The Stupidity of Free-Market Chic . . . . . . in Eastern Europe
Rowe, Jonathan
The Stupidity of Free-Market Chic . . . . . . in Eastern Europe A How American economics is hurting Polish capitalism by Jonathan Rowe A visitor arrives at the Warsaw airport with...
...They didn’t spring up overnight, like the farmers’ markets in Warsaw that the press has been doting on as the harbingers of a Capitalist Spring...
...Now I must work 16 hours a day...
...We want capitalist relations here but we don’t know what this is,” one Milanowek resident told me...
...Yes, life is easier here...
...On this particular trip, however, our host drove a little further, to a town called Milanowek about 20 miles outside Warsaw...
...There are Sam Spozywczy (“serve yourself food”) stores in all the neighborhoods, a kind of state-owned 7-11 for bread and basics...
...A theme heard over and over, in 50 different ways, is how the Communists destroyed the connection between effort and reward...
...Foreign investment has much stricter ecological standards,” Lindenberg says, explaining why Poland should court American business...
...Money is in the streets,” he says...
...People told me that the reporting is generally free of government tilt...
...It probably was not an accident that my host built his house last year...
...not too much...
...People eat at home, their foods often grown locally...
...So will Richard Puch, who stone-washes dungarees in a small factory in Milanowek...
...His business is struggling as he spends almost all his time on town affairs...
...What these small businesses do want is practical advice on how to save enerfamily dinner table instead of going to McDonald’s, there is little for the GNP...
...But attach to the economist’s neutered term “capital” the name of the actual places from which that investment is likely to come and complications arise...
...The customs agent is dressed in an armysurplusstyle uniform too big around the waist, and the clutter behind the baggage claim counter brings to mind the office at a refrigerator repair shop...
...But like most things it requires investment, know-how, tools that won’t simply appear if nobody makes them available...
...The market, he says, “will bring both sides, good and bad as well...
...But it has no sewers and many dirt roads, plus a huge debt that the old communist government left behind...
...So it is the macro-whizzes who hold sway in the national and international debates...
...You only need a garden tool to rake it in...
...But what about the local enThe Polish communists were not orthodox Marxists...
...Poland, like the rest of Eastern Europe, now has too little unemployment, ment...
...Well, there may be a few things you can do...
...But the job of doing it is falling to people like Moes, and he’s getting worn to a frazzle...
...Poles should work harder but not the way Americans do...
...Economists assume that given the correct price “signals,” conservation will appear by spontaneous generation...
...Yet the family dinner table represents social cohesion Americans are groping to recover...
...He was recently elected chairman of the new Milanowek town council, which has the job of digging out after 45 years of communist cronyism and bad managetablished channels...
...Some think the collective memory is too strong for economic changes to dislodge...
...Shopping malls haven’t replaced the traditional town center, which reinforces a sense of social cohesion and community...
...sometimes feel adrift in a world in which people relate more to work and to things than to each other...
...This part Poles don’t understand...
...People in government must be very careful not to let foreign money overwhelm us and dominate US,’’ Moes says...
...During two years in America, he says, “I never made a real American friend...
...Andrzej Stepnik of Milanowek illustrates the leavening effect of Polish culture on free-market views...
...He talks about the need for zoning and land-use controls in town and warns that the “sharks” are starting to circle Poland for financial killings...
...People expect that the town management will give them a flat, will give them work...
...Moes lives in a modern one-story house he designed himself, set back from the road behind a cluster of trees...
...Poles who visit the U.S...
...and before a youth culture, prompted by the marketing needs of business, drives a wedge between parents and their kids...
...By looking the other way, the authorities turned private enterprise into a means of social control...
...Moes represents a side of Poland not much reported in the American press: anticommunist, pro-free market, but not obsessed with economics in the manner of American free marketeers...
...Sweating equity Beyond the appearance of fancy houses around Milanowek, the other big change has been the introduction of a program designed to plunge Poland into a free-market economy...
...Their idea of a sacrifice is a capital gains tax cut...
...This is not to understate the fascination with things American...
...Though the space isn’t bad by New York standards-plumbing excepted-most American writers in their mid-thirties would find such an arrangement stifling...
...But what I saw there suggests some significant gaps in the press reports coming back to the American public...
...The truth about anything-history, the economy, one’s own businesscouldn’t be spoken, was conducted off the books...
...Brostek lives with his wife and her parents in a small apartment building in Milanowek...
...Poles apart Free-market ideology stresses the impersonal relationship of contracts...
