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For the next 45 days, we'll be celebrating Reason's 45th anniversary by releasing a story a day from the archives—one for each year of the magazine's history. See the full list here.
Writing in Reason's May 1993 issue, Virginia Postrel explained why the "extraordinary experiment" that is the United States of America "will continue to work as long as the multiculturalists of the left and the monoculturalists of the right aren't allowed to impose their visions on America."
]]>In the fall of 1978 I left the religious, conservative, biracial, slow-paced culture of South Carolina for the secular, liberal, multi-ethnic, intense culture of Princeton University. Like most immigrants, I was looking for a better life in a place I only half understood. Like many immigrants, I found educational and economic opportunities greater than any in my homeland. And I assimilated–dropped most of my accent, changed my politics and my religion, stopped trying to get a tan. I did these things not because anyone foisted a common culture upon me but because they made me happy.
That is how, and why, most immigrants assimilate. Not because they hate themselves or deny their roots. Not because the government has prohibited their native tongue or forced them to swear allegiance to a new religion. Not because they've gone through the homogenizing experience of public school. Assimilation is a combination of willful self-fashioning (11 percent of the Mormons in L.A. are Latino; they didn't accidentally convert) and unconscious adaptation. I dropped most of my twang because prejudiced people, on hearing it, would think me stupid and a bigot; I replaced it with a hodge-podge of Northeastern strains, because that is where I lived. Happiness and practicality, the pursuit of personal furfillment and financial success, preserve the common culture. A common purpose has nothing to do with it.
America won't crack up in the next 25 years because its mosaic is not the one the Balkanizing multiculturalists describe. America is a mosaic not of groups but of individuals, each of whom carries a host of cultural influences, some chosen, some inherited, some absorbed by osmosis. That mosaic is held together by the pursuit of happiness, the most powerful mortar ever conceived. Left alone, it will long endure.
For the next 45 days, we'll be celebrating Reason's 45th anniversary by releasing a story a day from the archives—one for each year of the magazine's history. See the full list here.
Writing in Reason's August/September 1991 issue, Virginia Postrel and Lynn Scarlett tackle the trash problem, and explain why the free market makes for a better garbage man than big government:
]]>Looking through a nation's garbage, you can tell much about its people—how much they read, whether they're too poor to own refrigerators or rich enough to buy microwave ovens, whether they prefer gardening or fixing their cars. You can figure out how much their time is worth and whether they have a lot of kids. But it's hard, very hard, to see how everything fits together—how a Uneeda cracker box, resealable and lined with wax paper, could lead to national brands and mass marketing, how disposable diapers could make small-scale day care more feasible, how floppy disks could produce more paper waste.
Facing a solid-waste crisis, we have a choice. We can manage our garbage, getting rid of the barriers that keep people from seeing what their habits cost. Or we can assume omniscience and, thinking we know everything about the intricate connections between people and materials, we can try to manipulate both. If we choose the latter course, we will run into the old planner's problem. We just won't know enough to do the job. Garbage in, garbage out.
Irvine, California, is the epitome of tightly controlled urban design, a squeaky-clean edge city of office parks and master-planned neighborhoods. The Orange County town is so tidy that when my husband started teaching at the University of California campus there he couldn't find a gas station.
I've come here to talk with SteveKellenberg, who creates master plans for large-scale developments that sell more than 1,000 homes a year. These "high-production, high-velocity" businesses represent the present and future of American home construction, supplying the booming suburbs of the Sunbelt. I'd heard Kellenberg tell an audience of developers about survey data showing that 63 percent of buyers in master-planned communities want more diversity, while only 32 percent want their neighborhood to look consistent.
That was what I wanted to hear. Like many variety-loving city dwellers, I'm leery of master-planned communities, even though I know they're extremely popular. It's bad enough that even my little 18-unit townhouse complex has ridiculously conformist rules -- no plants by the front door, no non-neutral window coverings, no door decorations except around Christmas -- but at least our homes are literally connected to each other, making the cost of spillovers high. I can't imagine wanting to live in a whole neighborhood of similar uniformity.
But people really are different.
During the last two decades, master-planned communities with standardized styles and prescriptive "pattern books" have become the norm for large-scale home developments. These communities sell predictability. While old-line suburbs started out fairly uniform to keep down construction costs, owners could (and did) dramatically transform their properties over time. Master-planned developments, by contrast, seek to control changes. Buyers are bound by contract to abide by rules designed to preserve a certain look and feel.
The Highlands Ranch community in Colorado, for instance, limits house numbers to no more than six inches tall and kids' backyard clubhouses to no more than 24 square feet. No white picket fences are allowed in most neighborhoods. An enforcement team cruises the streets looking for such offenses as deviant home colors. (A light purple house got neighbors particularly riled up.) A competing community, Prospect New Town, takes a contrasting tack, going so far as to require striking colors on its houses -- no Highlands Ranch neutrals allowed. Prospect, too, tightly regulates its environment. The developers require changes on 95 percent of the new house plans submitted for their approval. "It sounds harsh," says one developer. "But somebody's taste has to prevail, or else it would be anarchy."
In this case, the taste enforcement occurs within a voluntary, profit-sensitive development that has to compete with nearby alternatives offering radically different design philosophies. Homebuyers select the design regime that fits their personalities and lifestyles, and business success depends on design rules that please potential residents. But such restrictions aren't limited to competing contractual communities. The public sector has jumped into the act, bringing similarly uniform standards to property owners who don't necessarily want them.
Building appearance is getting the sort of government scrutiny once reserved for public health and safety. A 1993 survey found that 83 percent of American cities and towns had some form of design review to control building looks, usually on purely aesthetic (as opposed to historic preservation) grounds. Three-quarters of these regulations, covering 60 percent of cities and towns, were passed after 1980, an adoption rate survey author Brenda Case Scheer compares to that of "zoning in the 1930s." The trend appears to have accelerated in the late '90s.
Some communities prescribe design rules in detailed dos and don'ts. Others use general terms like appropriate and compatible, illustrated with drawings showing acceptable and unacceptable examples. Scheer, now the dean of the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Utah, recalls a suburb that had no specific rules at all, allowing the design review board to outlaw whatever members happened to dislike. The result was an ad hoc checklist of idiosyncratic no-nos. "The strangest things," she says, "like they didn't want to have any windows with round tops on them. The decking on a deck couldn't run diagonally. If you had shutters, your shutters had to be able to close."
That town isn't an isolated example. Architectural review boards, planning commissions, and city councils often have broad discretion to determine and enforce taste standards, from mandating roof lines and window styles to specifying what kinds of trees can be planted. Minutes of routine meetings record officials opining that the red leaves of ornamental bushes will clash with the brick of a shopping center sign and instructing a housing developer to build more single-story homes on certain streets. In one town, a city council member praised the beauty of Bradford pear trees, while in another an official condemned them as an "epidemic."
People are different.
During our visit, Steve Kellenberg comes back to that message again and again, expressing a tolerance that arises as much from relentless pragmatism as from liberal idealism. If you're in the business of designing environments people will pay money to live in, you can't kid yourself about what they value. You can't design your idea of utopia and force everyone to conform to it; if you try, everyone who isn't just like you will go elsewhere to find a home.
Unlike me, some people really do prefer uniformity to variety, regardless of cost. Not everybody thinks it's bad if every house on the street looks pretty much like every other one, or if people can't change their houses much over time. Some people like that sort of predictability. It makes them feel secure, at home in their neighborhood. Even if cost were no object, not everybody would want the same thing I'd pick.
"We have this incredible tendency to overgeneralize about the population and to say, 'Everybody wants this -- everybody wants to live in a community where you can't paint your house unless it's the right color and you have to close your garage door,'" says Kellenberg. "Well, the fact is that there really are a lot of people who want that kind of controlled, predictable environment," often because they've had bad experiences in deteriorating neighborhoods. "And there are others that find that an incredibly repressive regime and wouldn't live there if you gave them a house, because they believe there should be an organic, fluid, self-expressive environment."
