The Zero-Sum Solution

...17.95 The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Quotations flew Edition A collection of 5,800 well-known quotations by 1,100 authors, ranging in time from the eighth century B.C...

...As for national defense, Thurow would cut outlays even if the federal budget were in surplus...

...LibertyClassics is publishing softcover versions of these volumes printed so as to provide exact copies of the hardcover editions...

...in Western Europe...

...Whelan points out that the fundamentally counterproductive character of the environmental movement was nowhere more evident than in its pilot project—the banning of DDT...

...The national disaster that Thurow hoped to heal was not cyclical but longer term, one of progressive stagnation as suggested by his title...

...A more unfavorable (for the United States) period for judging comparative international performance could barely be found since the Civil War...

...tax on gasoline and diesel fuel...

...SIMPSON The only dictionary to record the use of the proverb in the modem English-speaking world...

...In the details, however, Thurow incorporates some additions mostly borrowed from planners, past or present...

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...With a faint Marxist touch, Thurow attributed the malaise to evolving and inherent Melville J. Ulmer is professor of economics at the University of Maryland and author of The Welfare State: USA, Economics: Theory and Practice, and numerous other books and articles...

...A major strength of Toxic Terror is that Whelan presents the scientific evidence fairly, pointing out the health hazards of chemicals where they exist and counseling caution when the evidence is conflicting or not yet fully evaluated...

...It plunges much deeper in despair than any ordinary recession could possibly enmesh us, evoking the aftermath of a major catastrophe...

...Sure, Paul Samuelson, John Kenneth Galbraith, and James Tobin are still very much around, but they are a generation older, and well acclimated to popular adulation in the pantheon of progressive heroes way back to FDR...

...Musical America 736 pp...

...deficits or deficiencies in elementary education or a significant portion of our population deteriorating on welfare—stem not from the private market system that The Zero-Sum Solution derogates,- but from the wayward public policies it proposes to expand...

...Whelan narrates the Wodehouse-worthy saga of how California Governor Jerry Brown refused to give the go-ahead for spraying malathion (one of the safest pesticides in use) to eradicate the medfly until the U.S...

...Thurow is youthful, brimming with intellectual libido and vaulting ambition, tasting with a jackaroo's relish the reception of top print media—Newsweek, the New York Times, the Atlantic.—and TV talk shows...

...Now you can build your own reference library, starting with a favorite subject or with a standard dictionary, so the next time you have to "look it up," you need only go to your own bookshelf...

...Previously published are The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Lectures on Jurisprudence, Essays on Philosophical Subjects, and, in two volumes, The Wealth of Nations...

...Indeed the seminal trends were long in evidence, though they contradict all that Thurow describes...

...Even way back in the Carter years, Thurow's favorite period, our leads were nearly as large...

...This manuscript was first discovered by John M. Lothian of the University of Aberdeen in 1958...

...Also of particular interest is a segment on the outlawing of EDB, not on the basis of scientific data, but as a result of political pressures flowing "from a spectacular media hype...

...Bureau of Labor Statistics, industrial production in America rose by 25 percent compared with 21 percent for Japan, 15 percent for Germany, 7 percent for the U.K., 3 percent for France, and 2 percent for Italy...

...The central goal of The ZeroSum Solution is to mobilize a mighty effort to repair something that was never broken, to wit: the secure position of America at the very top of the economic world...

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...What difference a few years, plus some data corrections, make in the evaluation of America's economic accomplishments will be shown later...

...The aim is to strengthen the industries that are now sunrise industries, to restructure old industries so that the parts which remain can exist as world-class competitive entities, to manage decline where decline must occur, and to finance civilian research-anddevelopment projects with long- to medium-term payoffs...

...The magnitude of taxable profits and dividends would be diminished by a national profit-sharing plan...

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...The book includes chapters on such environmentalist bete noires as Love Canal, DDT, PCBs, PBBs, "deadly" Rael Jean Isaac's most recent book (with Erich Isaac) is The Coercive Utopians (Regnery Gateway...

