NOTES ON DECENTRALIZATION

...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...

...In radio, WMCA charges $700 an hour for air time, excluding the cost of the program...

...Villages and city neighborhoods are disrupted by highway shopping centers...

...For another comparison, Operation Crossroads, prorated for the same period, costs $5000...

...and establishing as much face-to-face association with decision-makers as possible...

...The licenses once given are apparently in perpetuity...

...On the 226 PAUL GOODMAN 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...

...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...

...Profit-motivated enterprises may or may not be more efficient than Establishment nonprofit enterprises...

...the waste of skill by departmentalizing task roles and standardizing procedure inflexibly...

...he must simply adapt standard plans that are a generation out of date and were not good to begin with...

...An elementary pupil in the New York Public School System costs $750, also excluding capital costs for plant and replacement...

...By 1970 the cost, with accrued interest, of roads for a single car trip five miles to the center of Washington will come to $2.50 (per car trip) each way...

...How should it be tailored...

...No other kind of operation or administration is paid attention or subsidized...

...they are institutions, and this is usually necessary for continuous operation over a range of occasions...

...On the other hand, KQED in San Francisco runs for $225 an 224 PAUL GOODMAN hour...

...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...

...The public system, by and large, discourages the entry of unlicensed teachers into the classroom...

...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...

...And there is a tremendous social and economic cost in forced urbanization and rural depopulation...

...This law is relevant especially for bulky and perishable commodities like foodstuffs, and where the NOTES ON DECENTRALIZATION 223 fixed capital investment can be relatively low in proportion to the product (as in natural farming...

...expense accounts...

...But its structure is -a disaster...

...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...

...A mixed system would try to keep the proportion of the types roughly within limits of maximum cost efficiency...

...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...

...Finally, activity becomes timeserving and statusmaintaining, regardless of the function...

...This might involve lowering the GNP: e.g., cooperative enterprises often avoid cash transactions...

...Overexposed to one fairly homogeneous kind of interpretation, and underexposed 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...

...Since performance in the nonprofit field is largely symbolic, there is no attempt to cut costs...

...To Our Contributors • When sending manuscripts, please make sure that you do not send your only copy...

...To remove a door catch ("city property") requires years of appeal...

...proliferation of administrators, paper work, business machines...

...B. Enterprises Determined by the Function or Concrete Task: 3. Professional (E.g., KQED, Friends Service, West Village Neighborhood...

...In the small colleges proposed in The Community of Scholars, the tuition is estimated at $650, with 10 professors for 150 students...

...At present, $1 out of every $2 spent for food goes to 100 corporate or (not Rochdale) cooperative chains...

...And 40,000 are killed annually in automobile accidents...

...Finally, the systems tend to run for their own sake...

...Inevitably, marginal farms must discontinue, and this is an important cause of the present excessive urbanization...

...Now compare two nonprofit (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 programing...

...Meantime the hidden costs involved in centralization are omitted from the cashaccounting...

...The expensive network time makes for minute and second scheduling, and thus a format that prevents freedom of thought or art...

...The image of performance is more important than the actuality...

...NOTES ON DECENTRALIZATION 221 Some kinds of news and events do warrant standard national researching and broadcast...

...There is no mystery about what swells costs in commercial, official, and Establishment enterprises, where the organization, motivation, and procedure are not designed directly to fullfill the function...

...Also, in situations where force must be collected and directed to an emergency...

...skilled and engaged people do more directly for themselves and one another, e.g., repairs...

...For a continuously productive artist, each work is ad hoc...

...an economic style dominated by abstract money-profits rather than specific uses and work processes...

...I doubt that the American proportion is at all within these limits...

...B. Monolithic Mass Communications: A Constitutional Danger The interlocking systems of mass communications with a few decision-makers at the top of each system produce inevitable brainwashing and make democracy impossible...

...III...

...Naturally, many of the bright new graduates go elsewhere, to the suburban communities...