People are different.
"You have people in Irvine that love living in Irvine," he says. "And you have people that moved to Irvine and leave after five years because they hate it, and they move to Seal Beach or Santa Ana," nearby towns with few design restrictions. In a diverse society, some people will indeed want a lot of rules, "but it clearly isn't something that is the right way of doing it for everybody." Neither is the alternative.
People are different.
Even those survey statistics are misleading aggregates. Some people care a lot about diversity; others really, really want consistency. A lot are in the middle. Some people want to be sure to run into their neighbors. Others just want to stay in with their big-screen TVs or to socialize with the friends they already have. Some people want to be able to walk to the store without seeing a car. Others want to be able to drive in and out easily. The difference isn't one of demographics -- age, income, education, and so on -- but of identity and attitude. You can find people shopping for houses in the same price range, for the same size families, who want all sorts of different neighborhood designs.
What the survey numbers actually say is that part of the housing market has been underserved. For years, large-scale developers have focused so much on those homebuyers who want a predictable environment and the most house for the money that they've ignored people with other preferences. Offer the long-ignored groups a different sort of design, and they'll reward you handsomely. This pragmatic, trial-and-error process of discovering new sources of aesthetic value is less grandiose, and perhaps less inspiring, than the ideological search for the one best way to live. But it is also less divisive and venomous.
You can see its latest products in the spanking new streets of Ladera Ranch, a huge new development about a half-hour drive southeast of Irvine. A blue-gray Cape Cod home, with the deeply sloping roof of its saltbox ancestors, sits next to an updated beige and brown Craftsman with a low-pitched roof. Down the street is a Spanish colonial with a red-tile roof, and around the corner a stuccoed house whose turret recalls the fantasy homes of 1920s Los Angeles. Although many garages face the street, most are recessed so they don't dominate the landscape. You see porches and yards and sidewalks -- social space. And between the sidewalk and street is something no new Southern California community has gotten in a generation: a small parkway planted with trees, spindly today but promising charm and shade as the neighborhood ages.
These are mass-produced homes, with metal windows and Hardiboard concrete siding rather than wood. They'd never pass purists' tests of authenticity. But they offer something genuine and rare -- variation in more than façade, rooflines and massing that match their styles, a street of different colors and different forms. Built on the empty hillsides of what once really was a ranch, Ladera Ranch is turning the previously unfulfilled desire for varied and sociable neighborhoods into extraordinary profits. The development sells 1,200 houses a year for prices 10 percent to 14 percent higher per square foot than in the more conventional community right next door. The landscaping and construction quality cost more, acknowledges Kellenberg, but even accounting for those costs, "it still appears that there's a 7 to 10 percent lift in the base values that can only be explained by people being willing to pay more to live there."
People are different.
Specialization pays. "There really is a lot of the market that doesn't want everything to look the same, that does want to have individuality in their home, that does want a diversity of neighborhoods, that wants [the design] to feel like it grew out of the heritage of the place, that are interested in meeting their neighbors, that would enjoy having the street designed as a social space, that would like to have other social spaces and social opportunities that they could participate in," he says.
Ladera Ranch's design owes much to the New Urbanism, a planning philosophy that favors high densities, limited setbacks, and old-fashioned Main Streets. Both put an emphasis on community, and both understand streets as social spaces. But Kellenberg dismisses the New Urbanism's one-size-fits-all doctrines, its "singular mission" that "rejects everything other than New Urbanism." Lots of beloved neighborhoods, he notes, don't conform to New Urbanist prescriptions.
The design for Ladera Ranch isn't New Urbanism. It's specialization -- specialization within specialization, in fact. The development includes four different neighborhood styles, each crafted to suit a different personality and lifestyle. And if you want something different, you don't have to buy a place in Ladera Ranch. You can go next door. There's something for everyone and, if there isn't, a smart developer will figure out how to fill in the gaps.
The seeming homogeneity of master-planned communities -- the planning that gives them a bad name among intellectuals -- turns out to be real-world pluralism once you realize that everyone doesn't have to live within the same design boundaries. Community designs and governance structures are continuously evolving, offering new models to compete with the old. This pluralist approach may overturn technocratic notions of how city planning should work, but it's the way towns are in fact developing in the United States, suggesting that these institutions offer real benefits to residents. From 1970 to 2002, the number of American housing units in homeowner associations, including condominiums and cooperatives, rose from 1 percent to 17 percent, with more than half of all new units in some areas in these associations.
As an alternative or supplement to large-scale local government, some economists (notably Robert Nelson of the University of Maryland) and legal scholars (such as Robert Ellickson of Yale) have begun debating ways to let homeowners who aren't in private associations form them, whether for whole neighborhoods or just a few blocks. Some proposals envision the privatization of former city services such as garbage collection and zoning-style regulations. Others involve only a specialized complement to city governance, with special fees to cover services that people in that small area particularly value. For instance, Ellickson suggests, "if artists were to concentrate their studios on a particular city block, their [Block Improvement District] could make unusually heavy expenditures on street sculptures. Indeed, the prospect of forming a Block Improvement District might encourage artists to cluster together in the first place."
Some of these plans would require unanimous agreement, others a supermajority. The question of whether new boundaries can be drawn around residents without their individual consent is a difficult one. If unanimous agreement is necessary, a single holdout can make everyone worse off. But retroactively limiting what property owners can do with their homes raises the same problems that allowing small districts is supposed to avoid.
This problem is especially great when the new district isn't truly self-governing. Many cities, for instance, allow a supermajority of homeowners to petition to make their neighborhood a historic district subject to special aesthetic controls -- potentially a good model of specialized design boundaries. Unfortunately, historic districts usually have to conform to procedures established by a higher level of government. They can't create processes and rules tailored to the wishes of those they govern. In Los Angeles, for instance, a Historic Preservation Overlay Zone is regulated by a five-member board. Unlike a homeowner association board, members are appointed by city officials and other board members, and only three of the five must be residents of the area they govern. Since residents don't have a direct vote, they can't easily predict, or check, the board's actions.
Even some preservation activists admit to concerns. Adriene Biondo, a San Fernando Valley resident who's campaigning to make her neighborhood a historic zone, says she isn't looking to crush individual homeowners' self-expression, only to raise awareness of the history and value of the neighborhood's mid-century Eichler homes. But some local preservationists are sticklers for architectural authenticity, narrowly defined. If the board is captured by purists, admits Biondo, it might even outlaw the pistachio-green siding she and her husband chose to match their vintage car. "I don't think we'd like that too much ourselves," she says.
Even in the best of circumstances, small, self-governing districts wouldn't eliminate aesthetic conflict. Neither do master-planned communities. As anyone who's lived in a small condo complex knows, even small groups of people disagree. Governance rules simply provide processes for resolving disputes. And they help people know what to expect, avoiding the nasty surprises and bitter conflicts that result when aesthetic rules are imposed after the fact. The best we can hope for isn't perfection but fairness, predictability, and a reasonable chance of finding rules that suit our individual preferences. The advantage of narrow boundaries is that if all else fails, we can vote with our feet, not only improving our own situation but sending a signal that the competition is offering a better design package.
The more difficult it is for people to enter and exit -- to find design rules to their liking -- the more general the rules need to be. A four-block special district can have very prescriptive rules that would be inappropriate for an entire city. A metropolitan area like Orange County that is made up of many smaller cities can offer a range of city-level design regimes.
