America the Inefficient
WHATEVER else it may stand for, the U.S. has long been the Land of Efficiency. Here, if nowhere else, things worked: the trains, the plumbing, the vending--well, no, not the vending machines. But surely the telephones and, until the 1965 Northeastern blackout, the lights. Here mass production was born, the assembly line for good or ill became the modern cornucopia, and Henry Ford once reigned as the leading culture hero. Around the world American efficiency became a byword; at home it came close to being a religion, and wasted time was considered a sin. Only in America could it have occurred to that most idealistic of Presidents, Woodrow Wilson, to praise "clear, disinterested thinking and fearless action" by describing them as "spiritual efficiency."
Lately a horrid suspicion has been growing. Tales of the difficulty, expense and frustration of getting repairs for the car, the dryer, the TV set or just about anything were first whispered and then shouted through the land. The advent of the computer brought a quantum jump in dunning letters for bills already paid. Travelers swiftly spanned the oceans only to spend hours circling airports back home--and then find that their baggage had flown on to some destination of its own. At length the telephone--lifeline of American society and quintessential product of American efficiency--brought not the voices of faraway friends but strange clicks or buzzes, interminable rings, or deep, total silence. Now there is a strong feeling abroad that things just do not work right any more. America the Efficient seems to have become a land governed by Murphy's Law: If anything can go wrong, it will--and at the worst possible time. *
That, of course, is blasphemy--but blasphemy backed by a great deal of Kafkaesque evidence. The Federal Government, for one, sets a particularly disastrous example: it has given the nation, among other questionable monuments to efficiency, the farm-subsidy program, the F-111 swing-wing jet, and urban renewal (sometimes referred to as "Negro removal"). A congressional committee recently heard that between 1951 and 1964 the federal-highway building program in the Baltimore area, for instance, destroyed 21% of housing available to low-income blacks, jamming them into ever more crowded slums.
Of all the bureaucracies that have a knack for creating headaches, few can match the Internal Revenue Service. In the name of efficiency, it changed the income tax forms this year, making them so complicated that millions of Americans for the first time will have to give up and hire tax specialists. Sample instruction: "If line 15a is under $5,000 and consisted only of wages subject to withholding and not more than $200 of dividends, interest and non-withheld wages, and you are not claiming any adjustments on line 15b, you can have IRS figure your tax by omitting lines 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25 and 26 (but complete line 19)." The Post Office may not be able to match that, quite, but it regularly exceeds its own heroic standards of inefficiency. One letter took 16 days to move from Massachusetts to New Jersey. Neither bureaucracy nor political interference nor rigid seniority rules help the postman complete his appointed rounds.
Remember the Titanic
Local governments are trying hard to emulate Big Brother in Washington. In the San Francisco area, the Bay Area Rapid Transit authority (BART) is a three-county agency that was supposed to build a mass-transit system for the entire region by 1968. Snarled in squabbles among the municipalities, and hampered by unrealistic cost estimates and design blunders, it will not be completed until 1972 at the earliest. Among its ludicrous inefficiencies, BART has somehow managed to lose 100 lampposts, a total of 200,000 lbs. of metal costing $150,000. Workmen pulled them from a street that was being torn up for a new subway line, and BART's managers just cannot find them.
In Chicago, the Transit Authority early this year opened a 5.2-mile new subway and surface line. In the first ten days, there were four derailments and one collision, injuring more than 40 people. Chicago Daily News Columnist Mike Royko was moved to write: "Everybody agreed that it had indeed been a big event in transportation history, ranking right behind the voyage of the Titanic and the landing of the Hindenburg."
In the Northeastern U.S., ever costlier commuter trains make fiction of their timetables and livestock of their passengers. In cold or wet weather, the cars can be counted on to run as much as three hours late, providing bumpy rides in often unheated or brutally overheated trains. The creaky commuter lines serving Boston eat up so much in subsidies that State Senator Mary Fonseca has suggested that Massachusetts might save money if it bought autos for commuters instead. Particularly in Manhattan, the commuting fiasco has cost business uncountable lost man-hours of work and all sorts of extra expenses (example: hotel bills of managers who are forced to stay in town overnight). The transit snarls have led to marital quarrels, cold dinners, a feeling of nonrecognition between father and son, and the phenomenon of the weekend that begins at 2 p.m. Saturday, when the commuting father finally wakes up. Suburban psychologists are making a tidy business of treating real or imagined commuter ailments--general nervous tension, depression, and in a few cases, sexual impotence. Burton H. Mandel, an advertising executive, is suing the Long Island Rail Road for $50,000 in damages for causing him to suffer "commuter neurosis."
