Overkill: Causes and Consequences (Our Depleted Society, by Seymour Melman)
Rousseas, Stephen
OUR DEPLETED SOCIETY, by Seymour Melman. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965. 366 pp. $5.95. Seymour Melman's book is a bit disconcerting. It is repetitious, at times it screams at...
...has continued to realize a healthy surplus in its balance of trade, as distinct from its balance of payments...
...The interested reader can save himself the chore of wading through this overly padded book by jumping directly to the statement by Senator George McGovern of South Dakota—which Melman has conveniently provided as an Appendix to his book...
...At any rate, he places too great an explanatory burden on his theory of overkill...
...The one place where Melman does make a strong point is on the social costs of overkill...
...And since Melman estimates that at least 40 per cent of the defense budget is for purposes of overkill, this is not an unreasonable figure to shoot at—provided, of course, that we could convince Congress and the Administration to cut back the defense budget by this amount and reallocate the funds to investment in social capital...
...He illustrates his thesis of depletion with the general deterioration of the shipping, machinetool (a great favorite of Melman's), typewriter, railroad, and sewing-machine industries...
...Throughout this book Melman raises critical problems, examines them at excessive length, and then gets frightened when considering their policy solutions...
...At times Melman gives the impression that imports are un-American, and on the basis of his argument one must consider it a wonder that the U.S...
...Yet credit must be given to Melman for his courage in tackling these problems at a time when the more adequately trained social scientists are busy counting privies or cranking wertfrei models of reality...
...Though he does not separate capital items from recurrent operating expenditures, he estimates that our current needs for housing, health care, education, urban renewal, pollution control, and the like, amount to $314 billion...
...His case may have some merit, but his methodology is woefully inadequate...
...The iron law of oligarchy seems uppermost in his mind and succeeds in pushing him toward decentralized solutions on the state and Iocal levels, autonomous international organizations, and the general checks-and-balances approach that so plagues social thought in this country...
...His technique could as easily be used to "prove" the inferiority of any and all economies since no country is simultaneously proficient in all fields of economic endeavor...
...I would not want for a moment to minimize the perverse effect of our defense expenditures on the economy, but I cannot accept the sloppiness of Melman's analysis...
...In short, Melman is radical in his criticisms and conservative in his solutions...
...in the world economy, increas ed the degree of alienation in our society, disoriented the young by facing them with a "no future" prospect, and severely warped the imbalance between the public and private sectors in favor of the latter...
...When the role of government goes up, freedom is destined to go down...
...New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965...
...If we were to decide to redress these imbalances in the public sector over a ten-year period (Melman unrealistically uses a five-year period), this would require an annual non-defense expenditure of $31 billion —or roughly 60 per cent of our annual defense budget...
...It has, furthermore, intimidated the free expresssion of ideas and brought on a dramatic decline in responsible social criticism...
...Melman would have been better advised to shift his emphasis to the low rate of economic growth since the end of the Korean War (as compared to the European experience) and then go on to examine the effect of defense expenditures on the fixed investment ratio and its persistent overall decline in the postwar period...
...It is repetitious, at times it screams at the reader, and it is seriously wanting in sustained analysis...
...Melman is as faulty in his analysis as those who are in a state of panic over the threat of automation...
...Senator McGovern says succinctly in 17 pages what it took 285 pages for Melman to do...
...The recurrent theme is that American emphasis on overkill has resulted in a redundant stockpile of nuclear weapons and a gross misallocation of our resources away from the public and private sectors of the economy...
...It is important that a distinction be made between the extent of overkill and Melman's theory of it...
...What Melman needed most was a good editor...
...In short, Melman does not provide us with a balanced analysis...
...His is the approach of the industrial engineer and not that of the professionally trained economist...
...He tends to see government and freedom as opposite ends of a see-saw...
...And, like Daniel Bell, I must apply to Melman what Bell did to the automation peddlers—namely, the old Jewish proverb, "For example is not a proof...
...If Melman's figures are correct, they serve to describe the wide gap between the rhetoric of the Great Society and the paltry funds that have so far been allocated for its implementation...
...In the early chapters of this book the amount of overkill is convincingly documented, but what is not so convincing is Melman's attempt to show that our defense expenditures have sapped and depleted the industrial base of our economy...
...But despite these limited examples (there is more to the American economy than the industries he cites), Melman has not proven the inferiority and non-competitiveness of the American economy...
...And without a balanced account, his plea to rejuvenate the depleted industries is not at all convincing...
...There is, of course, some merit to this exaggerated argument, though I think some of the problems he cites are a cause rather than an effect of overkill...
...In short, whatever is wrong with contemporary American society can be directly attributed to one thing—our preoccupation with overkill...
...This morbid obsession with overkill has, in Melman's view, distorted our values, increased the influence of the military-industrial complex, worsened the relative productivity position of the U.S...
Vol. 13 • January 1966 • No. 1