In larger areas, one way to accommodate different tastes within an overall sense of structure is to make the rules fairly generic. Consider the difference between a work uniform, a requirement to wear black, and a general prescription for "business casual." All three establish an organizational identity, but each allows more individual choice and flexibility than the previous one, accommodating a wider range of appearance and personality. To attract a diverse group of employees, to avoid turning off independent or creative individuals, or simply to stay up to date as fashions change, it may be better to keep the dress code as general as possible.
Along similar lines, Brenda Scheer suggests that urban design regulations should pay more attention to the urban forms that are hard to change and concentrate less on the stylistic details that are easily altered. It's easy enough to ignore a single building you don't like, especially once it's been around a while. But street widths, setbacks, and lot sizes affect the whole experience of being in a particular neighborhood. They establish the underlying structure that creates the sense of place. "If you get the lots right and the blocks right and the street right and the setbacks right, somebody can build a crummy house and it will sit there for 30 years, and somebody will tear it down and build a nice one," she says. "There's a kind of self-healing process that's available if the structure is fine."
This model allows for flexibility, personal expression, and change while still preserving a coherent underlying design. It echoes the pattern identified by Stewart Brand in How Buildings Learn, which examines how buildings are adapted to new uses over time. Brand explores what makes architecture resilient and capable of "learning" as its purposes change. A building, he notes, contains six nested systems: Site, Structure (the foundation and load-bearing elements), Skin (the exterior), Services (wiring, plumbing, heating, etc.), Space plan (the interior layout), and Stuff. The further out the nested system, the more permanent. Moving around furniture (Stuff) is easy; altering a foundation (Structure) is difficult.
In a building, Brand writes, "the lethargic slow parts are in charge, not the dazzling rapid ones. Site dominates Structure, which dominates the Skin, which dominates the Services, which dominate the Space plan, which dominates the Stuff. How a room is heated depends on how it relates to the heating and cooling Services, which depend on the energy efficiency of the Skin, which depends on the constraints of the Structure....The quick processes provide originality and challenge, the slow provide continuity and constraint."
A well-designed, adaptable building, Brand argues, respects the different speeds and different functions of these nested layers. It keeps them separate, allowing "slippage" so that the quick inner layers can change without disrupting the more permanent systems. (You don't have to tear up the foundation to fix the plumbing.)
Scheer's proposal applies a similar model to the surrounding environment. She essentially adds a seventh layer we can call the Street. By limiting design restrictions to the Street, Site, and possibly Structure, rather than the usual obsession with Skin, she makes room for evolution and learning. Like Brand, she emphasizes the effects of time. Given enough slippage between outer and inner layers, we can correct flaws and adapt to changing circumstances while preserving some underlying sense of order. A city, she says, is "a living thing, it's a changing thing, and it has to adapt or it dies. A city that is not having a continuous renewal is a dying place."
A dynamic model of city life recognizes that not just purposes or technologies change over time. So do tastes. Like Capri pants and stiletto heels, aesthetic styles go in and out of fashion, flipping from positive to negative and back again. Hard as it is to believe today, from the end of World War II until the 1980s the Art Deco hotels of Miami Beach were considered "tacky, in bad taste, and old fashioned." When the Miami Design Preservation League was formed in 1976, recalls one of its founders, South Beach "was considered a disgrace to the city, because of its cheap neon lights, 'funny-shaped' buildings, and the signs along Ocean Drive blaring 'rooms $5 a week.'"
Similarly, American tastemakers have for decades condemned neon signs as the epitome of commercial tackiness, and many cities continue to ban neon. Others, however, have rediscovered the lively pleasures of the lights. While some neighboring cities such as Santa Monica have been forcing businesses to take down their neon signs, Los Angeles has spent about a half million dollars helping building owners restore and relight historic neon signs. The city's Museum of Neon Art not only preserves vintage signs but lends them to the popular Universal CityWalk outdoor shopping area. Commercial neon has slowly regained its 1920s status as a source of public pleasure.
The built environment is filled with once-scorned designs that have become architectural touchstones or popular icons. When it was new, a critic called the Golden Gate Bridge an "eye-sore to those living and a betrayal of future generations." Writing in Architectural Record, critic Suzanne Stephens provides a wide-ranging tour of similar examples: "In 1889 artists, architects, and writers, including Charles Garnier and Guy de Maupassant, called the Eiffel Tower 'useless and monstrous.' Frank Lloyd Wright's Larkin Building in Buffalo was deemed 'ugly' by eminent critic Russell Sturgis in [Architectural] RECORD in 1908, and in 1959 his Guggenheim Museum was dismissed by visionary architect Frederick Kiesler. In 1931 Lewis Mumford charged that New York's Chrysler Building by William Van Alen was full of 'inane romanticism' and 'void symbolism.'" Some of the world's most beloved buildings and architects have been dismissed by their contemporaries. Tolerating strange styles can create significant value over time, as the unfamiliar becomes familiar, leading to aesthetic appreciation.
Aesthetics may be a form of expression, but it doesn't enjoy the laissez-faire treatment accorded speech or writing. To the contrary, the more significant look and feel become, the more they tend to be restricted by law. The very power of beauty encourages people to become absolutists -- to insist that other people's stylistic choices, or their tradeoffs between aesthetics and other values, constitute environmental crimes. Individuals may expect more expressive freedom for themselves, but they often feel affronted and victimized by the aesthetic choices of others. This is particularly true for places, the touchstone category of our aesthetic era.
Yet now that people increasingly care about look and feel in their private choices, aesthetic regulation is less necessary to control blatant public ugliness. The same taste shift that has made the spread of design review politically viable is slowly but surely changing the definition of what's commercially necessary. Our greatest fears of the aesthetic future are not of too little design, but of too much.
]]>In 1947, The Road to Serfdom had been a sensation only a few years earlier. The 39 founding members included future Nobel laureate economists Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and Maurice Allais (and Hayek himself) as well as such luminaries as philosophers Karl Popper and Michael Polanyi and Hayek's mentor Ludwig von Mises. Through intellectual camaraderie and rigorous discussion, they sought to achieve "the rebirth of a liberal movement in Europe" and, by implication, the rest of the world.
Fifty-two years later, both the society and the world have changed. Liberal ideals of free minds and free markets have indeed enjoyed a rebirth, not only in Europe but throughout the world. And Mont Pelerin now boasts a membership of nearly 500, including scholars, journalists, think tank researchers, and business people. In late August, those from the Americas met in Vancouver to take up the question, "Are we experiencing 'creeping socialism?'" In 1947, socialism's growth was obvious. In 1999, it was a matter of much debate. In one of the opening talks, REASON Editor Virginia Postrel argued that "socialism" is no longer the major challenge to markets and economic freedom and that classical liberal ideals face opponents with new arguments and different values. The following is a slightly adapted version of her speech.
The theme of this conference is "Are we experiencing 'creeping socialism,'" and I am supposed to provide the optimistic answer to that question. The format presumes, however, that it is the right question, which I don't believe it is.
But I'll start with the official question. It immediately raises the issue of what we mean by socialism, creeping or otherwise. As a good journalist, I'll begin with an anecdote: The week of our graduation from college in 1982, my husband (who was then my boyfriend) participated in a debate between two teams of graduating seniors. The resolution was something like, "Resolved: Socialism is better than capitalism," and Steve, not surprisingly, was on the anti-socialism side.
One of the critical terms of that debate was the definition of socialism. Steve's team argued that socialism was the Soviet Union, and therefore guilty of the terrors of the Soviet system, while the opposing side argued that socialism was Sweden, and therefore innocent of eroding political freedom. Seventeen years later, we are gathered to examine whether socialism is expanding--and I would argue that the terms of that debate suggest quite clearly that it is not. Neither the Soviet system nor the Swedish system is on the march.
That does not mean we don't have to worry about threats to liberty. It just means we don't have to worry very much about socialism. The issues that define our political, intellectual, and cultural coalitions are changing, and we ignore those changes to our peril.
