Microscope on the Middle East

...But Meyer's trenchant microscope has meanwhile revealed that these remedies may often be irrelevent, and sometimes even pernicious...

...He detects the existence of an imaginative entrepreneurship, candid where candor is profitable, with international scope and technological alertness...

...Thanks to "integration," the oil companies are now indeed relying more on local economies and have helped extend the Middle East's do-it-yourself sophistication—but they acquire locally only about 10 per cent of their needs, and their success in creating native contractors or home-owning workers has rarely spread beyond their own plants and a fraction of their own employes...

...There is, for example, the marvelous Sheikh of Kuwait, Abdullah el-Salem el-Sabbah...

...He open-handedly invests a tidy portion of his principality's oil revenue in free distilled water, free clinics, free schools, lunches and pocket-money for his 250,000 happy subjects and their offspring...

...Much of this, moreover, was dependent upon the thin reed of disaster: Turkey's anti-Armenian drive, Hitler's Europe and the Arab-Israeli conflict sowed the area with talented fugitives...

...He stands clear of common delusions when he takes the economy apart and examines its operational foibles...

...Worse, the global population explosion about which we have lately been hearing so much afflicts the Middle East in particular: Annually it adds 2.5 million new citizens, and Egypt's population at the present rate will double every two decades...

...We should, it appears, extend more gifts, more loans and perhaps more royalties...

...Or consider the wiliest native businessmen in the entire Arab world, the Levantine middlemen...

...It is A. J. Meyer's gallant distinction that he emphasizes this difference and gives it precise illustration in most of the nine essays in his book...

...He draws a sparkling parallel between the 16th century mercantilists who made England's capital inflow a generator for her future economic greatness and the latter-day Lebanese operators whose canny manipulations have made Beirut the center of the Middle East for loans, services and ideas on economic growth...

...Yet, if you visit such a tycoon in his office, you may have trouble finding it and, when you do, it will be an obscure room without a secretary, steel cabinet or even card-index—so sensitive is the Levant to the tax collector and readable records...

...After eight years in the area as administrator and consultant, in shoulder-rubbing contact with the human beings involved, the Associate Director of Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies understands the need for "a change in the very fabric of Middle Eastern society" as a prerequisite to effective economic growth...

...Author, "Israel: The Beginning and Tomorrow" THE ODDITIES OF Middle Eastern economics are wondrous and manifold...

...rather gingerly, that the rising ratio of government to private investment there is not necessarily "socialism...

...He justifies his book's title by pointing out that the rate of Middle Eastern public expenditure is still no higher than in the United States and that capitalist acquisitiveness is just as fervent there as here...

...Further, Arab leaders talk valiantly of "Arab Unity" and of "One (Middle Eastern) World"—but have yet to produce a single genuinely significant example of economic cooperation between one Arab state and another, to say nothing of regional consolidation...

...World War II created whopping local credits...

...Meyer has spent enough consecutive time at down-to-earth labors in the Middle East to know what he is talking about...

...The author does conclude with one valid note of cheer—though it is negative, and should be taken with reserve unless we wish to commit the perilous sin of complacency...

...The author catalogues numerous other ingrown frailties of the region: lack of entrepreneurial specialization...

...In addition, the further one-way passage of payments and talents is jeopardized by such dark obstacles as the Arabs' golden-goose appetite for a larger share of the oil spoils, and by the brake on export prices implicit in the technological progress constantly achieved by outside competitors...

...With similar largesse he has already deposited an estimated $1 billion from oil to his own private accounts abroad, making him the largest single source of supply for the London money market...

...In the face of all the grandiose planning, there is nowhere discernible an approach to "the point where dependence on the outside world seems lessening, or where a take-off into sustained growth seems imminent...

...Western economists and economic policy-makers have congenitally performed as if the inhabitants of the Middle East were pretty much the same kind of people as the inhabitants of Europe and North America...

...Nearly all of this, one is constrained to reply, we have already largely agreed to or been doing anyway...

...he cautions us...

...This aid has ranged from a current annual $1-billion oil royalty and tax bonanza, to Anglo-Soviet-American purchases, grants and loans, to the import of steady overseas remittances from emigrants and sympathizers and the import of skills by non-indigenous refugees...

...In the end, nevertheless, the author delivers to the reader a corpus of recommendation which seems, to put it mildly, a letdown...

...Still, one might have expected him, after such a brilliant expose, to make at least a college try at some original proposals, springing logically from his diagnosis...

...the absence of trade associations and of standardization...

...Actually, Meyer regrets, no truly beneficial reform has occurred in economic structure, where change really counts: no relatively larger employment in industry than in agriculture, no increase in mass purchasing power despite the rise in per capita income, no higher level of productive private investment...

...Too often, foreign capital influx has merely caused capital "indigestion...

...The Turks have earnestly striven to create a large independent peasantry through careful agrarian reform—but at the same time they have imported 40,000 tractors, each of which makes the work of eight peasants obsolete and dispenses with Turkey's economic need for them...

...Having laid all this on, however, Meyer proceeds to probe behind the woodwork and uncover disquieting activities and situations...

...He notes straightaway that, compared with its own previous history and with the record of South Asia, Africa and Latin America, the Middle East shows "remarkable" improvement in its first postwar decade...

...He stresses that the Arab world shows signs of growing disenchanted with the Soviets, now that the Kremlin too is grappling with the region's economic enormities...

...Each sets the welfare and elevation of the humble citizenry as its high objective...

