Notes on Decentralization
Goodman, Paul
1. What Is Meant by Decentralization and What Is Not Meant Decentralizing is increasing the number of centers of decision-making and the number of initiators of policy; increasing the awareness...
...Conversely, centralization is organization with top-down decision-making (on the basis of "upward communication"), departmentalization of the function, chain-of-command or bureaucracy, and maximum standardization of performance and procedure...
...Because of specific pedagogic conditions, a principal asks for soundproofing, but no money can be allotted for that, although there is provision for much less urgent needs...
...they eschew status and sometimes live on a subsistence wage...
...Some kinds of news and events do warrant standard national research ing and broadcast...
...Typology of Enterprises in Terms of Engagement A. Enterprises Extrinsically Motivated as Part of the Organized System: 1. Commercial enterprises, run for Profit as well as Status, etc...
...The decentralist kibbutzim might, by some, be considered as fanatical, but hardly provincial...
...On the other hand, KQED in San Francisco runs for $225 an hour...
...but automation, computing, and standardizing methods in general, should be severely restricted in all human services, education, restaurants, social work hospitals, e.g., there should be a standard high-grade TV machine made by the millions and at minimum price—even though this would lose certain excellences of highest quality, styling, workmanship—but the larger part of programming should be decentralized and for specific audiences...
...Over-exposed to one fairly homogeneous kind of interpretation, and under-exposed to any rival interpretation (and in some localities and on the TV medium not so exposed at all), people begin to take the interpretation of the interlocking mass-media for the reality...
...Breakdowns in the centralizing system are handled not by examining the system but by patchwork or imposing new levels of control according to the same administrative style...
...A very old-fashioned type of door-hardware is specified, which is kept in production, for reasons of nepotism, only for the N.Y...
...Yet the civil service type of procedure is necessary to avoid nepotism and political pressure...
...The cars and highways have imposed an entirely new and disruptive community plan...
...This is an application of Borsodi's Law: as the cost of production per unit diminishes because of centralized operation, the cost of processing and distribution increases disproportionately...
...for instance, the rule that a teacher must have no trace of a foreign accent, that made sense during the height of the immigration three generations ago, was a disaster when some districts had 35% Puerto Rican children who could nog speak English, yet one could not recruit bi-lingual teachers...
...This system requires creating a pervasive mass-audience and attitude...
...2. Official or Establishment Non-profit enterprises (E.g., Columbia University, WNDT...
...The neighborhood plan comes to $18,000 a unit...
...skilled and engaged people do more directly for themselves and one another, e.g...
...A mixed system would re-open opportunities for people to choose the way of working and living that most suits them, and would thus re-create the possibility of engagement...
...This law is relevant especially for bulky and perishable commodities like food-stuffs, and where the fixed capital investment can be relatively low in proportion to the product (as in natural farming...
...The requirements of educational community are necessarily sacrificed to administrative convenience and ignorant public pressure...
...school system...
...There is no mystery what swells costs in commercial, official, and Establishment enterprises, where the organization, motivation, and procedure are not designed directly to fulfill the function...
...But the proportions are, of course, very various— so the United States, Russia, Sweden, Nigeria, etc...
...no research is done into possibilities of decentralizing...
...In publishing of books, there is similar concentration of capitalization (huge presses and teams of salesmen and promotion), and this increasingly determines the content and format of books, in order to make it possible to set such big capital in motion...
...I1...
...By contrast, a Summerhill school in Stony Point charges $450 per child, provides, for 50 children, 3 full-time paid instructors and the equivalent of about 5 more voluntary teachers from among parents who are artists or professionals and teach part-time...
...It is profits, patents, and rents...
...There is little effort to achieve a balanced transit pattern, using all means for the general convenience...
...Meantime, the middle-class suburbanites pressured the building of parkways...
...The equal-time provision has been abrogated for national elections—the networks are trying to extend the revocation to State elections...
...and with each abstraction there is the accumulation of mere approximation and of actual misfitting...
...they keep their eye on the essence rather than the convention...
...Only the competition of European small cars made, for a time, a radical change...
...the vast capitalization demands a vast coverage to pay for itself...
...Many functions must be centralized by their nature: Where there are no natural limits, or the function extends over the whole system, or the logistics is more important than the particulars—e.g., epidemic-control, setting of standards, certain kinds of production and distribution, unification and scheduling of transportation...
