Half-Speed Ahead

...In my view, he has failed to answer a crucial chronological and quantitative question: Can Britain shift quickly enough and in a substantial enough fashion really to pay for all the imports its citizens need or want with the artifacts of "mind and spirit" foreigners are willing to pay for...

...Nossiter does not dispute the charge that British workers turn out about half as many finished products as their European counterparts, even when they use equally modern equipment...

...For their part, the British, a highly civilized race, prefer to divide annual growth dividends between more leisure and more things...

...One of the strongest chapters in this volume is an illuminating analysis of the British role in Northern Ireland...

...Frequent interruptions break the monotony...

...No reason to panic...

...As Nossiter explains the matter, the general impression of British stagnation is a consequence of the fact that living standards in Western Europe during the same three decades rose even more rapidly...

...Hypocrites at least are ashamed of the feelings they suppress...

...medicine, insurance, teaching, and the arts...

...England's future is attractive because "Things of the mind and spirit?books, medicine, television, music, drama, education (as well as banking and insurance)—not only enrich the human personality but enable men and women to earn their way in a world whose material income expands...

...One need only hark back to the venerable principle of comparative advantage...

...Unlike their many critics, they feel no need to match the living'standards of the Swedes and West Germans...

...Reviewed by Robert Lekachman Bernard Nossiter, London correspondent for the Washington Post, admires England even more than I do...

...Hence, as people and capital shift, "the transfer need not be from less efficient to more efficient manufacturing, but to those areas where Britain has the greatest advantage...

...By Nossiter's telling, this style of life is perfectly consistent with British prosperity...

...its commanders sabotaged a fragile power-sharing deal that William Whitelaw, the Conservative minister then responsible for Irish affairs, had patiently worked out...

...In other words, Americans and other frantic types collect the rewards of technology almost entirely in the form of additional goods and appliances...

...As expounded by its inventor David Ricardo in 1817, it recommends national specialization in those activities where a country enjoys the widest margin of superiority over its trading rivals...

...Nossiter worries also about the spread of racial bigotry in England and the feeble official reaction to it, yet seems to underestimate the gravity of the problem...

...For blue- and white-collar toilers this has been the real golden age...

...Moreover, one way of humanizing factory work is to avoid taking assembly lines too seriously...

...British workers and managers simply attach great value to a leisurely work pace and to the pursuit of recreations off the job that demand relatively small expenditures of cash...

...Nossiter labels this behavior a quiet mutiny and fears it has impaired the tradition of civilian control over the armed services...

...For ordinary English workers real income has been steadily increasing (until the last three years) ever since the end of World War II...

...There is something to be said for American hypocrisy on this topic...

...Irritated by routine adverse verdicts on British productivity, union and management behavior, and the economy in general, he has composed a spirited response to conservatives like Irving Kristol, pundits at Harvard and elsewhere, and the futurologists of Herman Kahn's Hudson Institute...

...Nossiter's case is a good deal stronger than casual readers of the newspapers might think...

...The bias of national income measurement notoriously is in favor of things, the quantity rather than the quality of life...

...The bulk of the country's natural advantages now, though, are located in the service sector—in which, conveniently, most talented young people prefer to work...

...A good economist and a gifted writer, Nossiter is persuasive up to a point...

...For visiting Americans, there is something shocking in hearing open expressions of racial prejudice from the lips of well-educated, presumptively liberal English friends...

...As the recent convictions under the Official Secrets Act seem to suggest, Britain's unwritten constitution protects civil liberties a good deal less than does our own Bill of Rights...

...But the English, comparing their earlier and later state, are pleased...

...British industry is still competitive by global standards in a few manufacturing specialities...

...The British Army has not merely favored the Protestant side of the civil war...

...It sounds like fun, but is it a way to run a railroad...

...As for the executives, they come late to their offices, go home early and indulge in British variants of three-martini lunches—a sherry or two before the repast, a sound claret accompanying it, and a snifter of the club's superior cognac to top off the meal...

...In the end, whether one accepts or rejects Nossiter's brief for the soundness of England's economy and society depends less on tedious disputes over factory productivity and managerial enterprise than on the weight attached to evident erosion of civil liberties and growing xenophobia...

...Nossiter's own qualifications of his general optimism are, if anything, more disturbing...

...I am somewhat more pessimistic than Nossiter about British prospects, but I hope that his qualified optimism is justified...

...For Britain, a postindustrial society, these are not steel, shipbuilding, textiles, or even autos and consumer items...