Socialism is not simply a synonym for a large state or for government regulation of the economy. In both the nasty Soviet model and the nice Swedish one, it is particularly concerned with some issues and less concerned with others. It may be a fuzzy term, but, like an electron's quantum field, the fuzz forms around some places and not around others. The goal of socialism is a fairer allocation of economic resources, which its advocates often claim will also be a less wasteful one. Socialism is about who gets the goods and how. Socialism objects to markets because markets allocate resources in ways socialists believe to be unfair on both counts: both the who and the how.
In its pure form--what Hayek in The Road to Serfdom called "hot socialism"--socialism essentially turns the economy into a government monopoly, either through direct state ownership of the means of production or through complete state direction of economic life. Socialist governments nationalize industries. They set up boards governing wages and prices. They direct supply and demand.
Until the mid-1980s, this sort of socialism was common, not only in communist countries but throughout the free world--which is why it made for a good debate topic in 1982. During my teenage years, the American economy itself was marked by wage and price controls and complex schemes to allocate energy supplies; in the 1970s, you could call for the U.S. government to nationalize the oil industry and not be dismissed as a nut. (I would argue, and do in The Future and Its Enemies, that the U.S. regulatory system is better understood as technocracy, which substitutes the judgments of supposedly efficient experts for diffuse market decisions, than as socialism. But from time to time, the U.S. government did adopt both the methods and the goals of socialism.) Today, the remnants of hot socialism exist in the very few countries with deliberately socialist regimes, of which North Korea is the purest example, and in a few industries within otherwise nonsocialist countries. But few remnants remain.
Hot socialism disappeared so quickly, both as a policy and as an ideal, that we have forgotten how utterly common its assumptions used to be. That's one reason we can seriously debate whether our contemporary situation represents "creeping socialism," a term that dates back to the 1950s, when socialism really was on the march.
The other sort of "socialism" is what I, like Steve's debating team, would more properly call "social democracy," or the redistributive state. This is the Swedish model, which uses massive redistribution through taxation and subsidies to rearrange economic outcomes. The goal is the same as for hot socialism--a fairer allocation of resources--and the animating ideology is economic egalitarianism.
Having spent some time recently in Sweden, I find it hard to imagine that Swedish socialism is creeping anywhere, except possibly under a rock to hide. The Swedish system is in serious trouble. The Swedish economy is no longer creating jobs--private sector employment has been shrinking for decades, and the public sector can no longer absorb more workers. The country is facing a brain drain. A backlash is developing against refugees and immigrants, who once represented Sweden's commitment to human rights and now are increasingly seen as outsiders consuming a fixed welfare pie. Many Swedes are pessimistic about the future, in large measure because they cannot imagine how their system can survive, yet cannot overcome the political obstacles to changing it.
The "social democracy" form of socialism is difficult to maintain because it runs head on into the political pressure of democracy--which replaces abstract issues of "fairness" with the practical calculations of interest-group politics--and the economic pressure of open markets. The Western democracies, Sweden among them, have not been willing to sacrifice their political freedom or their general prosperity to maintain ever-expanding socialism. They haven't, for instance, kept their people from leaving the country or even, in most cases, from sending their money abroad. That freedom has maintained the political legitimacy of social democracies, but it has undermined their ability to stay socialist.
As Hayek noted in The Road to Serfdom, "Many kinds of economic planning are indeed practicable only if the planning authority can effectively shut out all extraneous influences; the result of such planning is therefore inevitably the piling-up of restrictions on the movements of men and goods." The flip side of Hayek's observation is that countries that allow the more or less free movement of products, people, and financial capital will find that socialism cannot be sustained. A socialist regime depends on monopoly power that cannot survive the pressures of competition from outside. In the postwar period, a combination of liberal idealism, economic pragmatism, and Cold War calculation led not to Hayek's "piling-up of restrictions" but to increasingly free international markets, greater freedom of movement, and, most recently, ever freer capital flows--all enhanced by advances in communications and transportation.
We are not experiencing "creeping socialism." That is not the challenge we face. If you are used to fighting socialism, and have developed your arguments, tactics, and alliances accordingly, it's tempting to define any form of redistribution or regulation as creeping socialism and therefore to declare the expansion of any and all government programs to be socialism. But that sweeping definition leads to political and economic confusion: It destroys the ability to detect threats early, to form alliances and perceive enemies, and to hone arguments.
We must keep in mind what socialism is, and therefore what it is not. Socialism, creeping or galloping, is an ideological concept with a particular sense of what is important. What distinguishes socialism is its appeal to economic fairness. It declares that markets do not allocate wealth and power fairly, and that political processes will do a better job. Socialism is not simply about moving money from the powerless to the powerful--a goal as old as politics--but about flattening the distribution of income and wealth. Pork-barrel spending is not socialism. Farm subsidies are not socialism. "Corporate welfare" is not socialism. These programs are not ideological in nature. They are about competing interest groups.
Socialism is about claims of justice, and it is also about money: about wealth, income, physical and financial capital. It is an ideology based on allocating economic resources. It may try to achieve that goal by nationalizing assets, by command-and-control regulation, or by taxation and redistribution. But the goal is the same: to rearrange society's wealth, generally from the "haves" to the "have nots." Rearranging wealth (or income) is not the only possible ideological goal of economic regulation. It is merely the goal we have become accustomed to since the late 19th century.
Market processes do more than determine who winds up with which resources. That means that socialism is not the only conceivable ideology that might launch an attack on markets and, conversely, that anti-socialist conservatives are not the only possible allies for classical liberals in defense of economic freedom.
Markets have many characteristics. They serve and express the individual pursuit of happiness. They spread ideas. They foment change in the ways people live and work, and in what character traits are valued. They dissolve and recombine existing categories, from artistic genres to occupations. They encourage the constant search for improvements, and they subject new ideas to ruthless, unsentimental testing. Markets evolve through trial and error, experimentation and feedback. They are out of anyone's control, and their results are unpredictable. It is this dynamism of markets--their nature as open-ended, decentralized discovery processes--that attracts the greatest ideological opposition today.
The most potent challenge to markets today, and to liberal ideals more generally, is not about fairness. It is about stability and control--not as choice in our lives as individuals, but as a policy for society as a whole. It is the argument that markets are disruptive and chaotic, that they make the future unpredictable, and that they serve too many diverse values rather than "one best way." The most important challenge to markets today is not the ideology of socialism but the ideology of stasis, the notion that the good society is one of stability, predictability, and control. The role of the state, in this view, therefore, is not so much to reallocate wealth as it is to curb, direct, or end unpredictable market evolution.
Stasists object to markets because the decentralized evolution of market processes creates not just change but change of a particular sort. By serving the diverse desires of individuals and by rewarding the innovators who find popular improvements, markets constantly upset unitary notions of what the future should be like. Markets don't build a bridge to the future--a path from point A to point B across a scary abyss; they continually add nodes and pathways in a web of many different futures. Market processes make it impossible to make society as a whole adhere to a static ideal--whether that ideal is a traditional way of life, the status quo, or a planner's notion of the one best future.
As a result, we find stasist enemies of markets arrayed across the old left-right spectrum, which we may define by its relation to socialism. Consider CNN's Crossfire, a show whose entire premise is the sparring of left and right. In denouncing the dynamic economy, the show's right-wing host, Pat Buchanan, has joined forces on one occasion with left-wing technology critic Jeremy Rifkin and, more recently, with corporate gadfly Ralph Nader. All agree that international trade, technological innovation, global financial markets, corporate reorganization, the expansion of some industries and the contraction of others--and just about every other manifestation of economic competition or creativity--portend a terrible future. They also agree, in principle at least, that the government should do something to curb market dynamism. This is not a socialist call for regulation. It is a stasist one.