...For a continuously productive artist, each work is ad hoc...
...This is Marx's "administration" that is supposed to supersede the "withering away of the State," but, in my opinion, he extends the range of these functions too far and would make the whole society lifeless...
...proliferation of administrators, paper work, business machines...
...they put in as many hours as are necessary without watching the clock...
...There is no way to be effective outside the system and no way in the system, so people with inventive ideas and initiative become discouraged and either drop out or resign themselves to token performance...
...A system running for its own sake loses touch with its ostensible function and becomes isolated from the environment...
...Only great news services and networks can perform such services...
...and any novelty or experiment involves dislocations and is "not worth the trouble...
...Finally, activity becomes timeserving and maintaining status, regardless of the function...
...and—to a lesser degree—a style of industry determined by large concentrations of machinery around steam prime-movers, cash-cropping, and enclosures...
...And, internationally, where vast capital is required, like the moon shot...
...public relations and promotion to shore up the Image...
...A counter plan proposed by a neighborhood group would cost $8/2 million, without subsidy for net 475 units, without neighborhood disruption and relocation...
...In established organizations, those who rise to the top also tend to be chosen by systematic rather than functional criteria...
...At present, there is a strong trend to spontaneous decentral political Notes for a seminar in Urban Affairs at the University of Wisconsin (Milwaukee), the nucleus of a book, Decentralizing and the Mixed System, Random House, February 1965...
...General Motors alone employs 600,000 people...
...increasing the awareness by individuals of the whole function in which they are involved...
...Everyone in society, from lowly citizens to topmost leaders, shares the sneaking suspicion that "Nothing Can Be Done...
...The system now serves 1,000,000 children, there are 750 schools rather rigidly controlled by one headquarters...
...repairs...
...gencies because of tight scheduling...
...Much is left out altogether...
...The difference is that the top salary at WNDT is $45,000, the staff about 150, etc., whereas at KQED the top salary is $15,000, the staff about 50, etc...
...Unfortunately, when such systems are very large, they pre-empt the social means and space for carrying on their functions at all...
...But its structure is a disaster...
...The expensive network time makes for minute and second scheduling, and thus a format that prevents freedom of thought or art...
...D. Supermarkets: Logistic Planning That Proves to Be Inefficient The effect of the hyper-organization of food-production, processing, distant transportation, and super-market retailing has been that the farmer's share of the take has persistently diminished (e.g., 44% in 1953, 38% in 1963), whereas the profits of the chains themselves have not risen, and food prices to the consumer have risen slightly...
...Families are dispersed and the lives of children depend on automobility...
...Nevertheless, despite these disruptive changes in the way of life of farm and city, brought on by rationalization of food-production and distribution, there is little increase of actual efficiency...
...The administrators, superintendents and secretaries, principals, assistants, clerks, guidance, attendance-officers, etc., proliferate...
...At present, we ought to centralize further in some functions: e.g., we ought to have modular standards and standard parts in building and in machinery...
...In this system, both farmers and retailers fall under the control and decision-making of the chains...
...This does not include the cost of the program: a very modest half-hour program costs $10,000 to produce...
...cooperative enterprises often avoid cash transactions...
...tY...
...have different real constitutions...
...Forty thousand are killed annually in automobile accidents...
...The automotive complex (including oil and roads) has become indispensable to keep the economy going, so that a falling off of car sales can precipitate a serious recession...
...The fact of great populations does not prevent decentralization...
...With the best will in the world, these few persons cannot know what is all the real news...
...The grave threat in modern urbanization is anomie, the rootlessness and helplessness of individuals, the loss of citizenry...
...The structure has been aggrandized from an ancient plan with little change...
...The licenses once given are apparently in perpetuity...
...Natural monopolies" like telephone-telegraph or railroads...
...A mixed system would allow various types of motivation and organization to do what they can do most appropriately and cheapest...
...But for useful leisure, the development of community culture, human services, and education, the rationalizing and cash-accounting style is inappropriate, whereas the decentralist style is enriching...
...expense accounts...
...E.g., the textbook manufacturers, the graduate schools of education, the National Science Foundation, the proliferating national testing services, the corporations, the church, the Pentagon...