...e.g., in some states a small rise in the farmer's price for milk results in many marginal farms resuming operation...

...In a departmental system, much of each man's capacity is unused...

...Much is left out altogether...

...Everyone in society, from lowly citizens to topmost leaders, shares the sneaking suspicion that "Nothing Can Be Done...

...D. Supermarkets: Logistic Planning That Proves to Be Inefficient The effect of the hyperorganization of food production, processing, distance transportation, and supermarket retailing has been that the farmer's share of the take has persistently diminished (e.g., 44 percent in 1953, and 38 percent in 1963), whereas the profits of the chains themselves have not risen, and food prices to the consumer have risen slightly...

...Independent grocers are forced out, adding to the anonymity and anomie of urban neighborhoods...

...E.g., in 1900, 6 percent of 17-year-olds graduated from high school...

...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...

...There is little effort to achieve a balanced transit pattern, using all means for the general convenience...

...In what industries in the U.S...

...An architect is told that he is not allowed to consult the teachers of a school he is to replace...

...salaries determined by considerations of status because the personnel is not intrinsically motivated to the task...

...they use all available skills wherever available...

...In its high early period the free enterprise system of joint-stock companies was decentrally coordinated...

...The decentralist kibbutzim might, by some, be considered as fanatical but hardly as provincial...

...VII...

...its chief business is paper work, public relations, and the maintenance of a routine production...

...This is a constitutional crisis for democracy...

...increasing the awareness by individuals of the whole function in which they are involved...

...they become inventive by making decisions flexibly as opportunity presents...

...This leads to inevitable misfitting and loss of peculiar appropriateness and quality...

...There is increased reliance on extrinsic motivations of salary, security, and perquisites, because subordinates cannot take satisfaction in completing the function...

...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...

...To cope with the multifarious details and persons of large enterprises, recourse is had to standardization...

...That is: the professional neighborhood housing is cheaper than official housing, but artists' lofts are cheaper still...

...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...

...College tuition at Columbia or Cornell is $1700, which is estimated to be a little more than 50 percent of the actual cost per student for "education and educational administration...

...the annual budget exceeds $700 million —excluding capital improvements...

...Only the competition of European small cars made, for a time, a radical change...

...In the retailing there is a profound change in consumer habits...

...Progress in design has been determined entirely by profits...

...The American political system of limited powers and checks and balances is decentralist in principle...

...Fifty percent of central Los Angeles has been given over to the roadways...

...These are served now by only three international news services...

...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...

...the class size is officially 29, but in fact most classes are 32-35...

...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) . Our emphasis ought to begin to be the other way...

...The fact of great populations does not prevent decentralization...

...The administrators, superintendents, and secretaries, principals, assistants, clerks, guidance personnel, attendance officers, etc., proliferate...

...Since so much capital and so many persons are tightly interlocked in them, they cannot afford to risk any change...

...yet the fundamental educational fact, the number of children per teacher, cannot be altered because of the expense...

...With the best will in the world, these few persons cannot know what is all the real news...

...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...

...communication breaks down since few men have a sense of the whole...

...Since those who could criticize— colleagues, consumers, electorate—become stupider, the top men also become stupider...

...222 PAUL GOODMAN The cars exist as the crucial element in a vast complex—of fuel, servicing, and highways—that entirely transforms the environment...

...but automation, computing, and standardizing methods in general, should be severely restricted in all human services, education, restaurants, social work, hospitals...

...The inflexible departments do not always dovetail...

...If they also control most of the local stations, this makes it impossible for new political thought to enter into discourse...

...People are directly engaged in the function...

...These have produced overcapitalized 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, mass democracy without real content, and mass education that is both wasteful and regimenting...

...NOTES ON DECENTRALIZATION 219 Unfortunately, when such systems are very large, they preempt the social means and space for carrying on their functions at all...