...In 1984, the latest full year for which such data are reckoned, our output per employee—or productivity—also led the world, 15 percent greater than Germany's, almost 40 percent greater than Japan's...

...This, he writes, would help us "compete in the high-tech world economy of today and tomorrow...

...ly, as a disciple of the "nuclear-winter hypothesis" of the Concerned Scientists for Disarmament, he holds that "the number of warheads that are necessary to destroy one's opponent (and oneself) may be very small in-deed...

...A subsidiary function would "ensure that new information can be spread rapidly across the entire economy," apparently ruling out private patents...

...It was hard at the time to imagine a more unlikely target than the man-made chemical that, with the possible exception of antibiotics, had prevented more human death and disease than any substance in history...

...Scholarly, meticulous, and authoritative...

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...Moreover, Thurow extrapolates from these years, forward and backward, drawing a trend line through the lot pointing ever down-ward...

...Notice well that his chosen period includes all four of the stagnant years of the Carter economic debacle plus just enough of the first Reagan Administration to end with the 1982 recession...

...The fantastic portrait of national doom with which Thurow starts his book (and extends through the first five chapters) is so obviously contrived that even school children would remain unconvinced, thinking only that they were being treated to a modernized Grimm's fairy tale...

...Whelan begins with "The Charges," presenting a series of quotations from books whose titles carry much of their message, e.g., America the Poisoned, Who's Poisoning America, Malignant Neglect, The Poison Conspiracy, The Politics of Cancer, Laying Waste, and from newspapers and magazines ranging from the New York Times to the Progressive, which echo their themes...

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...Contrary to his own fantasies, we already a e the "world-class" economy that Thurow so heroically offers us...

...Whelan then briefly sums up "The Facts," and follows these with an analysis of the issues involved, sorting out legitimate environmental concerns from false and hysterical attacks...

...Such considerations point to the conclusion that the United States should sharply reduce its arsenal in any case, and if the Soviet Union were sufficiently wise it would do the same...

...But the problems we do have—like the budgetary and foreign trade r al Which of these languages w 1 would you like to speak...

...He believes that the military power of the Soviet Union is vastly exaggerated because of our own overestimations of their per-ruble and per-man output...

...to the 1970s and in space from Russia to South Africa...

...How can he support such assertions, which violate the sense of any American who reads newspapers and travels abroad with open eyes...

...Regardless of how one may react to Thurow's opinions and various institutional innovations, a fundamental objection to his entire enterprise seems irrefutable...

...Perhaps the most widely publicized and also the most controversial element in the "national industrial policies" previously placed before the public by Robert Reich, Ray Marshall, the AFL-CIO, and others is that reposed by Thurow in his Industrial Restructuring Board...

...But the major theme of Toxic Terror is that the public has been misled into believing that chemicals are destructive of health—above all, are causing a dramatic increase in cancer deaths—when in fact Americans are healthier and live longer than ever before, thanks in large part to those very same chemicals...

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...His hypothesis of a no-growth economy had been drawn from the Carter years, 1977 through 1980, in which productivity did indeed decline, and for the first time in more than a generation...

...As he explains it: Industrial policies exist not to pick the sunrise industries of the year 2000...

...In what might seem like a tilt to the right in politics, Thurow would eliminate the corporation in-come tax but then would include all undistributed profits, in addition to dividends and interest, in the personal income tax base of stockholders...

...He describes his culture-shock when, upon returning to the United States after an absence of forty years, he encountered a movement in full swing whose aim was to take us back to the 1930s, before science and technology had trans-formed food and fiber production...

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...Since sales taxes are regressive, however, he prescribes refunds for the poor and progressively higher tax rates for more expensive items as compared with necessities, which for food and medicine would drop to zero...