...Characteristically, the staff-turnover at KQED is almost nil—we are obviously relying on artistic and technical motivation—whereas WNDT is a way-station for persons moving toward higher salaries elsewhere...
...Very little is naturally nurtured or naturally ripened...
...They are safe men...
...Also the discouragement of using especially TV to cover actualities— since these might always prove either boring or untoward...
...An elementary pupil in the New York Public School system costs $650, also excluding capital costs for plant and replacement...
...Fewer than 60 towns have competing newspapers (in 1900 there were 600...
...The image of performance is more important than the actuality...
...the increase in power has been largely for sales and is unfunctional for most situations...
...The standard estimate for an off-Broadway production, e.g., at the Living Theater, is $20,000 to mount and $2,000 a week to run...
...communication breaks down since few men have a sense of the whole...
...The American political system of limited powers and checks and balances is decentralist in principle...
...In the mess we are in, however, the only conceivable remedy is public centralized regulation and planning...
...For another comparison, Operation Crossroads, pro-rated for the same period, costs $5,000...
...In a departmental system, much of each man's capacity is unused...
...At present, $1 out of every $2 spent for food goes to 100 corporate or (not Rochdale) cooperative chains...
...The resulting difficulties are solved by adding higher levels of control, more administrators...
...they are sharing in objective enterprise...
...What is good for General Motors is good for the country...
...Where intelligent principals ask for 400, there are schools of 1800 and the official limit has finally been reduced to 1200...
...roles and standardizing procedure inflexibly...
...high cost of contin...
...Present Excessive Centralization In some aspects of social organization, there is historically a discernible cyclical swing between excessive centralization and excessive decentralization...
...Highways are built at a cost varying from a half million to three million a mile...
...VI...
...Each man knows only part of the process and so cannot really understand what he is doing...
...Examples of Overgrown Systems A. New York School System: A Classical Bureaucracy (Let me say that I have affection for the earnestness of the N.Y.C...
...but by hypertrophy the system has itself become the dominant cause...
...When local school-boards (with rather unspecified powers) were re-established in 1962, at the end of a year of operation it was said that their main achievement so far was to make it possible for the field superintendents to communicate with headquarters (through the free-wheeling of the local boards), something which had not occurred in two generations...
...Intrinsic professional performance necessarily costs more than Artistic and community performance (which really costs nothing beyond materials and subsistence) because the persons are members of a licensed or peer-group guild...
...By and large, our country at present is constituted of a rather small number of great commercial baronies, organized as described, which are private powers...
...A big university should be run by its many faculties...
...Three big broadcasting networks get most of their news from the same source...
...and there are also great entrenched organizations like the Pentagon, the FBI, the major Universities and school systems, the labor unions, and a few others...
...Now compare two non-profit (educational TV) stations: WNDT in New York costs $650 an hour to run, not much cheaper than commercial television (but this figure includes the cost of programming...
...College tuition at Columbia or Cornell is $1700, which is estimated to be a little more than 50% of the actual cost per student for "education and educational administration...
...In one case of being threatened, a network was promptly able to produce 10,000 telegrams sent by children...
...With extrinsic motivation and organization not growing from the function, the cost may rise by a factor of 5, 10, or more...
...For instance, one nation might have a per capita "income" several times more than another, and yet the actual standard of living be very little different, since the "poorer" nation is more skilled and self-reliant...
...In all forecasts of the fairly immediate future, it is said that employment in commodity-production will be sharply diminished...
...the following somewhat comparable enterprises: On Broadway, a modest play (without music) requires upward of $100,000 to rehearse and mount, and $20,000 a week to run...
...Decentralizing is primarily a question of sociological organization rather than geographical dispersal, though that is sometimes involved...
...People are personnel of the organization that performs the function...
...When an experiment— e.g., the tailor-made Higher Horizons—succeeds on a small scale, it is diluted by being standardized...
...need for unionprotection of workmen hired for somebody else's enterprise, union scales and featherbedding...
...The mark-up over actual classroom costs is 400...
...These are served by, now, only 3 international news services...
...How should it be tailored...
...Yet it costs more than $14,000 to select, train, and maintain a volunteer for one year...
...it takes $30,000 in new investment to re-employ 1 workman...
...a military style developed with the emergence of the nation-states for logistics and to wage war...