The stasist attack on markets, regardless of what part of the old spectrum it may come from, applies two common tactics that are very different from the old arguments for socialism. First, it argues that we should not let people take chances on new ideas that might have negative consequences. This "precautionary principle" is particularly well developed--and increasingly enshrined in policy--in the environmental arena. (See "Precautionary Tale," April.) But it can crop up anywhere. I recently read an article in Policy, the magazine of the Centre for Independent Studies in Australia, in which the author distinguished between conservatives like himself and classical liberals on just these grounds: He criticized the Tory government of London for deregulating the color of buses. "The gain remains potential, and this is the key word," he wrote, while the loss of uniformly red buses is guaranteed.
The precautionary principle counts only the downside of new ideas, not their potential benefits--the potential doesn't count--and it ignores the costs of maintaining the status quo. It puts no value on discovery and learning, either as social processes or as means to individual satisfaction. Market processes simply cannot survive this standard of judgment. It outlaws their inherent uncertainty.
The second stasist attack on markets has equally devastating potential. This is the argument against externalities. Most of us have been willing to grant the problem of externalities in such areas as air pollution and to look for ways of addressing it with minimal disruption of market processes. But it's not that hard to declare that every market action has potentially negative spillover effects. The infinitely elastic version of the externality argument turns the language of market-oriented economics against the essential nature of commerce. Indeed, we increasingly see the externality argument aimed not at producers, the traditional target, but at consumers. My choice of which movies to watch creates cultural pollution. My purchase of convenient packaging produces environmental waste. My house color or garage facade does not please the neighbors. My purchase of consumer goods leads to "luxury fever" that hurts everyone. We are all connected in the marketplace, and therefore, in this view, our actions must be tightly regulated to contain spillovers.
Stasists do not just make tactical left-right alliances on specific issues; they share a worldview and similar rhetoric. On the left, stasist critiques of markets are increasingly replacing traditional distributional arguments. Green demands for "sustainability" and a "steady-state economy" have supplanted socialist concerns for fairness. Critics like Juliet Schor and Robert Frank attack markets for encouraging ever-expanding yuppie consumption, not for immiserating the poor. The sociologist Richard Sennett, who was raised on children's books from the Little Lenin Library, attacks today's "flexible capitalism" not for exploiting the workers or paying poorly but for fostering instability and rewarding personal adaptability. Today's jobs, Sennett complains in The Corrosion of Character, do not tell workers who they are and thus threaten "the ability of people to form their characters into sustained narratives." Egalitarian bioethicist Daniel Callahan attacks the push for medical progress, which he finds expressed in the dynamic interplay of markets, technological innovation, and individual patients' desires. He calls for "steady state medicine" and "finite health goals." Although socialized medicine might provide a regulatory vehicle for achieving his goals, Callahan is not making a socialist argument.
Turning to the center of the old spectrum, we find stasists who are,if anything, even more upset about market dynamism than their counterparts to the left and the right--because decentralized discovery processes cannot coexist with technocratic, political control. There are many examples of such objections, which are particularly virulent when Europeans start denouncing the "American" openness of the Internet, but one of the best is from Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who defined the postwar "vital center" in the United States. Writing in the 75th anniversary issue of Foreign Affairs, Schlesinger condemns the "onrush of capitalism" for its "disruptive consequences." He warns of dire results from the dynamism of global trade and new technologies: "The computer," he writes, "turns the untrammeled market into a global juggernaut crashing across frontiers, enfeebling national powers of taxation and regulation, undercutting national management of interest rates and exchange rates, widening disparities of wealth both within and between nations, dragging down labor standards, degrading the environment, denying nations the shaping of their own economic destiny, accountable to no one, creating a world economy without a world polity."
Meanwhile, over on the right we find two major objections to market dynamism. Like their counterparts on the left, some on the stasist right attack trade, immigration, technology, large-scale retailers like Wal-Mart, and other elements of market dynamism that upset "settled ways." In these attacks, stasist conservatives often make alliances with environmentalists pursuing the same goals. Sometimes it's easy to apply the old left-right distinction--Pat Buchanan is clearly a man of the right--but not always. I would certainly put Prince Charles on the right--he's a hereditary aristocrat, after all--but many people consider his stasist views, especially his views of technology, to be versions of left-wing environmentalism.
At least in the United States, however, the more common right-wing objection is that by serving diverse individual desires, markets undermine a central notion of the good. Thus some conservatives, notably David Brooks and Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard, have called for federal programs to serve the ideal of a "national purpose." More often, we hear markets subjected to conservative attack when they produce goods or institutions--from violent movies to domestic-partner benefits to in vitro fertilization--that do not fit conservative goals.
Even on education policy, where the conservative "line" is support for school choice, there are signs of disquiet. Choice is a useful political tool against the teachers unions tied to the Democratic Party and against secular public schools, but its premises of variety, competition, and tolerance cut against many conservatives' views of good education. When California conservative Ron Unz editorialized against vouchers in the left-wing Nation, he shocked many on both the left and the right. But he was only expressing a worldview he absorbed over years of reading neoconservative publications: We know the right answer already; there is no need for a discovery process in education.
The good news is that just as the breakdown of socialism has created new alliances against markets, it has also created new alliances in support of them. The idea that markets produce not chaos and disruption but positive, emergent order has become common in the same circles where a generation ago socialism, or at least technocratic planning, was all the rage. Some of you may have seen, for instance, this endorsement of market dynamism from a noted economist: "What's the single most important thing to learn from an economics course today? What I tried to leave my students with is the view that the invisible hand is more powerful than the hidden hand. Things will happen in well-organized efforts without direction, controls, plans. That's the consensus among economists. That's the Hayek legacy." The source of that upbeat assessment of markets was Larry Summers, now U.S. secretary of the treasury and the epitome of a Cambridge economist.
If Schlesinger's hysteria exemplifies the attitudes of centrist stasists, Summers' optimism represents a new centrist coalition on the side of dynamism. That does not mean that Summers is a classical liberal, of course. It simply makes him, and other centrist dynamists, the sort of ally on behalf of markets that anti-socialist conservatives were in an earlier time. The American center (and, I suspect, Britain's New Labour) is full of chastened technocrats who have come to accept the practical limitations of state action and the practical advantages of economic freedom.
There are also many political "moderates"--journalists, scholars, technologists, scientists, artists, and business people, all far less famous than Summers--whose intellectual appreciation for self-organizing systems has come from outside economics: from complexity theory, from the decentralized evolution of the Internet, from the process of scientific discovery, from ecological science, from cross-cultural exchange, from organization theory. These centrist dynamists share an appreciation for dispersed knowledge and trial-and-error evolution that spills over into their attitudes toward markets. They do not always prefer markets to government, but they usually do. They lack the reflex that says a single, government-imposed approach is the best solution to public problems. They are more concerned with finding mechanisms to encourage innovation, competition, choice, and feedback. One thing that makes our political discourse confusing is that the term moderate does not distinguish between those whose moderation implies an appreciation for market processes and those whose moderation suggests just the opposite--a long list of schemes for small-scale government tinkering.
Even more striking is a profound split on what used to be the left. While leftists like Sennett are attacking economic dynamism, their erstwhile allies are finding in markets the values of innovation, openness, and choice. The counterculture has morphed into the business culture--to the consternation of both commerce-hating leftists and cultural conservatives. The left that gave us socialism is not the left that gave us personal computers and Fast Company magazine. Yet both the PC and America's hot new business magazine were unquestionably created by people who, by both personal history and political agenda, saw themselves as left-wing critics of establishment institutions. Individuals who would have no great love of "markets" if that concept implied static, hierarchical, bureaucratic corporate structures have embraced the idea of markets as open systems that foster diversity and self-expression. The very characteristics that make stasists wary of markets lead an emerging coalition of dynamists to defend them.