...She recounts the major in-stances in which chemicals were used improperly, ranging from the PBBs that devastated Michigan's agricultural community after they were misidentified as animal feed, costing $100 million and more in destroyed animals and animal by-products, to the kepone poisoning that caused serious ailments among workers at a Hopewell, Virginia plant and forced closing of a hundred miles of the James River and its tributaries to commercial fishing for five years...

...No need for the rich to worry, though...

...He undertook the task to save our nation, much as John M. Keynes had saved—or thought he had saved—the United States and Great Britain in the Great Depression...

...Naturally, the publication date was canceled...

...But the environmentalists won, setting the pattern for the decades to follow, with regulatory decisions coming to be made routinely on the basis of pseudo-science in an inflamed political atmosphere...

...Now available is, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, a transcription of the notes of an unknown student who attended Smith's lectures in,1762-63...

...Mix well with a little thought to discover the roles in each case played by foreign trade orientation, the over-valued dollar, the unfair trade practices of our devoted allies, excessively high wage rates, and just plain American inefficiency...

...From here on the Thurow story becomes a travesty...

...From early 1983 through the autumn of 1985, according to the U.S...

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...First, though, we turn to the medicine Thurow prescribes for the illnesses he finds, however imaginary, since his pro-gram rather accurately reflects the ex-pressed will of one important branch of the Democratic party and also ocTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUA...

...And while thinking of themselves as humanitarian, they would impose deadly serious food shortages on a world that no longer numbers 2 billion, as it did in the 1930s, but 4.8 billion...

...208 pp...

...The centerpiece of Thurow's solution is an industrial policy which, like the book itself, rests upon his saturnine assumption that the U.S...

...In banning EDB, therefore, we not only lost an effective pesticide, but embraced others that presented the same hypothetical risk of being animal carcinogens and at the same time were known to pose much greater risks to workers who must apply them...

...In his interpretation, socializing risk means financing firms not simply on the basis of their individual and immediate prospective profits, but on the longer term gains that would accrue to related industries and hence the country at large...

...And he is bright as a summer's sunrise, tall, blond, with flashing eyes...

...In the very month of the book's publication, November, the Dow Jones and all other stock averages stretched again and again to all-time highs...

...even allowing for a generous printing lag, opportunity must have been afforded to have seen much of the data just cited and more that I could have added...

...As Whelan points out, the three available substitutes for EDB had not even been tested for carcinogenicity to animals at the time of the ban...

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...Introduction, appendices, index...

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...is sinking fast, starved of energetic research, innovations, investment, productivity, and above all central direction...

...The format for most chapters is the same...

...He had described that sorry state of affairs in 1980, in his The Zero-Sum Society: Redistribution...

...You pick the ones that are winning and losing now, simply assume that they will continue so, and turn on the ministrations of the public bank, the technology ministry, and the restructuring board...

...Admittedly, that's a leading question...

...Overseeing" would be accomplished in part by mobilizing the might of the technology ministry and the public bank, since both would have funds to distribute or withhold...

...Name (please print) Street City State Zip Language 'Masters The I 1 I I r TOXIC TERROR Elizabeth Whelan/Jameson Books/$18.95 Rael Jean Isaac 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1986...

...In these lectures, Smith demonstrated the connection of language and the ability to communicate thoughts and inclinations to the development of sympathy and fellow-feeling, concepts central to his more famous works...

...640 pp...

...It is the ambition especially that shines forth in his new book, The Zero-Sum Solution: Building a World-Class American Economy...

...We devote more of our GNP to "research and development" than any other country, our chief problem here being to shield our patent rights from the greedy paws of our trading partners...

...In his zeal to create a victimized economy to rescue, he even utilizes data (on unemployment and the distribution of income) that other reputable economists have demonstrated are unreliable and misleading...

...A zero-sum society is one of no-growth, in which the poor can be helped only at the expense of the rich...

...BOOK REVIEWS THE ZERO-SUM SOLUTION: BUILDING A WORLD-CLASS AMERICAN ECONOMY Lester Thurow/Simon and Schuster/$18.95 Melville J. Ulmer Lester Thurow is clearly the most radiant luminary in this decade's swarming firmament of liberal economists...