...Because of the superstition and the inflexible organization, these beliefs are self-proving...
...There is increased reliance on extrinsic motivations of salary, security, and perquisites, because subordinates cannot take satisfaction in completing the function...
...Professionally the two stations are equivalent, but KQED is much more daring and lively...
...The standard of living (how to be decent) and what is correct and tolerable in expression and entertainment is determined by these networks, the movies, and a few national magazines...
...E.g., in 1900, 6% of 17-year-olds graduated from high school...
...The cars exist as the crucial element in a vast complex—of fuel, servicing, and highways—that entirely transforms the environment...
...Correspondingly, each school is too large...
...all this would cost the city nothing, yet the rubber-stamp was delayed for nearly two years and a mountain of correspondence, till a local board complained loudly and got the stamp...
...These have produced over-capitalized and often inappropriate technology, an inflexible and insecure tightly interlocking economy, ignorant mass-consumption with a complicated standard of living of inferior quality, the development of sprawling urban areas rather than towns and cities, brain-washing mass-communications, massdemocracy without real content, and mass-education that is both wasteful and regimenting...
...70% of all food sales is through the central systems...
...Especially in the freshman and sophomore classes, the professors lecture to very large classes and the smaller groups are taught by ill-paid section-men...
...the waste of skill by departmentalizing task...
...The baronies compete semi-monopolistically, fix prices, and generally maintain the structure...
...It takes many years to change an outmoded rule...
...In TV, NBC sponsored time costs $143,000 an hour for 220 stations, $650 per outlet for the network, or $2,000 for one station...
...For example, the New York City Board of Education is experimenting with decentralizing...
...Professionally, these productions will be comparable in every way—we are not here considering the esthetic or community value...
...9,000 for the volunteer, $5,000 for central administration, liaison with host countries, etc...
...This is the opposite of the TVA idea, where the official was to serve as a yardstick...
...Despite this bureaucratic pedantry, there are public scandals because janitors have been taking home $50,000 a year, or a roof costs $750,000 to fix, and still leaks...
...It is probably most convenient and efficient to run all of these by free appropriation...
...The automotive complex must now be treated as a "natural monopoly" and regulated...
...Profit-motivated enterprises may or may not be more efficient than Establishment non-profit enterprises...
...school system, its attentiveness to the children as the main object, its sincere equalitarianism, its concern for all types and conditions...
...It is clear that in many thousands of cases, people would choose the farm way of life, if there were any possibilities of getting any cash at all...
...For instance, a rubber-stamp from the superintendent in charge of building was required to make alterations to a wall to install a valuable new press given to the School of Printing...
...50% of central Los Angeles has been given over to the roadways...
...Thus public and private costs are similar...
...When it tries at all to cope with this, centralized administration tries to encourage "participation," but participation is empty unless it involves the possibility of initiating and deciding, that is decentralized administra Lion...
...Since so much capital and so many persons are tightly interlocked in them, they cannot afford to risk any change...
...A considerable useful leeway is given to the principals—both in staffing and methods—so that the schools differ a good deal depending on the principal...
...When Private Power confronts Public Power, e.g., in the regulatory agencies, the result is often a stalemate, so that there is no social motion...
...It is rare that the standard procedure is the best in any particular case...
...Despite the good intentions of many individuals in the system, this vast machinery of social power is almost powerless in most simple practical matters...
...Idea of a Mixed System The above 6 types of enterprise are, in one form or another, operative in any modern society...
...semi-monopolistic fixed prices...
...It is interesting to contrast the dull formality of a PTA meeting at which nothing important can be decided, with the liveliness of the public meeting of a local school board to which important authority has been delegated...
...To remove a door-catch ("city property") requires years of appeal...
...C. Cars and Roads: Hypertrophy of a System Beyond Function During the 20's, automobiles began to be sold for style and status rather than more serious function and convenience...
...In recruiting teachers for such a vast system, processing takes nearly a year...
...Add to these 4 Types, 2 other extreme types of production and service...
...The weight of publication, broadcasting, and journalism in the style, format, and acceptable content of the mass-media, decided by the few who rise to the top in such vast semi-monopolies, finally simply swamps independent and dissenting thought and style and constitutes a virtual censorship-in-depth...
...This is a constitutional crisis for democracy...