...Research assistance was provided by Joshua Ray Levin...
...Americans supposedly learned from In Search of Excellence and its progeny that a healthy economy begins with healthy fms...
...Yet the family dinner table represents a kind of cohesion that Americans are groping to recover...
...The kitchen was done in hand carpentry, with bright red utensils and matching TV...
...The town center has everything from a large garden supply store to an inchoate boutique...
...A week in Milanowek hardly qualifies me as an expert on Poland...
...It’s easy for American economists to preach a “cold turkey” plunge into capitalism...
...The intelligent people think about that, the Americanization of our culture,” Jacek Gutowski says...
...For one thing, Poland has a lot of private entrepreneurs...
...He spoke no English, however, so for an explanation of how such private business took hold in a communist nation, I asked Andrzej Moes...
...They are a little piece of freedom...
...They were once so for Americans too, of course, and there’s no reason to expect Poles to be any different, especially considering the dark night they’ve come through...
...It is in my blood...
...If the iron gate at my host’s driveway was a surprise, an even greater one was the house behind...
...Their leaders worry that euphoric economists are creating the impression that the market is a magic carpet to prosperity and ease...
...My garden...
...Lila Szoszuk, a retired resident of Milanowek, spent three months with her brother in the Chicago area in 1983...
...The teenagers who soak up “Dynasty” in the afternoon may have different notions, however...
...The explanation for this relative affluence was an old shed out back...
...Our television is not for joy,” Lila added...
...This is true in the political realm as well...
...It is a problem of mentality,” says Jacek Gutowski, a geologist and member of the Milanowek council...
...Dynasty’ doesn’t show how hard the guy has to work,” says Gregg Lindenberg, manager of Warsaw Gazetta, the popular new Warsaw daily that is aligned with the anti-Walesa faction of Solidarity...
...They didn’t care about other people...
...Capitalist boobs Poles often say they don’t really know much about this thing called “the market” in concrete particulars...
...When I go to walk, they think it strange...
...You can expect that we know all these bad things...
...On another wall is his other grandfather, who lost his land to the Russians after World War 11...
...Stepnik is a square-shouldered former merchant seaman who shipped out because, as he puts it, speaking of the communists, “I hated those guys...
...One, the daughter of a fairly prosperous businessman, commented, “We don’t have enough...
...To hide turnover...
...From landed nobility they were reduced to wandering “nomads” until they settled in Milanowek in the late 1940s...
...But that raises a lot of questions, one of which is whether it’s enough to sweat off the fat without taking care of the muscle...
...In the U.S., by contrast, wealthy Americans have conniptions at the possibility of a tax increase of some 2 or 3 percent...
...From the street, it looked like a place for rusted oil drums, the Gasoline Alley that Americans expect in Poland...
...The camera lingers on scenes without the jumpy, quick-cut techniques used in America to cater to short attention spans...
...Such memories lie behind one of the hottest political debates in Poland right now-how quickly to get rid of the old nomenklatura, the party elite now in a position to set themselves up in the newly privatizing industries...
...It represents a routing of the system in which the communists jiggered everything, in which hypocrisy pervaded the whole society...
...They explained how the utility could save money (and cut pollution) by helping entrepreneurs like Puch finance new motors instead of adding generating capacity to the plant...
...These have gone up precipitously, 50 percent for commercial rates and 100 percent for residential...
...There are too many things to be done at once,” he says...
...Rather, they were a bastard form, a kind of mafia...
...You had to hide part of the income and pay part [of your salaries] under the table...
...A power plant belches smoke in the distance, and everything seems tired and gray like an old house going to seed...
...I learned that Milanowek is bustling with cottage businesses, enough to have a small chamber of commerce...
...I think I can’t live in America,” she says...
...To a Western economist, though, such things look like poverty and underdevelopment...
...His idea is to help Milanowek manufacturers market their products in the U.S., with his share of the profit going back to the town in the form of conservation equipment...
...The outskirts of Warsaw offer more along this line...
...Today he can sound like a supply-sider...
...My father was very rich...
...Tree-shaded streets ramble towards the town center, where people go to shop or catch the train...
...The general ambience resembles a Worcester, Massachusetts airfield circa 1957...
...Life is a succession of deals, all to maximize personal benefit...
...That was when the communists finally fell from power...
...It is no clear how American economists qualify even on that limited ground these days...
...people get a full-fledged Polish dinner at a kitchen down the hall...
...He and his partner are doing it Ben Franklin style, using a printing business for financial support...
...We have more calm living...
