How Do We Climb Down from Pisgah?
BELL, DANIEL
How Do We Climb Down from Pisgah? TOWARD A DEMOCRATIC LEFT By Michael Harrington Macmillan. 314 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by DANIEL BELL Professor oj Sociology, Columbia University Few persons...
...What do we do next?' A generation later the same wildfire spirit was touched off when four young Negroes sat down and demanded a cup of coffee at a Jim Crow lunch counter in North Carolina...
...there would be an enormous gain for both the individual and the society...
...Yet if there were any villians in the Reston case, they were first "the public," which did not respond sufficiently to these imaginative designs, and perhaps more important, the rigidity of a government that failed to provide the future bond guarantee necessary for the developer, Robert Simon, to reduce his debt service charges...
...Perhaps I draw a different moral from the story, a dilemma which Harrington largely ignores...
...The report shall project the basic choices, and estimate both the economic and social costs of alternate programs...
...My feeling, then, is not that Harrington's book is wrong, but that it is irrelevant...
...Harrington writes: "There is an anecdote which John Cort tells of the Thirties...
...He was a consultant to the task force which eventually drew up the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, and he writes: "At my first meeting with [Sargent] Shriver I told him that the billion dollars the White House then planned to invest in the project was 'nickels and dimes.' ('Oh really, Mr...
...If there is any further lesson to be learned from these experiences, it is that a social program can work best when the government sets guidelines, policy, and standards, but leaves the administration and operation to a wide variety of decentralized units...
...That is a much more mundane task, and there are few people working on laying out the road, let alone building it...
...The gap between the intellectual and the technocrat, indeed, is that the former has little notion of how to turn ideas into a program...
...In short, all the reforms urged throughout the book can take on their proper meaning when people are in motion...
...And, in fact, such an effort, though less grandiose, is under way...
...They have the organizational skills, the experience and flexibility, and they even have a motive...
...We've just kicked the manager out and started a sit-down strike...
...Everybody wants to be the prophet...
...If there is any lesson to be learned from these past few years, it is that there is little "magic" in the phrase "the government must do...
...But what is the program...
...Yarmolinsky has accurately observed: "Bureaucrats realize better than anyone else how difficult it is to get anything done in government and they adopt the devices of routinizing and systematizing—and bureaucratizing—if you will, in order that certain things at least will be done...
...This proves that good ideas are relatively easy to come by but are not easily incarnated in workable programs-?especially large programs involving millions of people...
...And the inability to learn from the past 30 years also leaves me with a sense of dismay...
...Yet it leaves me with a sense of despair...
...He wants to stand on Pisgah and point to the future while, like every radical ideologue, clinging to his perch and staving off the other ideologues who are trying to shove him off the mountain so that they can point the way...
...But how does one get from Pisgah to the Promised Land...
...It may be that many more persons living in slums will be rehoused faster by a "rent supplement" program which pays a landlord 25 per cent of the rent and allows the private developer to borrow mortgage money against the security of government leases, than by cumbersome government-built housing projects...
...As Adam Yar-molinsky has remarked, an idea is a "free good," there is no cost involved...
...Reviewed by DANIEL BELL Professor oj Sociology, Columbia University Few persons today recall the name of Tom Amlie...
...What has been happening, in fact, is that new goals and new programs are proliferating faster than improvements in administrative procedures...
...During the great surge of labor consciousness, the phone rang in a union office and a woman's voice said...
...The test, necessarily, has to be performance—within the framework of the social goals that we have agreed upon...
...But if one adopts a test of performance, rather than ideological purity, it may well be that such profit is cheaper for the society than the lagging progress and heavy-handed bureaucratization of governmental enterprises...
...One has to avoid the ideological fetishes which, in a priori fashion, rule out schemes simply because they do not square with the ideology...
...Our hope is that it will parallel the annual Economic Report in providing a set of measures for the performance of the society in meeting social and welfare needs, as we now try to measure economic performance...