...On the other hand, there are the great background enterprises that fill universal needs, necessary for a modern society to function: municipal services, natural monopolies, literacy, subsistence, etc...
...Also, expensive as they are, cars are built not to last, and the companies push for laws to exempt them from supplying repair-parts for longer than five years...
...Villages and city neighborhoods are disrupted by highway shopping centers...
...an economic style dominated by abstract moneyprofits rather than specific uses and work-processes...
...The inflexible departments do not always dovetail...
...This superstition confounds the real confusion accompanying unique conditions of modern life, new technology, urbanization, and oneworld...
...The Friends spend nothing at all on administration (the program is taken care of as an extra duty by their regular offices), prefer to train in the field where conditions are known, and their candidates have a service philosophy to begin with...
...But the cutting of costs in profit enterprises is largely offset by the grasping, padding, and status-seeking of the personnel...
...The emphasis is entirely on large-scale cash-cropping...
...In radio, WMCA charges $700 an hour for air-time, excluding the cost of the program...
...Incidentally, in a similar neighborhood, with the unpaid labor of friends, I remodelled a commercial loft to a comparable standard for $500, and the rental at ordinary market value and amortization came to considerably less...
...that is, they are brainwashed...
...Prevalent or Inevitable Defects of Centralization However competent, the few at the top who decide in large centralized enterprises are not enough minds to do an adequate job...
...salaries determined by considerations of status because the personnel is not intrinsically motivated to the task...
...And there is interlocking with magazines for serialization, with book clubs, with Hollywood...
...Also, in situations where force must be collected and directed to an emergency...
...e.g., in some states a small rise in the farmer's price for milk results in many marginal farms resuming operation...
...he must simply adapt standards plans that are a generation out of date, and were not good to begin with...
...Farm families now make up less than 8% of the population...
...Artistic performances, on the contrary, are ad hoc...
...For example, a gang or collective contract is used in important assembly-line manufacture in Coventry, whereby the gang determines its own working schedule, persons, and operations...
...We exist in a post-urban, post-mass communication, post-centralist period...
...its annual turnover is $14 billions...
...Decentralization is not lack of order or organization but a different kind of coordination...
...This might involve lowering the GNP: e.g...
...There is now a car for every 2.7 Americans, considerably more than one to a family...
...action—in the direct-action movements, and also some trend in cultural fields, like off-Broadway or Summerhill...
...Often, however, there are alliances, as in the military-industrial, scientific agencies-universities, Urban Renewalreal estate promoters, etc., and these alliances lead to further aggrandizement of the same overgrown organizations and the products are not distinguished by ingenuity, beauty, thrift, or precise utility...
...Important causes of expense in the Peace Corps are the very rigid selection to protect the Image abroad (only 1 of 8 original applicants are finally sent), training in the setting of an American university, and propaganda and promotion...
...For instance, automation, a centralized mode of production, is applied both where it is appropriate and where it is inappropriate, but little attempt is made to analyze these differences...
...With these, there is a prevalent superstition that no other method of organization could be more efficient or is even possible, and that in all functions the reasonable mode of operation is by "rationalization" (subdivision, standardization, cash-accounting...
...is this feasible...
...No effort has been made, e.g., to develop an efficient small slowermoving electric for urban use (taxis...
...On the other hand, there are scandals because of trivialities: a high-school student has done carpentry on a boat for a school official...
...Independent grocers are forced out, adding to the anonymity and anomie of urban neighborhoods...
...Even safety features are neglected...
...A mixed system would try to keep the proportion of the types roughly within limits of maximum cost efficiency...
...WBAI is one of the 3 stations of the Pacifica Federation, which exchange tapes but are entirely independent...
...but the large classes do positive damage to both children and teachers, so that the whole system perhaps does more harm than good...
...Topmanagers— and independent professionals—are the most overworked members of society...
...Since performance in the non-profit field is largely symbolic, there is no attempt to cut costs...
...Because of direct and indirect subsidy, cars and trucks have pushed other kinds of transportation out of the picture, especially for commuting...
...Progress in design has been determined entirely by profits...
...Contrast with both these types, an ad hoc production by artists, e.g., a play in the loft of the Judson Church: this might cost $50 to $500 to mount and nothing at all to run, since the script, acting, staging and space are all gratis...