On the old political spectrum, socialism defined the left. That meant that the more you opposed socialism, for whatever reason, the further right you were. On the old spectrum, therefore, classical liberals were on the right, which makes us the right wing of the dynamist coalition.
It matters a lot whether we define our central challenge today as opposing socialism or as protecting dynamism. If we declare "the left" our enemies and "the right" our allies, based on anti-socialist assumptions, we will ignore the emerging left-right alliance against markets. We will miss the symbolic and practical importance of such cutting-edge issues as biotechnology, popular culture, international trade, and Internet governance. We will sacrifice whole areas of research and innovation to stay friendly with people who'll agree to cut taxes just a little bit, and only for families with children. We will miss the chance to deepen the appreciation for market processes among people who lack the proper political pedigree. We will sacrifice the future of freedom in order to preserve the habits of the past.
So, yes, I am an optimist about creeping socialism. We must always be vigilant, of course, and we still have many socialist legacies with which to deal--legacies that can provide powerful tools for the partisans of stasis. But socialism is dead as an ideal and dying as a policy. The challenges of the 21st century will be different: They will be to defend the virtues of dynamism and to rally a new coalition on its behalf. How we rise to those challenges will determine whether the next century will mark a new flourishing of liberalism, or yet another long era of twilight struggle.
]]>Scott Adams is one of America's leading social critics: an astute observer of the follies and pains of corporate life in the age of the knowledge worker, downsizing, PowerPoint presentations, and endless management fads. Unlike most social commentators, however, Adams isn't looking to change government policy or re-engineer capitalism to suit his tastes. He's providing criticism from within--the sort of knowing commentary that can get stupid policies dropped before they're implemented. And, of course, he makes it funny.
Before his Dilbert comic strip took off, Adams himself did time as an anonymous cubicle dweller, working for Crocker National Bank and then Pacific Bell. "I worked in a number of jobs that defy description but all involve technology and finances," he reports. An MBA with an undergraduate degree in economics, he nonetheless lived the life of a technical specialist--"My business card said `engineer,' but I'm not an engineer by training"--and Dilbert and his co-workers reflect that background.
Nowadays, he stays in touch with the cutting edge of business stupidity through the hundreds of e-mails fans send him. The Internet, he says, has been critical to Dilbert's success, building a fan base that spread the word beyond the strip's first few newspapers. Those fans were especially helpful when Bill Watterson retired from drawing Calvin and Hobbes, and many newspapers polled their readers on what they'd like to see take its place. "We want Dilbert," was often the reply.
Now Adams is living the "new economy" dream, having escaped the cubicle grind to do what he loves and make piles of money doing it. His Dilbert comic strip runs in some 1,700 newspapers in 51 countries, and its devoted fans support a merchandising empire of mouse pads, coffee mugs, dolls, calendars, and so on. A TV version of Dilbert debuts January 25. In addition to the usual comics collections, Adams has written three semi-serious books, The Dilbert Principle, The Dilbert Future, and The Joy of Work, that combine illustrative strips with observations about improving (or surviving) corporate life.
REASON Editor Virginia Postrel interviewed Adams at his home in Danville, California, where he lives with his longtime girlfriend, who still works at PacBell; two cats; enormous amounts of Dilbert paraphernalia; and gadgets galore.
Reason: Why do you think Dilbert is so popular?
Scott Adams: It's a whole range of things. Some people are just looking at it and saying, "This is just like my workplace, he's talking about me," and so they're really into it. There are some people who just like jokes--wherever they find jokes, they're happy. And kids under 12 are saying, "Hey, there's a talking dog."
I think people use the strip in different ways. Readers tell me a lot--I get so many e-mails every day. They often say that some policy got changed because while their management was in the midst of creating it, a Dilbert cartoon came out mocking that same policy. So I have been credited for killing a lot of bad policies, which I guess I'm happy about. The other thing is that [the strip] kind of realigns the balance of power. Employees don't really have much ability to do anything about a policy they don't like. But through Dilbert they can mock it, and nobody can really withstand the mocking factor. I've created a way employees can mock policies without it being personal. If you mocked it personally, you would get fired. But people can take my cartoon, point to it, and say, "I'm OK with this. But this cartoonist guy, he thinks you're silly." It's a way to offload the risk.
Reason: Dilbert has emerged as the new workplace Everyman. This is a change from the traditional workplace Everyman, who was often an assembly line worker and whose greatest obstacles were the pace of the machinery and grinding repetition. Dilbert's biggest problem is basically bosses who keep him from getting his work done.
Adams: It's about futility and absurdity. But he's got a different problem, too. If you're on the assembly line, at least you've made something. Whereas Dilbert is like I was in my career: work 17 years and never do anything for anybody. Nothing tangible came out of anything I ever did. There's a lot of people in that boat. They're working on something which, if it were ever actually completed, it would be tangible. But nine times out of 10, things get canceled or delayed. You change jobs before it's finished. You never really get the feeling that you've done anything useful. You feel like you're bluffing all the time. It's the big difference.
Reason: That's the existential angst of the knowledge worker?
Adams: Yeah. You have no traction with the real world and you lose any correlation between your efforts, your paycheck, and what you are doing in the world. Those three things are thoroughly unconnected.
Reason: Is that why more people are working for themselves?
Adams: It probably [has to do with] searching for meaning and a connection between what their effort is and what their reward is. I think workers want that connection. But it's also just bad bosses and idiot co-workers.
Reason: What do you think about the trend toward self-employment?
Adams: I worry about a brain drain. I always wonder whether one of the reasons that the United States does so well and innovates so well is that the only people here are risk takers. You have to be, just to get here in the first place. But I wonder what happens when corporations are filled with people who don't take risks--even fewer risks than they already do. And it's pretty bad to begin with.
In The Dilbert Future, I talked about how the workplace would be more like the NBA, where the superstars get gigantic salaries and there are the people who are happy to have jobs, and a few middle managers in the middle to keep it together, but everyone else will just go off and work for themselves. The corporation is going to have superstars, irrelevant managers, and people who do real work. And that's about it.
Reason: Some economists have called this scenario the "winner-take-all economy."
Adams: There's a name for it?
Reason: It's supposed to be really bad. From the way you write about it, though, I get the sense that you don't think it would be that awful.
Adams: Not if you're a winner. The rap with capitalism is that in order for some people to do really well, some people are not going to do very well. Capitalism is just another form of discrimination. It discriminates against people who don't want to work hard or who are not capable. Why should they be discriminated against? We have internalized that it's the only kind of discrimination that is OK. You couldn't discriminate against skin color, age, and disability. Why could you discriminate against someone who is stupid? There's no reason. It's just we've all agreed--and by we I mean the people who are not so stupid. If everybody voted, I'm sure the stupid people would--well, who knows what the stupid people would vote?
Reason: They still might be better off than under any alternative.
Adams: I don't know. Would stupid people--people significantly below average, somewhere under a 100 IQ--be worse off under communism? I think they end up roughly the same. I think average people are doing just fine and would prefer capitalism.
Reason: Your strip certainly highlights the absurdities of corporate life. That's something you've also done in real life. Explain what you did for Pierluigi Zappacosta at Logitech.
Adams: I got a call from Tia O'Brien [an independent reporter on assignment] for the San Jose Mercury News. She wanted to do a story that was going to be interesting and different. We brainstormed and came up with the idea that I'd put on a disguise, go to a corporation as a consultant, and see if I could fool people into thinking that I was a high-paid consultant when, in fact, I was just full of crap. Zappacosta thought it would be a fun idea.
So we set up the scam. Tia acted as my assistant, and Pierluigi was the only one who was in on it in a room full of business executives at Logitech. For over one hour I took them through an exercise on how to rebuild their mission statement. I actually convinced them that the one they had was woefully inadequate.
Reason: Was the one they had bad?
