry more weight but promises more growth."

Fierman provides several short profiles of workers who fled frustrating jobs for happier ones. In most cases, workers trusted their instincts in finding a new trade. Roger Proscio, for example, had wanted to be a writer since he was 12 but instead ended up working for a consortium of Miami banks that applied for government grants for low-income housing. Though he made $81,000 a year, had a big condo and season tickets to the opera, Proscio gulped antacids at the office and felt miserable. But after telling his troubles to one of his boss's advisers, who happened to be the CEO of Knight-Ridder, Proscio eventually became an editorial writer for the Miami Herald, where he makes half his old salary but is quite happy.

An anonymous petroleum geologist told Fierman that she had to fire half of the people she supervised and, given low oil prices, would probably get fired herself. But she told Fierman that she was resigned to changing her job. "I decided if I get laid off, so be it. If my husband and I have to sell our house, it won't be the end of the world. There is something very freeing about letting go of these fears."

This woman's attitude is the right way to face an insecure corporate workplace. Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and Robert Reich are doing what they can to persuade the voter that, somehow, Washington will give them better jobs and nicer bosses. But job-training programs have been a bipartisan boondoggle for decades. Given the history of the CETA and JTPA programs in the Carter and Reagan administrations, it is likely that a new job-training program will end up rewarding well-connected businessmen and major contributors to the Democratic Party and do very little to help the average worker.

America's workers will be happier and more productive if they relearn the virtues their parents and grandparents knew. The person who does what he loves at a low wage is far more admirable than the person who trades days full of hate for a high income. Self-reliance is better than dependence; saving increases independence, while debt ultimately enslaves you; and the best pleasures in life don't depend on money. But the most important lesson of all is that you are more responsible for your fate than the government is. Solving your own problems in the workplace is a far better way to live than depending on a bureaucrat to save you from ruin and despair.