...Because of specific pedagogic conditions, a principal asks for soundproofing, but no money can be allotted for that, although there is pro220 PAUL GOODMAN vision for much less urgent needs...

...The networks, once established, can wield enormous political pressure...

...No effort has been made, e.g., to develop an efficient, small, slower-moving electric for urban use (taxis...

...With extrinsic motivation and organization not growing from the function, the cost may rise by a factor of 3, 5, or 10, or more...

...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...

...Fewer than 60 towns have competing newspapers (in 1900 there were 600...

...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 Friends spend nothing at all on administration (the program is taken care of as anextra 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...

...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...

...Decentralizing is largely an empirical question and requires research and experiment (which it is not getting...

...Western science from 1500 to 1900 was entirely decentrally coordinated...

...these are checked by the great Public Power of governments...

...We exist in a posturban, postmass communication, postcentralist period...

...A system running for its own sake loses touch with its ostensible function and becomes isolated from the environment...

...Examples of Overgrown Systems A. New York School System: A Classical Bureaucracy (Let me say that I have affection for the earnestness of the New York City school system, its attentiveness to the children as the main object,, its sincere egalitarianism, its concern for all types and conditions...

...In one case of being threatened, a network was promptly able to produce 10,000 telegrams sent by children...

...this removed natural limitations on the proliferation of such formidable and expensive objects...

...Yet the civil service type of procedure is necessary to avoid nepotism and political pressure...

...a quality standard of living is less cultured and often costs less...

...4. Artistic or community (E.g., Judson Players, WBAI, the Barker School, artists' lofts...

...And this becomes explicit when tapes are wiped out and certain speakers are officially or unofficially blacklisted...

...And, internationally, where vast capital is required, as in the moon shot...

...Farmers' markets in the towns and cities are closed...

...public relations and promotion to shore up the image...

...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...

...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...

...Association" and "participation" are not mere interpersonal relations...

...In established organizations those who rise to the top also tend to be chosen by systematic rather than functional criteria...

...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...

...This system requires creating a pervasive mass audience and attitude...

...But WBAI, a listener-supported station of comparable power, costs $38 an hour to run, including programing (provided gratis by artists, academics, or the politically minded...

...Also the discouragement of using especially TV to cover actualities—since these might always prove either boring or untoward...

...official enterprises, as in cost-plus contracts...

...General Motors alone employs 600,000 people...

...The system now serves 1 million children, there are 750 schools rather rigidly controlled by one headquarters...

...The "storm of angry letters" that the sponsors fear may finally be as few as 20...

...For instance, one nation might have a per capita "income" several times more than another, and yet the actual standard of living may be very little different, since the "poorer" nation is more skilled and self-reliant...

...Therefore we need a mixed system...

...The resulting difficulties are solved by adding higher levels of control, more administrators...

...but by hypertrophy the system has itself become the dominant cause...

...But the cutting of costs in profit enterprises is largely offset by the grasping, padding, and status-seeking of the personnel...

...Considerable, useful leeway is given to the principals—in both staffing and methods— so that the schools differ a good deal depending on the principal...

...all this would cost the city nothing, yet the rubber stamp was delayed for nearly two years, with a mountain of correspondence, till a local board complained loudly and got the stamp...

...A mixed system would reopen opportunities for people to choose the way of working and livingthat most suits them, and would thus recreate the possibility of engagement...

...Also, expensive as they are, cars are built not to last, and the companies push for laws to exempt them from supplying parts for longer than five years...

...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 standard estimate for an offBroadway production, e.g., as at the Living Theater is $20,000 to mount and $2000 a week to run...

...My bias is that automation should be applied to the maximum in the production of hardware and perhaps subsistence goods, in clerical work, etc...

...Incidentally, in a similar neighborhood, with the unpaid labor of friends, I remodeled a commercial loft to NOTES ON DECENTRALIZATION 225 a comparable standard for $500, and the rental at ordinary market value and amortization came to considerably less...