...RJR recently bought an East German cigarette maker...
...Until recently, the shop buildings belonged to the state, so the commercial presence is muted...
...There are no billboards, no neon, no carry-out...
...Reynolds et al...
...people are accustomed to relate all problems to the money problem...
...It seems a long, long way in Milanowek before McDonald’s becomes an alternative to the family dinner table...
...The phones work...
...It is quite comfortable by Polish standards...
...Now these entrepreneurs face a new challenge: the Jonathan Rowe is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...
...The priorities for the new Milanowek council include sewers and low-income housing...
...But the right needs to grasp that there is more to this than Milton Friedman...
...This is really simple stuff for us,” Gordes says...
...Western observers should not over-dramatize layoffs and bankruptcies,” Sachs wrote in The Economist back in January...
...As Solidarity evolved from a socially minded labor organization into a broad-based movement, free-market thinking became its intellectual edge...
...Most people in Poland don’t realize that they have very good things apart from the political and economic problems,” says Andrzej Moes, Milanowek entrepenuer and chairman of the newly elected town council...
...Elderly couples, as well as mothers and children, pedal along on fat-tired bikes, net shopping bags over the handlebars...
...The rituals of food preparation and eating still revolve almost entirely around the home...
...Despite myself, I felt at first restless and deprived...
...People expect that somebody will give them something...
...He helped the new town council defeat the communist slate by publishing candidate profiles for the respective voting districts...
...Under the free market crash program, they have endured a drop in purchasing power of somewhere between 30 and 40 percent...
...before power lawnmowers turn Saturday mornings into an aural nightmare...
...In particular, there is a good deal of naivete on the political dimensions of capitalism-on the role of advertisers in influencing the press, for example, and on the political power of corporations...
...People organize their own lives without the guiding hand of the state...
...There was a ring of desperation in their voices,” he adds...
...There’s a great deal about Poland, and especially a town like Milanowek, that doesn’t show up in the GNP...
...When you don’t even have sewers, how are you going to begin to address such prospects anyway...
...The party clique ran everything...
...It can take days to realize how many stores there are in town...
...Getting a workshop and raw materials, for example, taxed ingenuity since there were no estrepreneurs...
...Then a series of the new Americanstyle ads appeared...
...Weathered old folks, like peasants in elementary social studies texts, pedal ancient bicycles along the main road...
...The factory When people brought Gordes and another local conservation specialist over there to do energy audits of local businesses and to brief local utility officials on peak-load pricing and similar strategies...
...We have poor people,” he continues, “but still in Poland many people don’t put together the problems of life and the problems of money...
...In some ways, Poland is ahead for being behind...
...The lines at the butcher shops were no longer than what Americans encounter at supermarkets and discount drug stores...
...After the war he was very, very poor...
...The thought does not rest comfortably on the Polish mind that Germany might now be able to accomplish with marks what it failed to do with tanks...
...I made people who are called, in America, ‘friend...
...One widow in Milanowek keeps a stun gun on her kitchen table...
...their property was taken, her husband died...
...In Poland, which is still largely rural, life tends towards the personal...
...Moes is unfailingly considerate and polite, to the point of embarrassment, given his schedule...
...Family ties are strong...
...Though the biggest line, at noontime, was at the liquor counter...
...There were two more TVs downstairs, and a fourth in the daughter’s room upstairs...
...The American left needs to grasp the exhilaration, the anti-establishment quality, that free-market thinking holds for people like Lindenberg...
...He stripping and insGlation...
...in communist times, it was where Poles could speak the truth...
...I have a good day...
...At the offices of Warsaw Gazetta, there are no Styrofoam containers and sandwich wrappers on the desks...
...Probably he has been working 14 hours a day 6 days a week for 20 years...
...My host, an animated man named Stanislaw Cwiklinski, was a prototypical small entrepreneurconstantly in motion, on the phone in his basement office at all hours of the day and night...
...One was for dungarees: the familiar motorcycles, black leather, and hips...
...Moes has thrown himself into the task of rebuilding from the rubble...
...Having survived the communists, local entrepreneurs face a new problem in the cold-turkey measures urged by people like Sachs...
...the ad ends with a well-endowed young lady, wearing nothing at all, slipping playfully into bed...
...The second point is more elusive but no less important: Economics has become virtually the only lens through which we view developments in the former East Bloc...
...For all this, most Milanowek residents I talked to have reservations about life in the U.S...
...What worries Brostek, by contrast, is time...
...It is for the mind-to know more about the world...
...They carried on business for their own sake...