...To cope with the multifarious details and persons of large enterprises, recourse is had to standardization...
...On the other hand, when enterprises are run autonomously by professionals and artists intrinsically committed to the task, people make do on means and procedure...
...This leads to inevitable misfitting and loss of peculiar appropriateness and quality...
...There is thus an inevitable restriction to the sensational and the bland...
...I doubt that the American proportion is at all within these limits...
...its chief business is paper-work, public relations, and the maintenance of a routine production...
...The idea of a Mixed System is a proportioning among types of enterprise so that they in fact influence one another pluralistically and if necessary can check one another...
...yet the rule has only now been modified...
...By 1970 the cost, with accrued interest, of roads for a single car-trip five miles to the center of Washington will come to two a half dollars (per car trip) each way...
...Naturally, many of the bright new graduates go elsewhere, to the suburban communities...
...Of course, most of this imposition of a new pattern would have been impossible if there had not been advantages and conveniences in the cars...
...Three or four car manufacturers control the market, competing semimonopolistically with fixed prices and improvements spooned out slowly...
...its chief function is to protect, reward, and incestuously recruit its own personnel...
...In what industries in the U.S...
...A good non-residential private school in New York, class size 20, costs about $850 per pupil per year, not counting plant and some endowment...
...Western science from 1500-1900 was entirely decentrally coordinated...
...a better rural-urban ratio, say 20% instead of 8%, would be more efficient, as well as more socially and culturally satisfactory...
...this removed natural limitations on the proliferation of such formidable and expensive objects...
...Farmers contract long beforehand, regardless of weather or the ability to take advantage of sudden opportunities...
...Decentralizing is largely an empirical question and requires research and experiment (which it is not getting...
...But at present, farm subsidies overwhelmingly favor the big operators...
...yet the fundamental educational fact, the number of children per teacher, cannot be altered because of the expense...
...Our present over-developed centralism goes back to a bureaucratic style perfected in the 18th century for taxation and policing...
...But to decentralize, to delegate autonomy to many centers, can also be a political decision of a central power, usually compelled by the fact that the centralization is not working...
...That is: the professional neighborhood housing is cheaper than official housing, but artists' lofts are cheaper still...
...B. Enterprises Determined by the Function or Concrete Task: 3. Professional (E.g., KQED, Living Theater, Friends Service, West Village Neighborhood) 4. Artistic or Community (E.g., Judson players, WBAI, the Barker School, artists' lofts...
...the fleets of cars on the suburban parkways make no economic or psychological sense...
...In the present period, decentralized centers need not be narrow, isolated, or "provincial...
...And this becomes explicit when tapes are wiped out and certain speakers are officially or unofficially blacklisted...
...and establishing as much face-to-face association with decision-makers as possible...
...Farmer's markets in the towns and cities are closed...
...These functions are best regarded as merely supportive and background...
...The networks once established can wield enormous political pressure...
...Official Urban Renewal planned for the West Village in New York City was to cost $30 million (including a $7 million subsidy), to provide net 300 units after demolition and relocation...
...E.g., NBC or the Broadway theatre...
...The Storm of Angry Letters that the sponsors fear may finally be as few as 20...
...Worst of all, in many functions of society, simple direct action becomes quite impossible, even though it is commonsense and would meet with general approval...
...The maxim of decentralization is to decentralize where, how much, and how it is expedient...
...The standards and motives of personnel should be strictly professional...
...In "upwards communication" of information, at each level there is processing and abstraction from the concrete...
...now more than 60...
...Our emphasis ought to begin to be the other way...
...Centralized plants, including central schools, claim per product efficiency, but the hidden costs of the highways and transportation are not counted...
...Since there must be limited broadcasting channels, if the networks control most of them, there is an implicit censorship...
...Inevitably, marginal farms must discontinue, and this is an important cause of the present excessive urbanization...
...Therefore we need a mixed system...
...On the one hand there are family, amateur, and folk enterprises, which do not enter the cash nexus at all, but are very important for the economic and social well-being...
...Eagerness and earnestness are stymied by licenses, merely formal standards, due process, confronting stuffed shirts, and the need for amounts of capital entirely disproportionate to the enterprise...
...The highway planning now occurs independently and determines the location of communities and the manner of life in them...