Adams: That's part of the humor of it--all mission statements are quite useless. So to tell them the one they had wasn't doing the job should have raised a red flag to begin with. But people in corporations are so used to two things: First, absurdity--so nothing seems too unusual. And second, there is not enough payoff to rock the boat. It was much easier for everyone to listen to what I had to say than to jump on me at the first sight of absurdity. Certainly everyone in the room had at least a moment where they said, "Man, I'm wasting my time!" But I made sure I always skated just below the level at which somebody would call my bluff and would think it was worth taking the chance of calling me a fraud. I had them thinking, "What if it just turns out that he's just eccentric but the best consultant in the world?"
Reason: What did they do when they found out?
Adams: For the first 30 seconds, they were just stunned. It took them a while. They had to rebuild in their minds the last hour of their life to make sense of the moment that was right in front of them. Their eyes were open, but there was slot-machine activity in there, as they rewound and fast-forwarded through until they got to where they were, and then they laughed. They thought it was funny. Nobody seemed to take it bad.
Reason: What do you hate about cubicles?
Adams: I think it's the symbolism more than anything--the fact that you're a grown adult and well into your career and you have to sit in a box. There's just something inherently degrading about that. Even if the intent [was not] to degrade when they built the things, it's always the effect. The ones I was in were always brown. They were small, and you couldn't decorate them--there were rules against it. So you couldn't make your cubicle look the way you wanted. You couldn't bring your personality. You couldn't leave any pictures out because that would affect the "acoustic integrity" of the wall. You couldn't put anything above the sight line of the cubicle, so you couldn't have a plant. When I would come to work, I'd be walking through the parking lot and I'd be in a perfectly good mood. Outside the sun was shining, and as I walked down the hall, closer and closer to my cubicle, I could feel my spirit shrinking, and by the time I sat down, I'd be in a terribly bad mood.
Reason: What possible justification could there be for telling employees that they can't pay for their own customization--put some pictures of loved ones on the walls or have a plant?
Adams: I guess the big problem with any large organization, whether it's a company or the government, is that there's always a reason for everything in large groups. Like why people can't put things on the wall of their cubicle: There probably was a study somewhere that said that it makes sound travel more because it's hitting the paper on the walls and bouncing off. But real people would never have that kind of rule in their house.
Reason: How does that relate to government?
Adams: Nobody makes more laws than the government, and every one of them has a good argument behind it. But individually, if it were up to you and somebody said, "Look at these 10,000 laws," how many would you keep? You would keep three: Don't kill people, don't steal things, pay your taxes.
Reason: Another thing you write about a lot is diversity training. What have been your experiences with it?
Adams: I think everyone is in favor of the goal of diversity training--don't abuse people just for being different. It's just the mechanism they dislike.
There are logical problems, of course, with diversity training: Everyone is different in some way. I happen to be short and balding, which is an incredible disadvantage in business. It's every bit as big a disadvantage as those of people in protected categories. But it's one of those things you can't claim, because nobody would believe it and you'd get no sympathy whatsoever. Being fat and short and ugly and bald can be huge disadvantages, but they are not on the list. And there are other things that are equally legitimate which aren't on the list. So right away you get a little animosity: "I wanna be on the list, too."
But the problem is really the same one with most corporate training: It's conceived and set up by people who are, in many cases, intelligent and understand the issue. Then they hire people to do the training who are not brilliant people and who don't really understand the issues. What I usually hear from people is that they went to a training class and somebody of a persuasion they're not told them that they are evil. That's their training: somebody telling them that they are bad. So they leave and say, "I'm not on the list, and I'm bad."
Reason: I take it they don't leave convinced that they're bad?
Adams: Nobody is convinced that they are bad. Right there, you have a problem. So everybody just leaves bitter. I just think there's a better way to do it. I certainly wouldn't claim to be an expert, but the concept of having everybody sit in a room so someone can tell you that you are bad because people like you (not even you personally, but people who look like you) have abused other people who look like them and that you better fix it--it's kind of an inherently offensive concept.
Reason: Do you get into trouble for saying that?
Adams: I don't say that, not in the comics. I only make fun of the process.
Reason: Do you think the law should try to make workplaces fair, as opposed to people trying to do it voluntarily?
Adams: It'll seem like I'm two-faced or hypocritical here, but here are my two points of view: For the individual, you should run away from your company and work for yourself. My advice for an individual is just to escape it. But given that there will always be companies and clusters of people that have to work together, you probably always need some rules to keep people from discriminating and doing things that a polite society should not do. So there's a role for it.
Reason: Do you think more people are able to have work that they enjoy now than in the past? Or is it always the lucky few?
Adams: Compared to a feudal society, more. Moving large amounts of bovine fecal matter from one place to another, if that was your job, you worried about the plague. I would say we've moved roughly sideways in the last 30 years.
Reason: Were things better when people thought, "If I'm loyal to the company, the company will be loyal to me. I'll put in my 40 years and they'll put in their 40"?
Adams: Yeah, they probably were better. But it doesn't matter, because it's gone. The reality is that as soon as downsizing came, the illusion of that balance--of what's good for you is good for me--was gone. It became obvious it was good for the company to get rid of an employee. I don't think that old sense will ever come back. And that is probably going to cause a seesawing of power into infinity. Right now the economy is booming and unemployment rates are low, so the employees have all the power because it's hard to get new ones.
As soon as that changes, if the economy crumbles and unemployment starts skyrocketing, all the employers are going to use their power again, because they know there's no point telling the employees that they'll be trusted and they'll be there forever, because they are not going to believe it anyway. The external events will drive that seesaw back down.
Reason: Downsizing isn't always done in the most intelligent way. But the theory behind it is that there are layers of management that were not just not adding value, but are possibly even subtracting value from a company. If you read Dilbert, you get the sense that there's something to that, don't you?
Adams: One thing you can say about downsizing is that it did make big companies more efficient. It clearly had negative effects--people's lives were dislocated, people who kept their jobs had to do more work. But there's no doubt about it: The fewer managers there are, the better things work.
Reason: In your new book The Joy of Work, you talk about Norman Solomon. Tell us about Solomon--what he said about Dilbert, downsizing, and why he was wrong.
Adams: Solomon wrote a book called The Trouble with Dilbert. Most of it sprung from one comment that I made and then later confirmed, which I didn't realize had been taken out of context. I was asked, "Are there any benefits to downsizing?" And I said that, in fact, there were: It made some companies more efficient, and once you get rid of all the managers, the companies' stock prices go up. Those are good things.
I said that in the context that I was one of the people who most made fun of the methods of downsizing and the turmoil that it caused. But Solomon took that as my core philosophy that downsizing is good, presumably with all of its ramifications.
Reason: The more pain the better?
Adams: That was implied, but he didn't come right out and say that I was in favor of pain. But he deduced that I was a tool of capitalists and that I was not in favor of the working man, as he felt I should be. Or rather I was opposed to the working man in some way. These are very conceptual arguments that are not entirely related to what I do in any given day, but he felt that those conclusions were valid, and they were a big surprise to me because most of them obviously were taken from that one comment.
Reason: People from the left don't seem to know what to make of Dilbert. They either want to make it them ("Dilbert is anti-business") or just the opposite ("Dilbert is a capitalist tool"). But you seem to be criticizing capitalism from within.
Adams: I would say yes to that. Capitalism being the thing which I know and love, I feel it's not above criticism.
Reason: How do you define yourself politically?
Adams: I find that I do not align with any well-established political viewpoint that has a name associated with it. So I've called myself pro-death. I looked for what commonality there is in all of my work and in all of my political views and realized that I support abortion, capital punishment, and a strong military. When I put together the things I'm in favor of, the only thing they had in common was that they all ended up killing someone, whether it was a fetus or a terrorist.
Reason: What's your idea of how government should work?