...But Moes, like others, is fatalistic...
...Another was graffiti in the tunnel under the railroad tracks, stating in English, “Skateboarding is not a crime...
...As we talked, we were watching Brostek’s news show on a color TV set...
...The same waste-intensive energy policies that helped get us into the Middle East crisis are now preventing us from promoting free enterprise in the East Bloc...
...And he is an environmentalist...
...There’s a remarkable lack of self-pity in this country...
...We are not so spoiled by industry, commerce, and technology...
...Poles know they need money from outside, along with the Italian gelato has here...
...This is a time when people who were against the communist system should do something for the country,” he says...
...A former country retreat for wealthy Warsawites, Milanowek today is a combination suburb and small factory town, with truck (actually horse) farms on the fringe...
...Even though he is a businessman, he does not see the fall of communism solely in terms of investment opportunity and gain...
...Boom boxes don’t disrupt the parks...
...Efficient new motors would pay for themselves many times over, if he could raise the capital to buy them...
...Poland’s free-market tonic has brought rising prices and-for the first time in memory-unemployment...
...A small bakery offers homemade ice cream at seven cents a scoop...
...This is tradition, but that the gates are often closed shows, I was told, a growing concern about crime...
...They have not the time to arrange for me a trip...
...Poles have a sophisticated grasp of certain points of similarity between communism and capitalism, however...
...There is not much packaging, litter, or waste...
...when you have a lot of money, you like only the people who have the same money...
...Germany is the prime example...
...The latter was one of the few signs of a youth culture...
...But all these things--Coca-Cola, McDonald’s-are near to our feelings...
...Suddenly, it was okay to show what you had...
...Today, people speak of the old regulated prices for such things as food and utilities as “dishonest” rather than, as economists do, “inefficient...
...Gregg Lindenberg noted the same thing...
...For me money is nothing...
...Questions such as what makes a town livable, what makes families close-we might well be seeking advice from the residents of Milanowek, rather than them seeking it from us...
...My friends...
...What economists tout as “market-clearing’’ prices may clear the market of entrepreneurs...
...More important than the plan are the values that lie beneath it...
...Freedom, by contrast, means the freedom to do right, not just to make money...
...A former Solidarity activist, Lindenberg was imprisoned during martial law in the early eighties...
...When I buy toilet paper I am happy,” one woman said...
...Poles have a chance to ask basic questions that we stopped asking long ago,” says Andrew Golebiowski, director of the Polish Municipal Training Programs for Sister Cities International...
...I have a [concern] that I will lose my lifestyle-being close with my friends and family and culture,” he says...
...Built last year, it was a modern chateau-style structure that would have stood proudly in Potomac, Virginia, or Lincoln, Massachusetts...
...Gordes was in Poland with Hank Ryan, who is trying to show on a small scale how Americans can provide such tools for Polish economic self-help...
...The “Dynasty” reruns in the late afternoon perpetuate this belief...
...They got the best government jobs and the best private businesses and “joint ventures” as well...
...D y n as t y ” d e m e n t i a Andrzej Moes had every reason to become a National Review hero-the kind of asocial, acquisitive Ayn Rand character that the right-wing press imagines rising out of the ashes of communism...
...Yet today, Moes speaks quietly, without the distemper common among anticommunists in the U.S...
...Family is central...
...The communists did pad the payrolls shamelessly, so that state-owned enterprises employed many thousands of people they didn’t need...
...Poles share a memory of suffering and oppression that has helped them tolerate hard economic measures with relatively little wailing and self-pity...
...As the days passed, I began to feel unburdened and relaxed...
...But people like Puch are not complaining...
...At a meeting of the local craft council, businessmen expressed enthusiasm for the idea...
...when people sit around the family dinner table instead of going to McDonald’s and a movie, there is no cash transaction, little for the GNP...
...In the U.S...
...The old subsidized rates may have encouraged waste, but this kind of sudden increase undermines the cost structure of fragile local businesses...
...Brostek doesn’t . The old Marxist critique of capitalism warned of poverty, unemployment, social insecurity, and so forth...
...People still read...
...Much as American parents of the fifties saw the world through the lens of the Depression and World War 11, Polish parents and grandparents today remember Hitler, Stalin, and the hardship of the past 45 years...
...There’s enough toilet paper...
...This may sound patronizing, but at least some Poles think about these things, and wonder just how much of the American model they actually want...
...Sachs preaches a kind of macro-economic machismo...
...At the Sam Spozywczy store business culture and marketing savvy that comes with it...