...In the mess we are in, however, the only conceivable remedy is public centralized regulation and planning...

...The equal-time provision has been abrogated for national elections—the networks are trying to extend the revocation to state elections...

...E.g., it takes $30,000 in new investment to reemploy one workman...

...The savings in this case come from 'tailoring to the actual needs by real architects rather than bureaucrats and promoters...

...and administration and overhead are tailored to what is indispensable for the concrete function...

...For example, the New York City Board of Education is experimenting with decentralizing...

...Top managers—and independent professionals—are the most overworked members of society...

...A major area of abuse by interlocking is the preemption of Research and DeveIopment money in all fields by giant corporations...

...In recruiting teachers for such a vast system, processing takes nearly a year...

...Yet it costs more than $12,000 to select, train, and maintain a volunteer for one year ($9000 for the volunteer, $3000 for central administration, liaison with host countries, etc...

...Professionally, these productions will be comparable in every way—we are not here considering the aesthetic or community value...

...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...

...And there is interlocking with magazines for serialization, with book clubs, with Hollywood...

...The tremendous suburbanization has become their creature...

...Decentralization is not lack of order or organization but a different kind of coordination...

...But the proportions are, of course, very various—so the United States, Russia, Sweden, Nigeria, etc., have different real constitutions...

...they eschew status and sometimes live on a subsistence wage...

...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 percent Puerto Rican children who could not speak English, yet one could not recruit bilingual teachers...

...A good nonresidential private school in New York, class size 20, costs about $850 per pupil per year, not counting plant and some endowment...

...semimonopolistic fixed prices...

...Thus public and private costs are similar...

...Our present overdeveloped centralism goes back to a bureaucratic style perfected in the 18th century for taxation and policing...

...Three big broadcasting networks get most of their news from the same source...

...And in automatic production itself, although there is a necessary concentration of capital in the equipment, it does not follow that programing should be under central control of the same corporation...

...V. Costs in Service Enterprises With Different Organization and Motivation CONSIDER A RANGE of services where staff and overhead are the chief costs...

...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...

...Entirely irrelevant qualifications, and the tie-in with the graduate schools that license teachers, keep many fine teachers out...

...Finally, this vast system is made increasingly inflexible by its interlocking with the other aggrandizing systems of society, to form one nationwide educational monolith...

...high cost of contingencies because of tight scheduling...

...Very little is naturally nurtured or naturally ripened...

...The requirements of educational community are necessarily sacrificed to administrative convenience and ignorant public pressure...

...IV...

...By contrast, a Summerhill school in Stony Point costing $500 per child, provides, for 50 children, three full-time paid instructors and the equivalent of about five more voluntary teachers from among parents who are artists or professionals and teach part time...

...and with each abstraction there is the accumulation of mere approximation and of actual misfitting...

...The standards and motives of personnel should be strictly professional...

...its dreamy desire to experiment...

...It is rare that the standard procedure is the best in any particular case...

...The grave threat in modern urbanization is anomie, the rootlessness and helplessness of individuals, the loss of citizenry...

...Families are dispersed and the lives of children depend on automobility...

...These functions are best regarded as merely supportive and background...

...Anything that might offend a large segment (a few hundred thousand) must be excluded...

...The baronies compete semimonopolistically, fix prices, and generally maintain the structure...

...A counterplan proposed by a neighborhood group would cost $8.5 million, without subsidy for net 475 units, without neighborhood disruption and relocation...

...Decentralizing is primarily a question of sociological organ217 ization rather than geographical dispersal, though that is sometimes involved...

...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 ,administration...

...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...

...Where intelligent principals ask for 400, there are schools of 1800 and the official limit has finally been reduced to 1200...

...C. Cars and Roads: Hypertrophy of a System Beyond Function During the '20s, automobiles began to be sold for style and status rather than more serious function and convenience...

...This does not include the cost of the program: a very modest half-hour program costs $10,000 to produce...