The Sinking Skyscraper
Private enterprise, which prides itself on being superior to Government bureaucracy, unfortunately seems to be becoming more like the Government every day in the inefficiency department. The building industry is notorious. When workmen put in the concrete floor of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at the Music Center of Los Angeles County, someone forgot that space was supposed to be left for parts of the air-conditioning system. Result: the concrete had to be broken up with air hammers. Another odd thing happened one year after construction started on Chicago's 100-story John Hancock Building: it began to sink into the ground. Air pockets had developed in the concrete caissons on which "Big John" rested, for reasons that the courts are being asked to determine. Workers spent the next five months tearing down two stories of steel framework and refilling the caissons. Cost: $1,000,000.
The fruit of these foul-ups is frustration for millions of Americans--and a desire to duplicate the heroics of the man who fired a pistol shot into a vending machine. Some random cases:
>Rex Reed, writer and sometime actor (Myra Breckinridge), ordered a bed from a Manhattan department store. Three months passed. Then came the long anticipated announcement: the bed will be delivered on Friday. Reed waited all day. No bed. Having disposed of his other bed, he slept on the floor. Next day deliverers brought the bed but could not put it up. No screws. "We have to put in a special order." On Monday, men appeared with the screws. But they could not put in the mattresses. No slats. "That's not our department." Reed hired a carpenter to build them; the department store's slats finally arrived 15 weeks later. Undaunted, Reed went to the store to buy sheets. Two men came up and declared: "You're under arrest." Why? "You're using a stolen credit card. Rex Reed is dead." Great confusion. Reed flashed all his identity cards, the detectives apologized--and then tore up his store charge card. Why? "Our computer has been told that you are dead. And we cannot change this."
>Mrs. L. Hugh Hutchinson, wife of a retired Air Force colonel, ordered a self-cleaning oven for her new Atlanta town house. Workmen jammed the oven into a wall opening that had been cut for a smaller appliance, thereby bending the oven out of shape. They removed it and more carefully installed another that turned out to have a defective thermostat. A repairman pulled out the thermostat and broke it. He summoned a colleague, who arrived with a new thermostat that was 15 inches too short. The two procured yet another thermostat, spent an afternoon trying to install it, and after much hammering and knocking reduced the oven to what Mrs. Hutchinson calls "a basket case--literally. They carried it out in 14 pieces in a basket."
>Edward Bak, a retailer, bought a rundown building at 1719 West Division Street, Chicago, and thoroughly renovated it as a new location for his hardware store. Meanwhile, officials of the city's buildings department sent Bak a letter, which he never got demanding that he make repairs. A process server could not find Bak to notify him of a court hearing for a demolition order because the summons was misaddressed to "Edward Bah" at 1711 West Division. Eventually, inspectors found Bak's building and mailed him a letter saying that it was in good shape, but by the time the letter went out the buildings department had hired wreckers to tear down the structure, and this time they got the address right. Bak's first word came on the telephone from a friend: "Eddie, they're tearing down your building." They did. Bak is suing the city for damages; the city is suing him for the demolition costs.
>Mrs. Jakie McCulloch, wife of a New York journalist, felt stirrings of annoyance when a crew of packers arrived three hours late at her Washington home to crate her family's belongings for a move to Old Greenwich, Conn. She watched anxiously as they tramped mud on the expensive living-room rug and grumbled incessantly about their low pay ($10 an hour). At 3 a.m. on a Friday, the packers were finished and Mrs. McCulloch offered them a $45 tip, which the crew boss pocketed for himself. Then the movers came. They demanded that she list for them the contents of each of the 586 boxes that the packers had filled and sealed. Finally she persuaded the movers to list the packers' labels, one of which was "basement, attic and garage junk." At 3:40 a.m. on Saturday, the boss announced that his van was fully loaded and that she would have to get a second van--from where, he did not know or care. In desperation, Mrs. McCulloch phoned the moving company's offices in Washington, Baltimore and Philadelphia. No one answered. By midmorning she reached the Chicago office, which arranged to send a second van. After Mrs. McCulloch arrived at her new home, she watched as the movers knocked much of the paint off her freshly decorated hall and kitchen while lugging in appliances. She is now trying to find pieces from various boxes. One box labeled "garage-attic-basement misc." contains nothing of the sort; it holds sheets and a crushed lampshade. Mrs. McCulloch does not intend to respond to a card from the company asking for comments on the move.