...He is an organic gardener, for example, whose wife makes natural pesticides by boiling certain plants...
...Polish TV news is of surprisingly high quality, more literate and reflective than the American network version...
...They were skilled machinists, and inside were machines with which they made bearings for use in Fiats manufactured in Czechoslovakia and East Germany...
...But in terms of family, friendship, things not encompassed in the economic sphere, they don’t want to lose what they have...
...Pollution is a problem that Poles associate with the communist bosses...
...In some ways, Poland is ahead for being behind...
...They were much more civil...
...No place to go for coffee and a bagel, not even a Hershey bar...
...Puch knows he needs to conserve, but no one locally knows how to help him,” says Joel Gordes, a Connecticut state legislator and conservation consultant who was in Milanowek recently, meeting with local entrepreneurs...
...Here people are forced to lead a social life, to have contacts...
...In this sense, Poland brings out the fault line in American rightwing thought between traditional family and community values on the one hand and the aggressive market culture that tends to undermine them on the other...
...He has hopes for a local radio station, possibly even TV...
...I hope the good influence will be the majority...
...the market, like democracy, isn’t ideal, only the least bad...
...The previous night he was in Warsaw until very late, discussing a new banking system and questions of foreign investment...
...If the U.S...
...Milanowek is a quiet and almost idyllic place...
...Smoking seems to be Poland’s national sport, and a potentially large leakage of foreign exchange to the coffers of R.J...
...In the U.S...
...People don’t go out for a quick bite because there’s no place to go...
...Brostek is starting an independent local paper in Milanowek, called Nasza, which means “Our...
...More than 70 years of communist thuggery hang heavily over his living room...
...In the end I felt in Milanowek not the euphoric free-market utopianism of The Wall Street Journal editorial page but rather a kind of fatalism...
...But they kept quiet for the most part, giving rise to a kind of reverse Potemkin Village effect in which things seemed poorer than they actually were...
...If time stopped in the fifties in Poland, then a town like this is the good side...
...Strangely, communist Poland had come to replicate what John Kenneth Galbraith observed about American capitalism: private wealth amid public poverty...
...Adam Brostek, a journalist with the state television network, reflects this ambivalence...
...Even a little town like Milanowek has a “Cafe Royal Bar,” a cozy little nook with three tables and American cigarette posters on the wall...
...This is not to downplay the appeal of a market economy...
...It’s easy to see how visiting journalists, traversing the route from airport to Holiday Inn and going on to the offices of politicians and intellectuals, could imbibe this view...
...They pressed Ryan for videos explaining conservation techniques and began discussing the possibility of converting their own small factories-ones that turn out plastic toys, for exsit around the ample-to making, weather uses a lot of electricity for washing and drying, and Puch isn’t sure he’s going to make it through the winter heating season...
...You won’t find people so hungry for money that they will agree to any monkey business,” he says of probable pressure on Poland to relax environmental laws to attract new business...
...Yet at about 7:30 a.m., two or three workers appeared quietly at my host’s gate and went to work in the shed...
...Previously, people tended to spend on interiors...
...Cruel as it sounds, Sachs is right, up to a point...
...Instead, he is a textile entrepreneur, and he just opened a little workshop making running suits (which he also designed himself) with the Milanowek town shield on the chest...
...The town council is working on a zoning plan, for example, that could protect the traditional shopping district...
...I want to make a lot of money,” Lindenberg told an interviewer recently...
...Foreign investment is another subject on which culture tempers free-market fundamentalism...
...measures designed-at the urging of American economists-to thrust Poland headlong into a freemarket economy...
...It is impossible to block the bad influence...
...So confident in their theoretical models and their top-down prescriptions, these economists don’t seem to know or care very much about the entrepreneurs who actually comprise the market they purport to create...
...Like many talented Poles, he returned when Solidarity began to inspire hope for the future...
...Greenhouses, a major form of private enterprise in Poland, will be hit especially hard...
...Much of the appeal of “the market” today is metaphoric...
...It turns out that there are lots of things Puch could do...
...But people who know how to manage and produce-dirt-under-thefingernails types-don’t have much cachet in editorial boardrooms and on Nobel Prize committees...
...A couple of good-natured sheepdogs patrol the front drive...
...Others could start small businesses, but only in “difficult and twisting ways,” Moes says...
...There are cabbage fields and nondescript structures where in America the shopping centers and Burger Kings would be...
...government were to take such initiatives on a larger scale-through a kind of Conservation Peace Corps, perhaps-it could genuinely help free enterprise take root in Eastern Europe and win the lasting gratitude of entrepreneurs there...