...Consumers pay several cents more for a brand-name product (e.g., Clorox, although a locally bottled bleach is identical in every respect...
...In most large cities, traffic congestion and parking are almost intolerably inconvenient...
...V. Costs in Service Enterprises with Different Organization and Motivation Consider a range of services where staff and overhead are the chief costs...
...An extremely extravagant model is the combination of centralized commercial and official, as in cost-plus contracts...
...After armaments, highway construction is the big item in Federal budgets, and it looms immensely in State budgets...
...Meantime the hidden costs involved in centralization are omitted from the cash-accounting...
...The subordinates, meanwhile, necessarily become stupider, since they cannot learn by initiation and responsibility...
...B. Monolithic Mass-Communications: A Constitutional Danger The interlocking systems of mass-communications with a few decisionmakers at the top of each system produces inevitable brainwashing and makes democracy impossible...
...In the small colleges proposed in The Community of Scholars, the tuition is estimated at $650, with 10 professors for 150 students, The Peace Corps is a model of efficient and dedicated bureaucracy...
...but the sustaining advertisers are the same and the ownership elaborately interlocks...
...these are checked by the great public Power of governments...
...There is excessive use of pesticides...
...Finally, this vast system is made increasingly inflexible by its interlocking with the other aggrandizing systems of society, to form one nationwide educational monolith...
...My bias is that automation should be applied to the maximum in the production of hardware and perhaps subsistence goods, in clerical work, etc...
...The 10 largest chains sell 30% of all food...
...The Friends Service VISA program, which is comparable in essential respects, provides the same service for $3,500 a volunteer...
...But WBAI, a listener-supported station of comparable power, costs $3^o an hour to run, including programming (provided gratis by artists, academics, or the politically minded...
...the class size is officially 29, but in fact most classes are 32 35...
...The Public system, by and large, discourages the entry of unlicensed teachers into the classroom...
...a quality standard of living is less cultured and often costs less...
...People are directly engaged in the function...
...Within the nation states at present there is, in most major functions, excessive centralization or centralism on wrong principles (just as internationally there is decentralization on wrong principles...
...The savings in this case come from tailoring to the actual needs by real architects rather than bureaucrats and promoters...
...Finally, the systems tend to run for their own sake...
...they become inventive by making decisions flexibly as opportunity presents...
...The tremendous suburbanization has become their creature...
...they use all available skills wherever available...
...Association" and "participation" are not mere interpersonal relations...
...In the retailing, there is a profound change in consumer habits...
...No other kind of operation or administration is paid attention or subsidized...
...With the concentration of growing in huge plantations in Texas, Florida, California, etc., breeding and hybridization are determined by terms of canning, ability to preserve and ship, and appearance for mass-sale, rather than freshness, flavor, or nutrition...
...At smaller liberal arts colleges, e.g., Wesleyan in Connecticut, the mark-up is 300...
...Entirely irrelevant qualifications, and the tie-in with the graduate schools that license teachers, keep many fine teachers out...
...but the teachers and staff-meeting have far too little leeway...
...An architect is told that he is not allowed to consult the teachers of a school he is to replace...
...In its high early period, the free enterprise system of joint-stock companies was decentrally coordinated...
...The following are expected, and actual, situations: to remove rats from a school, the principal cannot call an exterminator but must appeal to headquarters and go, in principle, to the Board of Estimate...
...and their relations with the labor unions are analogous...
...In a big city, the organization of arrondisements with neighborhood city-halls can importantly decentralize...
...I11...
...The FCC has proved powerless to compel reasonable coverage of everything worthwhile...
...If they also control most of the local stations, this make it impossible for new political thought to enter into discourse...
...Timidity, administrative unwieldiness, the need for standardization put insuperable obstacles in the path of experiment...
...Since those who could criticize, colleagues, consumers, electorate, become stupider, the top men also become stupider...
...they are institutions, and this is usually necessary for continuous operation over a range of occasions...
...Anything that might offend a large segment (a few hundred thousand) must be excluded...
...and administration and overhead are tailored to what is indispensable for the concrete function...
...the annual budget exceeds $700 millions—excluding capital improvements...
...Packaging assumes great importance, no matter what is in the packages...
...VII...
...its dreamy desire to experiment...
Vol. 11 • September 1964 • No. 4