>Herschel Elkins, a California deputy attorney general, sees a spectrum of frustration in the numerous consumer protests that he receives about auto repairs, car-sales practices and warranties. From the 27,000 protests about faulty auto repair that came in last year, Elkins picks out the case of a Mexican-American laborer who bought an old car for $100. In the next 60 days he was victimized by garagemen who were as efficient at stripping him of money as they were inefficient at fixing his car. The laborer was almost inexcusably naive. He spent $750 for repairs and parts, including a different engine and two separate transmissions. After all that, the car would go no faster than 30 m.p.h.; the owner got one traffic ticket for driving too slowly on a freeway and another because the car was smoking. And because he took too much time off from his job to fuss with the jalopy, he was fired.
>Mrs. Peggy Loewe had a wonderful trip--until the plane touched down in the U.S. The flight landed right on time, but there was a 45-minute wait for a parking ramp at Kennedy Airport. After trying in vain to hail a taxi (said a policeman: "Ya gotta be aggressive here, lady"), she boarded the crowded airport bus for a jostling ride to Manhattan's East Side Airlines Terminal, which is located away from almost everything. She waited in a long line for a taxi, then shared it with three strangers (all of whom paid full fare). At Grand Central Station, she learned that her commuter train was indefinitely delayed. An hour's wait--and then she boarded a train. It did not budge. Another 30-minute wait; the passengers were off-loaded and put onto another train. It wheezed out of the station, only to stall several times along the way. Mrs. Loewe had flown from West Germany to the U.S. in 7 1/2 hours. Her journey from Kennedy Airport to her home in New York's Westchester County--30 miles, as the crow flies --took five hours.
For the sake of efficiency, U.S. citizens have long been willing to give up many of the amenities of life that are common in less complex and slower-paced societies: clean cities, open space, the chance for an afternoon siesta. Until recently, most felt satisfied with the bargain. But now that the U.S. industrial and social system is delivering such "disproducts" as pollution and racial tension and no longer seems to be supplying the compensating efficiency, many Americans feel they have been swindled in the tradeoff.
Have they really? Is the U.S. actually becoming more inefficient? Or is merely the awareness of inefficiency on the rise?
The answer is elusive because efficiency is one of those relative values that are difficult to pin down. Webster's calls it "effective operation as measured by a comparison of production with cost in energy, time and money." Anyone who attempts to apply that definition can turn up some odd results. Harvard Researcher Ann Carter has been measuring the efficiency of various U.S. industries by gauging the amounts of capital and labor needed to produce a dollar's worth of glass, insurance, hotel service and so on. By these purely statistical standards, efficiency is rising fastest in the telephone and telegraph industries, among others. Even auto repair is rated moderately efficient.
Living with the Repairman
It can be argued that U.S. inefficiency is more apparent than real. Americans expect too much--they have been spoiled by riches, demanding smoother operation and greater variety than any economic system could provide. Many housewives, for example, are convinced that modern appliances break down more often than did old-fashioned machines. Betty Furness, who was once the voice of Westinghouse on TV, offers advice to the woman who wants to keep her appliances humming: "Have a repairman, living with you." But General Electric contends that fewer than 3% of its toasters, electric coffeemakers and other housewares are repaired under warranty today, compared with more than 6% ten years ago. Trouble is, today's appliances are so complex that they are tough to fix when they break down and, as a G.E. officer says, "the consumer is more conscious of malfunction today than ever before."
Visitors from abroad support the U.S. consumer's impression that something is happening to American efficiency. Compared with most foreign countries, the U.S. as a whole is still staggeringly efficient, but the image of oldfashioned, charmingly inefficient Europe in contrast with America is no longer true.