...politics have not devolved into the kind of self-interest grabfest that Poles associate with the U.S...
...Yet Stepnik also has a social awareness that does not always accompany such views in the U.S...
...Americans probably understand it...
...and, in a strange twist, Ralph Nader and the Sierra Club, by housebreaking the American corporation somewhat, have done much to make capitalism attractive to the former East Bloc...
...He could recapture moist heat from the hot washing water, for example, and run it through a heat exchanger to help heat the dryer...
...I was there at the invitation of an American environmentalist and small businessman named Hank Ryan, who has initiated a sister cities program between Milanowek and his own hometown of Winstead, Connecticut...
...In truth, the sorry state of the East Bloc was always a little comforting to Americans, especially when their own economic problems were getting out of hand...
...Many did quite well under the communists...
...This would also help Eastern Europe reduce pollution, which is a major health problem and an obstacle to developing new industries...
...Such precautions seem a bit exaggerated even for a visitor from New York City...
...In Poland many still think in other ways...
...Sachs may be laying the groundwork to attract foreign investment...
...The effort also put one constantly at the mercy of the authorities, because everything was illegal: “There were limits on earning,” Moe says, “even if you worked all day and all night...
...A current TV ad is pitching a conference center to Western businessmen...
...In Poland the rich and the poor are no different,” Lila Szoszuk says...
...The results are evident in Poland...
...With his curly thatch of hair, California shirts, and running shoes, Moes could easily be a sixties refugee in Marin County...
...Everybody knew about the cheating, Moes says, “even people from the Ministry of Finance...
...We have plenty of time,” he observes...
...He was tired...
...On one wall is his grandmother, who fought the Bolsheviks in the Ukraine in 1917...
...To an American, it seems a hamlet that time passed by...
...I couldn’t help thinking that Poland may be in for a generation gap that makes the American sixties version seem paltry...
...the shops are marked only by nondescript signs...
...Lifestyles of the rich and Polish Most of the homes in Milanowek lie behind heavy gates...
...He work all the time...
...Still, he worries about the cultural disruptions that an American-style economy might bring...
...Poles seem to prefer the Russians to the Germans as the lesser of two evils...
...Unfortunately, the Reagan and Bush administrations have pooh-poohed conservation...
...Szoszuk was also put off by Americans’ attachment to their cars...
...That was the aim of the communist rules-to put people in a position [where the govemment could say] ‘I know but I don’t draw the consequences as long as you are for us...
...From press accounts, I had braced myself for a week on a cot in a crowded kitchen...
...Americans also understand, of course, that the guy might have been living off oil royalties and not have done a stitch of work for the past 20 years...
...The Stupidity of Free-Market Chic . . . . . . in Eastern Europe A How American economics is hurting Polish capitalism by Jonathan Rowe A visitor arrives at the Warsaw airport with wellformed expectations, and at first Poland doesn’t disappoint...
...Yet here I was in a private guest room with pink curtains and a bowl of fruit and bottled water on the dresser...
...Previously, everyone had jobs, though many didn’t have work...
...Regardless, many Poles are attracted to the idealized version...
...My home...
...They go only by car...
...Mrs...
...What strikes an American is how little our economics has to offer in terms of social cohesion, beyond the rudiments of stoking up the GNP machine...
...To hide the real salaries of employees...
...before shopping centers undermine the easy sociability of Warszawska, the main shopping street...
...Raise prices, hike interest rates, welcome bankruptcies and unemployment as evidence that the fat of the communist years is sweating off the body economic...
...One was forced to cheat on the taxes...
...People organized in your way are separate from one another,” council chairman Moes says...
...A major point of concern in Milanowek, for example, is utility rates...
...The communists gave greed a bad name in Poland, he says...
...Poles tend to idealize America on this point, as a land where rewards are dealt strictly on the basis of effort and worth...
...It was unofficially official...
...Though any number of Westem advisers have had a hand in this program, the one who has gotten the most attention is Jeffrey Sachs, the globe-trotting whiz kid from Harvard...
...In Warsaw, “California” lodi (ice cream) seems to have the cachet that at a Warsaw apartment complex, the single biggest display was for Coca-Cola...
...Although modest expectations bring their own rewards...
...Andrzej Moes attributes his political independence to having learned “right history” at home...
...but nobody was there to tell him...
...The thought is especially galling because at today’s depressed prices, Poland could be bought for a song...
Vol. 22 • November 1990 • No. 10