...What is good for General Motors is good for the country...

...that is, they are brainwashed...

...Because of the superstition and the inflexible organization, these beliefs are self-proving...

...In all forecasts of the fairly immediate future, it is said that employment in commodity production will be sharply diminished...

...The Peace Corps is a model of efficient and dedicated bureaucracy...

...need for union protection of workmen hired for somebody else's enterprise, union scales and featherbedding...

...People are personnel of the organization that performs the function...

...its chief function is to protect, reward, •and incestuously recruit its own personnel...

...Correspondingly, each school is too large...

...now more than 60 percent...

...H. Present Excessive Centralization IN SOME ASPECTS of social organization there is historically a discernible cyclical swing between excessive centralization and excessive decentralization...

...Only great news services and networks can perform such services...

...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...

...They are safe men...

...they are sharing in objective enterprise...

...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...

...The flood 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 semimonopolies, finally swamps independent and dissenting thought and style and constitutes a virtual censorship in depth...

...Meantime, the middle-class suburbanites pressured the building of parkways...

...At smaller liberal arts colleges, e.g., Wesleyan in Connecticut, the markup is 300 percent...

...a better rural-urban ratio, say 20 percent instead of 7 percent, would be more efficient as well as more socially and culturally satisfactory...

...A very old-fashioned type of door hardware is specified, which is kept in production, for reasons of nepotism, only for the New York school system...

...Add to these four types two other extreme types of production and service...

...WBAI is one of the three stations of the Pacifica Federation, which exchange tapes but are entirely independent...

...E.g., NBC or the Broadway theater...

...the fleets of cars on the suburban parkways make no economic or psychological sense...

...The 10 largest chains sell 30 percent of all food...

...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...

...Since there must be limited broadcasting channels, if the networks control most of them there is an implicit censorship...

...but the sustaining advertisers are the same and the ownership elaborately interlocks...

...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...

...Natural monopolies" like telephone-telegraph or railroads...

...E.g., 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...

...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...

...An extremely extravagant model is the combination of centralized commercial anc...

...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...

...But recent reports of the Senate Anti-Trust Committee show that most invention and innovation come from individuals and small companies, and at far less cost...

...A big university should be run by its many faculties...

...and their relations with the labor unions are analogous...

...the rule has only recently been modified...

...After armaments, highway construction is the big item in federal budgets, and it looms immensely in state budgets...

...The big corporations use public subsidy for R & D mainly for what amounts to packaging for the consumer...

...and —to a lesser degree—a style of industry determined by large concentrations of machinery around steam prime-movers, cashcropping, and enclosures...

...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...

...With the concentration of growing in huge plantations in Texas, Florida, California, etc., breeding and hybridization are determined in terms of canning, ability to preserve and ship, and appearance for mass sale, rather than freshness, flavor, or nutrition...

...The Friends Service VISA program, which is comparable in essential respects, provides the same service for $3500 a volunteer...

...It takes many years to change an outmoded rule...

...In the present period decentralized centers' need not be narrow, isolated, or "provincial...

...Farm families now make up less than 8 percent of the population...

...the vast capitalization demands a vast audience to pay for itself...

...When an experiment—e.g., the tailor-made Higher Horizons—succeeds on a small scale, it is diluted by being standardized...

...Packaging assumes great importance, no matter what is in the packages...

...This superstition confounds the real confusion accompanying unique conditions of modern life, new technology, urbanization, and one world...

...There is now a car for every 2.7 Americans, considerably more than one to a family...

...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...

...Farmers contract long beforehand, regardless of weather or the ability to take advantage of sudden opportunities...

...The highway planning now occurs independently and determines the location of communities and the manner of life in them...

...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...

...Centralized plants, including central schools, claim per-product efficiency, but the hidden costs of the highways and transportation are not counted...

...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...

...they keep an eye on the essence rather than the convention...

...Even safety features are neglected...