...Economic growth has been not only primed but supported by astronomic foreign aid...

...a "temporal safety margin"—perhaps the lifetime of one more generation—still exists for the rest of the Middle East to speed production, slow down population growth and thus equalize the ratio between "hands working" and "mouths eating...

...But many readers will feel it is not good enough reason to stop trying for new approaches, really new ones...

...He lauds the results of the foreign oil companies' innovations to "integrate" themselves into the local economic scene by spurring native development programs, using native skills and resources, directing company and employe purchasing power toward indigenous services and supply...

...Meyer may be hampered by modesty or caution, aware as he is of the pitfalls in prescriptions for the ailing Middle East...

...The general preference of the area, he reports, is still for the West...

...as if theories, principles and practical remedies which might work or have worked in the West would also work in the East, since people are really the same all over, aren't they...

...Meyer applauds the "massive social overhead investment" programs of some of the governments, their proclaimed dedication to breaking up oversized estates and share-cropperism, and their trend toward increasingly large government out-lays for the commonweal...

...Except for the occasional and hedging insertion of bright flashes into the encircling gloom, Meyer has led his reader to suspect that something is radically wrong with Western policy...

...Wherever one turns in the Middle East's economy, one encounters more such Alice-in-Wonderland delights and sad paradoxes...

...He even grants, with Peter Bauer, that Western economic doctrine does have some relevance to elementary aspects of the Oriental economy—at least in such '"basic methods" and "elementary conclusions" as supply-demand factors, the eternal individual search for relatively profitable occupations, and the complementary-competitive relationships between productive resources...

...Meyer goes so far as to intone the gloomy verdict that Egypt, like most of Asia, cannot aspire ever to catch up on the man-land imbalance...

...We ought to favor economic aid over military aid...

...And, finally, economic plans and planners are epidemic throughout the area...

...But then he winds up with the advice, in effect, that we and others in the West should go on doing for the East what we have been doing all along, only more so...

...devotion to quick profit rather than to bigger output...

...Yet scarcely anywhere is visible progress being made toward a more equitable distribution of income to the agriculturist, the base of the economy being planned...

...Despite widespread reduction of the great baronial holdings, a proprietor of the maximum allowable 200 acres in the Nile Delta or the Syrian Jezira still stays fat and wealthy while the yeomanry stands wanly outside looking in...

...The Middle East is obviously an economic world such as we in the West have never known...

...Failing this, one has the unhappy sensation of being invited to administer old bromides...

...He finds hope in a tendency of certain merchants and industrialists to invest funds and curiosity into agriculture and even of certain landowners to contemplate the merits of soil improvement and machinery...

...Examining successive phenomena and problems cogent to his over-all survey, the author is careful to set down everything good there is to say about each of them...

...Let's stop insisting on Arab loyalty to us, let's not boggle over the area's passion for "neutralism," let's deal with the nation-state rather than push for regional consolidation, let's train more "Ugly Americans" for the earnest guidance of the Middle Easterner and fewer marginal misfits from American land-grant colleges...

...Meyer puts it in a nutshell when he writes: "So different are the resource patterns, histories, structures of economies, capacities to govern and breeds of man [in the Middle East], that projections based on postwar Europe's response to transfusions of public capital become virtually meaningless...

...The more the Russians walk in the Middle East, the more their feet of imperial clay will be revealed...

...Too often, native professors of economics merely drum economic dogmas swallowed at foreign universities into their students' heads without relevance to local conditions which contradict them...

...There is some objective evidence that Meyer is right about this...

...I have known local giants of commerce and finance, in places like Beirut, who by a telephone call or a laconic cable could send ships purposefully on their way loaded with bullion from South Africa, strategic metals and minerals from Hong Kong, or cocoa from Ghana...

...Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser's huge and hugely advertised Aswan Dam project, if and when completed, will create vast new reaches of arable land for Egypt's hungry millions—but will not ameliorate their misery one whit, because by that time Egypt's galloping demography will have given birth to enough millions to render the lopside-edness between land and stomachs no less lopsided than before...

...The vast uninstructed peasant majority is left to pursue such economically debilitating practices as burning fertilizer for fuel instead of mixing it with the soil, or subdividing puny scraps of field among swarming heirs according to Islamic tradition, condemning each legatee to greater famine than his father...

...In other words, the West's economic medicine men have put the fellah and his masters into their own gray flannel suits or themselves into the fellah's galabiya — loin cloth — instead of admitting that the poor devil is a type all his own, instead of trying to think as he thinks when they calculate the chances of any bright formula for his redemption...

...the endemic existence of the "family firm" rather than the skilled manager (with its concomitants of padded private payrolls, irrational capitalism, myriads of aunts and cousins in the civil service) ; the paucity of grassland (a dearth which helped topple Greece and Rome) ; the barrenness of managerial invention...

...They will ask for policy suggestions, even at the risk of a little daring, designed to fathom and confront firmly the peculiar economic (and political) human and national behavior patterns which Meyer himself has underlined, instead of programs which are, after all, hardly more than bigger and better draughts of old-time elixirs...

...Too often, the "demonstration effect" of high-consumption levels abroad — a pet theory of many Western pundits and the alibi for invasion by Hollywood—only prods the demand for Western-made gadgets and for lavish feasts, rather than for "Operation Bootstrap" and brave increases in home production...

...he doesn't make altogether clear whether he approves or decries the shift...

...as if the only difficulty were the Middle East's relative underdevelopment...

...the Korean War sent wheat and cotton prices zooming...