...The United States, he claims, is now a second-class nation, inefficient, 'disorganized, profligate, and headed downward—hence his heroic pledge in the book's subtitle to build for us all a "world-class" America...

...To order, or for a copy of our catalogue, write: LibertyPress/LibertyClassics 7440 North Shadeland, Dept...

...He would start with an average rate of 20 percent...

...Highly sensitive to the charge that industrial planners credit government officials with an unbelievable gift to "pick winners and losers," Thurow re-joins that critics are guilty of a mischievous misunderstanding...

...This trio in concert would correct the ineptitude of the market system that he believes is presently eroding the American economy...

...The answer is simple and yet professionally inexplicable: He focuses almost exclusively on a carefully selected time span extending from 1977 to 1982, and treats it as though it were all of modern history encapsulated...

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...Have we no economic or social problems then...

...Lester Thurow's book was not published until November 1985 and, In this lucid and lively study, Elizabeth Whelan, the director and founder of the American Council on Science and Health, sets the record straight on a whole series of the most emotion-fraught issues to have been exploited, and in some instances created out of whole cloth, by the environmental and Naderite public interest movements of the last two decades...

...Occasional recessions in a free economy are probably inevitable, but even if one were to arise in the next few months, it could hardly build a case for the secular, progressive stagnation that Thurow had expected...

...An instant classic.--T he flew Republic 592 pp...

...He could not have known it then but he was snared, like an insect drawn to the luring beauty of the deadly Venus's-fly trap...

...In these adjustments he follows European practice closely...

...dollars...

...Thurow would convert all wages and salaries gradually to "bonuses" fixed in pro-portion to business earnings...

...Even more important, he writes, "If a country has enough missiles and warheads to completely destroy another country, it has enough missiles and warheads regardless of how many missiles and warheads the other may have...

...R IO2 Indianapolis, IN 46250 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1986 clearly impossible...

...A second sign appeared, or so Thurow thought, when the economy faltered at the start of 1985...

...Amazingly, the decision to ban DDT was made by then-EPA head William Ruckelshaus following 81 days of hearings by the agency's own hearing ex1 A world class economy...

...Yet as Borlaug notes, the same people who wanted to outlaw most chemicals clamored for the preservation of vast areas for recreation and wilderness, most of which would have to be plowed up if we returned to the chemical-pure world they seek...

...For without changing a word—with barely a statistic brought up to date—he said "Go...

...384 pp...

...to Simon and Schuster and the book came out the following autumn...

...The Public Merchant Bank, as the author concedes, would perform a role once undertaken by the ill-fated Reconstruction and Finance Corporation in the 1930s, which be explains was to "socialize" risk...

...It is the direction especially that Thurow is eager to provide in the form of a Ministry of Technology, an Industrial Restructuring Board, and a Public Merchant Bank...

...Worse timing is difficult to imagine, since the nation's output rose throughout 1985, modestly at first, but slowly gathering force...

...We pay book rate postage on prepaid orders...

...FOWLER A classic reference work on problems of grammar and style...

...Fittingly, the book's introduction is by Norman Borlaug, father of the green revolution, which brought new methods of food production to underdeveloped countries...

...Although I believe he was handier with words, General Hugh S. Johnson had much the same idea when he headed the National Recovery Ad-ministration, inaugurated in 1933 and invalidated by the Supreme Court in 1935...

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...He also envies Europe's method for saving energy, and so sup-ports a one dollar per gallon increase in the present U.S...

...The remaining two institutions would hasten us to the same objective but more directly by mending the market system's errors in the formation and allocation of productive capital...

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...He wrote hectically and his book was soon ready for publication, scheduled for March 1984...

...defects deep in the market economy...

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...Indeed, and along with that we win the bulk of the world's Nobel prizes, send more of our youth on to college, and progress with a nation as free as any on earth...