Robert Ball, TIME'S European economic correspondent, is impressed by the changes that he notices on periodic visits home. "The breakdown in street cleaning and trash removal seems symptomatic of a general decline in urban public services," he reports. "Certainly public transport in a city like New York is a disaster. The subway system is one of the dirtiest I have ever seen --worse than London--and is by all odds the hardest to use. A visitor now is usually spared the rigors of long rail journeys because there are hardly any trains. Even airline efficiency in the U.S. is no longer so great. I have seldom experienced anything in Europe that approaches those hour-long holds over Kennedy Airport.
"If the visitor stays long enough to do some shopping, he will see evidence of inefficiency in the shoddiness of many types of goods. Blue jeans seem to be the only children's clothes that last any more. Corduroy clothes, which used to be bought for durability, just melt away. Sales clerks often seem to be uninformed or indifferent, though they are not yet as bad as waiters."
The countless petty and major annoyances are cutting into the quality of American life, and indeed into the quantity of the nation's production. The best overall measure of the efficiency of management and workers is output per man-hour in the nation's factories and offices. Late last year, productivity in the private nonfarm area declined slightly and that aggravated inflation. Reason: when productivity falls while wages rise, businessmen have to increase prices to cover costs. Inefficiency is not only impinging on production but also on the actual span of life in the U.S. Inefficiencies in the medical system have contributed to a decline in the life expectancy of the average American at birth, from 70.8 years in 1967 to 70.4 years in 1968.
The Traumas of Growth
At the root of much inefficiency is the nation's startling growth and the lack of planning to cope with it. More people every year crowd into the cities. Of the nation's approximately 80,000 cities, towns, villages, school boards, sanitary districts and other governments, most are too small, too fragmented, and too jealous of each other. There are few joint programs that would provide efficient transit for these people, educate their children effectively, or even haul away their garbage. The sheer growth in the numbers of people has led to many of today's inefficiencies --traffic-jammed streets, uncollected trash, interminable waits for taxis, lunch tables or a sales clerk's attention.
For all their Chamber of Commerce talk about long-range planning, many U.S. businessmen have shown a deep-seated distrust of planning, particularly by the Government. They have often been surprised and overwhelmed by the extent of growth and demand. In some cases they did not spend enough for expansion because the slow growth of the late 1950s and early 1960s misled them into believing that American consumers were becoming sated. But in many instances, managers simply skimped on spending to dress up their balance sheets. Says Mason Haire, professor of management at M.I.T.: "Too many companies still reward executives for short-term profits. Very often a manager will not spend money on the future, and with luck he will get promoted out of his job before the future arrives. Some other guy has to live with the consequences."
The consequences can be nightmarish. The New York Stock Exchange, whose members thrive or fail according to their ability to forecast, predicted a few years ago that daily trading volume might hit 10 million shares by 1975. Trading surged past that level in 1968. A mountain of paper work fell on exchange members, and they did not have enough men or machines to dig out. The Big Board went on short trading hours early in 1968, and has still not bounced back to a full trading week. In a similar way, demand for electricity has shocked power-company executives. Managers of New York's Con Edison decided some time ago that a 21% reserve capacity would be enough to give the customers what they need. The managers were wrong. They had to ask customers to turn off air conditioning in some of New York City's biggest buildings on the hottest days of last summer.
In a sense, affluence is the enemy of efficiency. Affluence weakens, sometimes to the point of nonexistence, the worker's fear of being fired. In her study of the Depression, The Invisible Scar, Caroline Bird describes almost lyrically the service enjoyed by people who were well off in the 1930s: "Shopping was a pleasure . . . The salespeople knew the stock and enjoyed showing it . . . Barbers came to the house if desired . . . Mail and milk were delivered along with newspapers in time for breakfast . . . Elevators were run by operators who said 'Good morning,' reported the weather, and took in messages and parcels." This, as Miss Bird notes, was clearly efficiency for the few based on the poverty and despair of many. In those days of unemployment rates ranging up to 25% of the work force, any job was a treasure to be treated with devotion. Several people were waiting to replace any sluggish or surly worker; if laid off, he could count on months or even years of idleness and penury.