...And why not...
...If in the next period there were a movement which would play the role of the cio in 1937 or the civil-rights organizations of 1960...
...The point of all this is that, short of Utopia, a society has to provide a large number of varied incentives, and usually monetary ones, to induce individuals and firms to act, especially for the realization of social programs, where there is little or no immediate economic payoff...
...Michael Harrington's book reminds me of Amlie's document, which excited my imagination 30 years ago...
...Harrington cites as a "striking illustration of what commercial values do to social and esthetic considerations" the fate of the New Town of Reston, Virginia, whose goals could not be "accommodated on a businesslike basis," resulting in its being taken over by the financial backer, the Gulf Oil Company...
...now it is the radical who denounces services and demands money...
...Harrington subtitles his book, ambiguously, "A Radical Program for a New Majority...
...Specifically, "What do we do next...
...For like Amlie's plan, Harrington's argument is essentially feckless—that is, without efficacy...
...Italics added—D.B...
...Its theme was simple and persuasive: We had the means to create abundance for all...
...And there is one general proposal: The President shall be obliged to make to the nation a periodic Report on the Future...
...How ideological fashions change...
...I have italicized some of Harrington's words because 1 would be grateful if he could clarify their meaning...
...Ten years ago, liberals and radicals wanted to provide "services" for the poor, while the conservatives wanted to provide money...
...More dismaying, they are increasing far faster than the number of competent administrators and planners...
...For example, despite the subtitle, there is no program in this book...
...In a chapter entitled "The Social-Industrial Complex," Harrington looks darkly on the entry of private industry into the operation of government-financed social programs, because they are in it "for profit" (a strange accusation, since Harrington relies for his economics on John Kenneth Galbraith, and one of his chief arguments in The New Industrial State is that stability, not profit, is the principal motivation of big business today...
...I think that Harrington does not know how to spend a billion dollars, and that all his hortatory earnestness is of little help in doing so...
...And even when one has finally set up a program, there is the further problem of operation...
...Together with William Gorham, the assistant secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, I have been heading a government panel to write the prototype of a Presidential Social Report...
...Thus Robert A. Levine, the assistant directoi of the Office of Economic Opportunity, writes (in the Winter, 1968, issue of the Public Interest): "As one reflects on the troubled history of the 'war on poverty' and other social programs of the Great Society, it becomes clear that the problem is not so much the nature of the programs, as it is difficulties of administration...
...Some of these operational units may be private enterprises...
...There is another anecdote in this book from which I draw, again, a far different moral than Harrington does...
...This is an unexceptionable suggestion...
...For these goals are not attained by rhetoric...
...In 1938 Amlie, a Congressman from Wisconsin, proposed the Commonwealth Plan...
...Harrington,' Shriver said, 'I don't know about you, but this is the first time I've spent a billion dollars...
...A program is an "economic good": One has to specify institutional arrangements, to say who is to do what...
...But given Harrington's, and our, ambitions—to eliminate poverty, provide liveable cities, clean up the environment, raise health levels, expand educational opportunities, and the like—the chief question remains: How do we do it...
...This is Mary Jones at the drugstore...
...The worst government programs are those stressing detailed planning and detailed administration—such as price control and rationing, public assistance and public housing?because their very detail creates rigidities that make them unworkable or invite abuse...
...One item can be taken as the touchstone of the problem...
...The report shall state a Social Consumption Criterion which will clearly measure the impact of every department of public expenditure on the social standard of living...
...The change in policy was only made belatedly...
...There is some rhetoric: ". . . . society [must] dictate to the Gross National Product rather than the other way around, the change must be conscious and democratic," whatever that means...
...what we had to do was redirect our spending and insure that the government established the correct social priorities...
...I suspect that he has little sense of the enormous conceptual difficulties in defining exactly what one would mean by a "social standard of living," let alone an "adequate social minimum," "decent housing," and other nice-sounding phrases...
Vol. 51 • May 1968 • No. 11