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...His restructuring board would carefully "oversee" transfer of the nation's capital from the latter to the former...

...Hence he had no confidence that the Reagan Administration would work an improvement, and eagerly awaited the first sign of renewed weakness—too eagerly, it turned out...

...A consultant to both Republican and Democratic administrations, he was formerly an associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and editor of the Survey of Current Business...

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...Department of Agriculture threatened to place his state under quarantine...

...39 cupies the major portion of his book...

...That is LibertyPn?ss LibertyClassics Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres By Adam Smith The Glasgow Edition Edited by J. C. Bryce To celebrate the bicentenary of the publication of Adam Smith's Wealth,of Nations in 1976, the University of Glasgow commissioned a new edition of Smith's extant works and correspondence to be published by Oxford University Press...

...Hence an otherworldly aura pervades The Zero-Sum Solution, as if its author dwelt elsewhere in company of things and events unfamiliar to the rest of us, leaving only as a single recognizable touchstone his own passion for reform...

...Spurred by Reagan's tax cuts, the economy had turned up and continued its advance with record-breaking vigor...

...All orders from outside the United States must be prepaid in U.S...

...FinalTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1986 I 1 1 I ing power indices, national production per capita of the United States was $14,000 in the most recent year available, against $11,500 for Germany, $11,300 for France, $10,700 for Japan, and $9,800 for the United Kingdom...

...The new book was to provide the cure...

...Specifically, he advocates adoption of a national sales tax, in the form of a "value-added" tax or VAT, favored in Western Europe...

...From the tone of the foregoing one would guess the nature of Thurow's "solution" to the huge federal budget deficit, which is to boost taxes for the rich and "economize" without mercy on national defense...

...291 pages...

...Had he taken notice, of course, he would have had to write a different treatise, if any at all...

...Moreover, relative to all other countries, our ascendancy has been growing...

...If Thurow were believed, and if we all in fact survived, eliminating the federal deficit might be less challenging than kindergarten arithmetic...

...Thurow believes that the Japan Development Bank has actually performed this function with success, as in robotics, though some other authorities disagree...

...dioxin, acid rain, urea-formaldehyde foam insulation, nuclear energy, and pesticides, as well as overviews on air and water pollution and the state of public health in the United States...

...UNDERSTAND what you hear language...

...Thurow first thought he detected the sign in 1982, the year in which America's business activity turned steeply downward, almost floored for a time by Paul Volcker's tight money assault on inflation...

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...In a volume bristling with footnotes, he claims to have shown that the U.S...

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...Others had attributed this misfortune to mistaken policies—diminished incentives, skyrocketing inflation, bracket creep with its stifling taxes, excessive government regulation and such...

...Adopting the standard metaphors, Thurow distinguishes sharply between "sunrise" and "sunset" industries, such as bioengineering and steel, respectively...

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...Characteristic is her chapter on pesticides...

...The data, prepared by the Office for Economic Cooperation and Development, are for 1983, but since then our lead has widened...

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...has fallen behind the rest of the world in output growth, employment, income, productivity progress (one-half Germany's, one-third Japan's, he says), price stability, education, and indeed every worthwhile human undertaking except baseball...

...The other part of the task, as Thurow describes it, would involve governmental support for an industry's firms to participate in "a concrete plan to remake the industry into a world-class industry...

...The chief objective of the Ministry of Technology would be to serve as a kind of "national science foundation for private industry," subsidizing profit-oriented research and coveringup to 50 percent of the cost of each individual project...

...They are not "the" solution, but they are part of "the" solution...

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...But meanwhile, zounds...

...a gifted communicator with the unpretentious confidence of a Ronald Reagan, a man whom he of course despises...

...In coordination with other policies industrial policies can play a positive role in achieving this result...

...Put briefly, his program appears in three segments: (l) national economic planning, euphemistically known as "an industrial policy," (2) higher taxes, and (3) a substantial cut in national defense—in general the platform upon which Walter Mondale's political body now mutely lies...