No Longer Turned On
Today, quite a few businessmen tell each other between drinks at the country club that some more unemployment would be good for the economy's efficiency. But any politician who says that even 5% unemployment is tolerable flirts with disaster. The nation is committed to relatively full employment and, though the jobless rate inched up to 4.2% last month, employers still have trouble finding anyone who will deign to take a position considered boring or menial. Turnover of workers runs high in the Post Office, with disastrous effects upon efficiency, because few Americans will accept jobs that require work at night or on weekends. Some restaurateurs are hiring the mentally retarded because they are the only people willing to try--and even take some pride in--mopping floors and washing dishes. Hospitals often recruit the physically handicapped for service jobs --handling bedpans, doing kitchen and laundry work--that no one else will stick with.
Urbanization also subtly strikes efficiency of personalized services. The big-city plumber or repairman who botches a job rarely has to face the angry customer again. He can find plenty of other customers who do not know him but pick his name out of the Yellow Pages when they are desperate for his services. In earlier times, in a small town, people had to build up a clientele, so good will mattered. Even today, city dwellers who visit smaller towns are surprised to find smiling cab drivers and hustling waiters.
But the true spur to efficiency is not fear--either of unemployment or a customer's wrath; it is rather a positive ideal. And that ideal is failing in the affluent urban society of the present time. "People are no longer turned on by the Protestant Ethic," says Abraham Zaleznik, a professor at the Harvard Business School. To some, the Protestant Ethic--hard work is a virtue for its own sake--appears to have been replaced by an almost Mediterranean spirit, a spreading belief that men should work no more than they must to enjoy the good life and worldly pleasures. "There has been a steady and consistent reduction in the commitment of men to work as a way of life," says Lane Kirkland, secretary-treasurer of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. "That movement has accelerated in recent times. The expansion of paid leisure time will continue, and there may well be a greater tendency to choose leisure over additions to income, where that choice can be made."
The choice is already being made. In auto plants, complains General Motors Chairman James Roche, absenteeism doubled during the 1960s, hurting production quality so badly that some G.M. output "is worse than no output at all." Chrysler President Virgil Boyd adds that "one of the biggest problems is Monday absenteeism--the fellow who works two weeks and decides to take a long weekend." Detroit's worst lemons are usually found among cars built on a Monday because they are often put together by inexperienced substitute workers and veterans nursing hangovers.
Status and Sabotage
Workers also insist on more leisure on the job itself--or what auto executives call "goof-off time." Local unions have sometimes called strikes over demands for slowing down assembly lines in order to allow workers more minutes each hour to stretch and gossip. Inefficiency, in the form of less productivity, becomes a formal contract goal. G.M. in particular has been hurt by walkouts over goof-off time and by wildcat strikes that occur with uncanny regularity just as the salmon-fishing or deer-hunting seasons begin. The trend of the times is echoed in Simon & Garfunkel's Feelin' Groovy:
Slow down. You move too fast.
You got to make the morning last . . .
That is precisely the spirit that the first of the stopwatch-toting efficiency experts, Frederick Winslow Taylor, condemned in 1911 as "the greatest evil with which the working people are now afflicted." In a yard where laborers were loading 12 1/2 tons of pig iron each aboard flatcars every day, he taught one worker named Schmidt to load 47 1/2 tons by changing the movements he used to lift the 92-lb. bars and the speed at which he walked to the flatcar.* Taylor's ideas were expanded by Frank Gilbreth, who contended that there must be "one best way" of doing everything. In a book, Cheaper by the Dozen, two of his twelve children recalled the living-room drills at which Gilbreth, fully clothed, demonstrated the proper movements for taking a bath. The modern followers of Taylor and Gilbreth have gone beyond time-and-motion study to give advice on plant design and quality-control standards.
They have a tough job on their hands. Some workers actively sabotage efficiency. A New Jersey-based oil company, for instance, once installed a $750,000 computer system to keep track of inventory and automatically reorder supplies. Within a few months the company was inundated by unneeded pipes, parts and paper. The reason, one manager recalls, was that "every foreman saw the system as detracting from his authority and adding more red tape. The foremen, I suspect, began faking shortages so the computer would reorder." The computer system was junked.