...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 mixed system would allow various types of motivation and organization to do what they can do most appropriately and cheaply...

...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...

...In "upward communication" of information, at each level there is processing and abstraction from the concrete...

...It is probably most convenient and efficient to run all of these by free appropriation...

...Artistic performances, on the contrary, are ad hoc...

...a military style developed with the emergence of the nation-states for logistics and to wage war...

...Because of direct and indirect subsidy, cars and trucks have pushed other kinds of transportation out of the picture, especially for commuting...

...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...

...The cars and highways have imposed an entirely new and disruptive community plan...

...Professionally the two stations are equivalent, but KQED is much more daring and lively...

...Consumers pay several cents more for a brand-name product (e.g., Clorox, although a locally bottled bleach is identical in every respect...

...At present there is a strong trend to spontaneous decentralist political action—in the direct-action movements, and also some trend in cultural fields, like offBroadway or Summerhill...

...but the teachers and staff meeting have far too little leeway...

...THE EDITORS VI...

...There is thus an inevitable restriction to the sensational and the bland...

...and any novelty or experiment involves dislocations and is "not worth the trouble...

...The automotive complex must now be treated as a "natural monopoly" and regulated...

...Often, however, there are alliances, as in the military-industrial, scientific agenciesuniversities, Urban Renewal/real 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...

...but the large classes do positive damage to both children and teachers, so that the whole system perhaps does more harm than good...

...Seventy percent of all food sales is through the central systems...

...There is excessive use of pesticides...

...And please also be sure to enclose a stamped, self-addressed envelope...

...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...

...The maxim of decentralization is to decentralize where, how much, and how it is expedient...

...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...

...Highways are built at a cost varying from $500,000 to $3 million a mile...

...The markup over actual classroom costs is 400 percent...

...The subordinates, meanwhile, necessarily become stupider, since they cannot learn by initiation and responsibility...

...It is profits, patents, 'and rents...

...In a big city the organization of arrondissements with neighborhood city halls can importantly decentralize...

...no research is done into possibilities of decentralizing...

...Three or four car manufacturers control the market, competing semimonopolistically with fixed prices and improvements spooned out slowly...

...the increase in power has been largely for sales and is unfunctional for most situations...

...Despite the good intentions of many individuals in the system, this vast machinery of social power is almost powerless in most simple practical matters...

...The structure has been aggrandized from an ancient plan with little change...

...But at present farm subsidies overwhelmingly favor the big operators...

...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...

...they put in as many hours as are necessary without watching the clock...

...Idea of a Mixed System THE ABOVE SIX TYPES of enterprise are, in one form or another, operative in any modern society...

...Each man knows only part of the process and so cannot really understand what he is doing...

...The emphasis is entirely on large-scale cash-cropping...

...In most large cities, traffic congestion and parking •are almost intolerably inconvenient...

...2. Official or Establishment non-profit enterprises (E.g., Columbia University, WNDT...

...On the other hand, there are scandals because of trivialities: a high school student has done carpentry on a boat for a school official...

...NOTES ON DECENTRALIZATION 227...

...This is the opposite of the TVA idea, where the official was to serve as a yardstick...

...Timidity, administrative unwieldiness, the need for standardization put insuperable obstacles in the path of experiment...

...In this system both farmers and retailers fall under the control and decision-making of the chains...

...is this feasible...

...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...

...When local school boards (with rather unspecified powers) were reestablished 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 freewheeling of the local boards), something which had not occurred in two generations...

...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...

...The neighborhood plan comes to $18,000 a unit...

...The FCC has proved powerless to compel reasonable coverage of everything worthwhile...

...its annual turnover is $14 billion...

...e.g., there should be a standard high218 PAUL GOODMAN 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 programing should be decentralized and for specific audiences...

...Important causes of expense in the Peace Corps are the very rigid selection to protect the image abroad (only one of eight original applicants is finally sent), training in the setting of an American university, and propaganda and promotion...

...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...