Many people, like the foremen, view efficiency as a threat to their status. Universities often operate at peak capacity only between 8 a.m. and noon, certainly an inefficient use of their buildings and their students' time. Senior faculty members, says Dr. E. Lee McLean, an adviser to several universities, consider that being asked to teach five days a week or during afternoons is an offense against professorial dignity. Factory workers in Flint, Mich., turned a cold shoulder to a bus line that offered to pick them up at their homes and drop them off at plant gates. The workers figured that men who could not drive their own cars to the plant were second-class citizens.
In the offices of business and government, executives often mistake the appearance of efficiency for its reality. The informal office that serves as a "social circle" for employees, says Eric Larrabee, an administrator at the State University of New York at Buffalo, may look sloppy to outsiders but is usually quite efficient. Its employees, he reasons, develop a community spirit, learn one another's strengths and weaknesses, and "adopt a kind of rhythm" that enables them to produce work quickly with a minimum of fuss. This is not likely to be achieved in a business environment totally dominated by men. "Women," contends Larrabee, "are much more efficient in offices than men."
Nor is efficiency likely to develop best in big, rich corporations. The giant company tends to become a political structure in which executives invest considerable time campaigning for higher office and protecting their flanks by rigidly following fixed procedures. Many an executive, for example, is required to hand over all buying decisions to a purchasing department that will bury them in paper work, attend meetings at which he knows no one will say anything of any interest to him, and address memos to other managers on everything that he does. (The managers probably will not read them but must be given a chance to object.)
These corporate rules are designed to promote efficiency but actually work against innovation. In offices bound by stylized procedures, says Larrabee, followers of the Protestant Ethic who are more interested in getting work done than in obeying the rules are looked on as "sort of scabs." In self-defense, he adds, they often set up a kind of underground network. "They tend to conceal themselves, but they are in touch with one another, and they know whom they can trust." Such undergrounds also operate in government. Harlan Cleveland, an Assistant Secretary of State during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, once remarked that it was best to have an international crisis burst on a weekend. In order to prepare a plan of action, he said, "you could put together an ad hoc group composed entirely of the people you really wanted and get the damn thing done before the organization got back on Monday."
The Power of Complaint
Short of such ingenious innovations, some practical first steps could be taken toward reducing inefficiency in a number of areas:
CONSUMER ACTION: Consumers could help themselves--and society--by complaining more about shoddy goods and slapdash service. When it comes to complaining, most Americans are really members of the Silent Majority. Ari Kiev, head of Cornell Medical College's social psychiatry program, figures that the atmosphere of the faceless society conditions customers to put up with inefficiency. Many Americans, he says, "have been trained from early on that nothing can be done. So much is made of rules and regulations, of the idea that 'you had better check it out first.' We become very dependent on others to give us cues. This fosters a lack of self-confidence. We become afraid to act." As Ralph Nader, John Banzhaf and other consumer crusaders have proved, the determined complainer can do plenty. For their part, companies could respond by following the example of Avis, TWA and a few other firms. They assign executives to work briefly at service jobs--as counter clerks or even car washers and baggage handlers--to learn firsthand how well or poorly the jobs are being done, and to find out what the customer really wants.
PRODUCT DESIGN: Companies could design products with an eye to easier repair. Motorola now produces color TV sets in which the basic parts are tucked into a pullout drawer; a serviceman can slide out the drawer and replace the faulty parts without hauling the whole set into his shop. In addition, manufacturers could spend more on improved quality and less on annual model changes. "Planned obsolescence," says Henry Ford II. "is out the window."
MANAGEMENT HABITS: Executives could surely re-examine some time-hallowed rules, with a view to eliminating make-work and Parkinson's first law ("Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion"). Though the work week has been growing shorter on the production line, today's managers are working harder--or at least longer --than those of any previous generation. Part of the problem is simply inept planning of time and operations (see box, page 78). Most executives should be allowed to set their own working hours instead of meeting fixed schedules, which often make for an inefficient use of time. Much executive work could be delegated to people on the lower rungs. There is considerable discussion of this in other fields: doctors are talking about turning over more of their basic chores to paramedics and nurses; judges are debating whether they could be freed to handle more cases if professional managers were appointed to handle administrative paper work in the courts.
NATIONAL PLANNING: There may have to be somewhat more Government planning and somewhat less emphasis on growth for growth's sake. In the area of transportation, for example, there is need for vast Government planning of new airport facilities and some curbing of competition. Is it logical or economical for four different airlines to fly half-empty planes at about the same time to the same place? On the other hand, transportation could be made much more efficient if the Government eased some of its old rules covering the shipment of goods. It might be wise to change the law forbidding any one company to use all modes of land, sea and air transport to move people or products.
These are only some possibilities, pointing in the direction of what might be done. Ultimately, though, the question is: How much efficiency does the U.S. really want?
The Counter-Cult
The answer is not as pat as it might seem. Though most Americans still accept efficiency as virtuous, there is a growing counter-cult that views efficiency as a dehumanizing, soul-devouring force. The cult began long ago, with Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. In their nightmare Utopias, Brave New World and 1984, they depicted future dictatorships made all the more oppressive by relentless efficiency. The counter-cult has strong expression in modern science fiction. Example: in This Perfect Day, Ira Levin, author of Rosemary's Baby, describes a futuristic society ruled by a gigantic computer, Uni, which calculates the most "efficient" assignments of careers for its many human subjects and, like a computerized dating service gone wild, even mates them.
The U.S., to put it mildly, is not yet faced with the problems of efficiency in the extreme. But it does have to contend with choices among competing efficiencies. In its crowded and complex society, the goals of individuals often conflict with those of larger groups, making one man's efficiency another man's inefficiency. To take a simple example, the man who drinks soda or beer likes the "one-way bottle." He can drink up and toss it away, rather than return it for a refund. But that little everyday luxury builds up a mountain of hard-to-dispose-of garbage. To the shopkeeper, efficiency means getting merchandise delivered at the start of every business day. Result: trucks flood the streets, producing traffic jams that are staggeringly inefficient for the city as a whole.
Thus the whole matter gets down to the question of goals. Just what kind of efficiency should one strive for? "In love affairs," notes Syracuse University Sociologist Manfred Stanley, "it is a very different kind of efficiency if you want to achieve marriage, or if you want to seduce a girl for one night."
One goal, of course, is to continue aiming for efficiency for the majority of Americans--not efficiency for the few, as in less developed societies. But the basic idea of efficiency is that a nation must make the most of what it has and not squander its resources. To that end, the nation may have to give up some of its past great luxury of choice --all the different makes and models that are not so different from one another. "We have always been able to afford enormous waste," says Sociologist David Riesman, "because we thought our space and resources were unlimited. We are spendthrifts with our time and materials. We no longer have that room. We learned to feel that it is our unalienable right to have the freedom of many options at our disposal and to have things always go smoothly."
The Charms of Loafing
Some inefficiencies may have to be tolerated simply because they make life more human. A labor shortage that inspires employers to hire ghetto blacks and other handicapped people instead of leaving them to subsist on public welfare is a good thing, whatever inefficiencies it may breed. Goof-off time feeds inflation by lowering productivity --and nobody should underestimate what social damage that can cause. But one of the charms of the affluent society is that it indulges the human propensity to loaf and gives at least partial fulfillment to the Industrial Revolution's old promise that the machine will free man from drudgery.
The inefficiencies that will be hardest to surmount are those that do nobody any good. Making sense out of the jumble of local governments will require a decades-long struggle against that most powerful of vested interests, inertia. Correcting the inefficiencies of workers in the service trades--repairmen, waiters, barbers and laundry employees--may be more difficult yet; it will take nothing less than a cultural change. Such jobs need not be regarded as menial; the person performing a service is exercising power, doing something for the customer that he cannot do for himself. But the U.S. has long been moving in the opposite direction, toward the state that John W. Gardner, head of the Urban Coalition, warned about in his book Excellence: "The society which scorns excellence in plumbing, because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy, because it is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water."
* The lawgiver is unknown, but the saying is an old joke among engineers. * John Dos Passes, in U.S.A., wrote an epitaph for Taylor: "On the morning of his fiftyninth birthday, when the nurse went into his room to look at him at fourthirty, he was dead with his watch in his hand."
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