Adams: I've always thought that, if I led the world--and God help us all if that ever happened--that the first thing I would do is make a list of what I considered the top priorities. And I'd have a criterion for why they were the worst problems. Probably on the top of my list would be something like tobacco and cigarette smoking, because it kills people.
Reason: Smoking is at the top of your list of the world's priorities?
Adams: Well, of the United States'. Maybe a strong military is at the top of the list--but it seems to be under control and nobody is attacking us. Anyway, I would have my top 10 problems and then I would bring together the experts. Let's say the problem was what to do about teen smoking. I'd get 100 of them in a room. Sixty of them say we should do this one thing, 40 of them say to do this other thing. By and large, not knowing anything more than these experts know, I'd go with the 60. I'd say, here's the experts, here are their credentials, so this is my policy. You'd never see that because it would never be politically viable to do that. But I've always imagined that it was the most sensible form of government.
Reason: A technocratic ideal. Is there no room for people wanting to smoke for the enjoyment they get out of it? Or do you decide from above that it's bad for them, therefore they shouldn't be allowed to do it?
Adams: I think that everything in our society is this tradeoff between how much does the government meddle vs. how much does it need to do for our own good. We make people wear seatbelts. We pass safety laws. We clean up the water. We clean up the air. Cars have a certain emission standard. For virtually everything you touch during the day, the government in some way has decided what the tradeoff is. It's a conscious tradeoff of individual freedom in exchange for preserving safety of life.
Reason: Some people have described Dilbert as anti-technology. One cultural critic has even used the strip to suggest that we think of technology as a "killing thing." Is Dilbert anti-technology?
Adams: No, he's exuberantly pro-technology. He loves technology. I love technology. If it hums or beeps or flashes, I want one. But it's just like any other tool. You can use a hammer to hit somebody in the head. If people are reading that into [the strip], that's got to be something they are bringing into it. It's not anything I'm putting in.
Reason: The creator of Zippy the Pinhead, Bill Griffith, has called Dilbert more marketing than cartoon. What do you think of that?
Adams: He did that just before his book tour, I think.
You always have to sort out who is mad at you because you are marketing vs. who is mad at you because you are marketing better than they are marketing. I choose to look at that part of my life [marketing] as one I want to concentrate on because I think I can do it well. If I can get good results and somebody doesn't like that, then I don't know how to disagree with that. It's just pure opinion based on nothing. I'm not killing anybody. I'm creating things which people understand. If they want to transfer money in return for those objects, who dies? Who loses for that? It's a free world. If I were forcing people to buy it, then I'd understand. Or if it hurt people. But they're just jokes and dolls. Nobody is surprised when they buy a Dilbert item and put out their $10. They get something, and they know exactly what it is.
Reason: Dilbert is used in Office Depot ads. Recently the National Parent-Teacher Association also agreed to let its name and logo be used in Office Depot ads. The Associated Press had a story in which an anonymous Texas PTA official said she didn't like the ad with Dilbert because the character said, "Don't be a dork when you go back to school." The official said the comment runs counter to the association's goal of encouraging children to feel comfortable about their appearance. What do you think about the controversy?
Adams: Well, it's the first time I've heard of it. Three hundred million people in the United States, 300 million opinions. All humor offends somebody, and you can't really understand that fully until you've done as many cartoons as I have. I did a joke about barbecuing unicorns, and there is a society that loves unicorns and they were put off by the whole concept. It's the nature of humor that you are taking something which is not belittled and you're belittling it. Belittling the way people choose to dress seems about the most harmless target you can possibly go after. But somebody is going to think that how kids dress is very important to their self-esteem and their life and make a case for it. It's not wrong. They are not incorrect. It's just a question of whether humor is banned from the planet, or do you accept that as the natural result of allowing free speech?
Reason: One of your books is called The Dilbert Future. You've said that you tend to live in the next moment. What's so interesting about the future?
Adams: I've decided that the only reason I get up in the morning is because I'm curious. It seems to be my most fundamental driving force, because I've met all of what [psychologist Abraham] Maslow would call lower-hierarchy needs. I actually wonder, If I write another book, will anyone read it? I'm just curious at this point. I don't need the money really. Can I write another book? Would anybody care? Would anybody buy it? If I did that, what would that lead to? Like what would be the next thing that would make itself available if I was successful in the last book? So I'm just curious. I already know what happened yesterday, for the most part. I don't know what will happen tomorrow.
Reason: Many people are afraid of developing technologies, such as biotechnology. What do you think?
Adams: This is where the engineer part of my personality dominates. There is a whole ethical debate about twiddling with people's genes. Here's something that you can debate all you want. But there's no technology that we've developed that could actually do something important that we haven't used. Once you have the choice that your kid can be whatever height and have perfect health, which parent is going to say, "Well, I think I'll take my chances with the health of my child. I think I'll roll the dice on that one"? Once the capability is there, it's going to be widespread.
Reason: So, do you believe in progress?
Adams: Yeah, I'm a total optimist. I'm the biggest optimist in the world. I think everything will get better except those things which are somehow permanently broken. The people who are dead today will still be dead tomorrow, but for those of us still alive, thinking and healthy, I'm a total optimist. I always wonder if my optimism is a genetic thing. At any given moment, I'm never exuberant, but neither am I really depressed. But my optimism is off the chart. I always think everything is going to be much better tomorrow than it was today.
Reason: Is it just an emotional sense, or do you have an argument for why you think that?
Adams: No, there is absolutely no rational reason, because it would be so easy to come up with an argument that counters it. On the plus side of that, things do seem better now in general than they ever have been in the past. There are a few bumps in the trend line, like in the early '90s. But if you're in it for the long term, things get better.
]]>Overhea href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691003548/reasonmagazineA/">The Monetary History of the United States to show that "money matters," contrary to the received Keynesian wisdom. Within a decade, the theory of continental drift goes from geologic crankdom to how the world works.
Hypotheses that challenge established ideas may have a tough time--for good reason in most cases--but under dynamist rules they can't be squashed altogether, only marginalized. Anyone can start a journal; form a scholarly, political, or religious association; set up a Web page or discussion group. Anyone can try to persuade the world (or the relevant portion of it) of their ideas. The freedom to persuade is central to a dynamic, learning system, whether the lessons are intellectual, cultural, religious, or economic. And that persuasion takes many forms, of both expression and example. "At the root of technological progress is a rhetorical environment that makes it possible for inventors to be heard," suggests the economic historian and rhetorician D.N. McCloskey. "Free speech leads to riches." Both showing and telling are important.
Rules Within Rules
We swim in a sea of rules. Few are as fundamental as the four principles elaborated above. Rather, they are particular: company policies, traffic laws, religious strictures, etiquette conventions, professional ethics, grammar and syntax, game rules, software programs, university honor codes. Between the common law of contracts and "Never eat old mayonnaise" lie layer upon layer of increasingly specific rules.
The final characteristic of dynamist rules, then, is a rule about rule making: Dynamist rules establish a framework within which people can create nested, competing frameworks of more-specific rules. The overall framework allows Morningstar's "little pockets of the universe" to emerge, establishing their own rules. Competition--the option to leave one pocket of the universe for an alternative--permits such specific rule regimes to flourish without making the overall system rigid or inflexible. We can choose the bonds with which to shape, and reshape, our lives.
In How Buildings Learn, author Stewart Brand examines how buildings are adapted to new uses over time--and what makes for resilient architecture that can "learn." His research provides a useful metaphor for dynamic systems in general. A building, he notes, contains six nested systems: site, structure (the foundation and load-bearing elements), skin (the exterior), services (wiring, plumbing, heating, etc.), space plan (the interior layout), and stuff. The further out the system, the more permanent. Moving around furniture (stuff) is easy, altering a foundation (structure) extremely difficult.
In a building, writes Brand "the lethargic slow parts are in charge, not the dazzling rapid ones. Site dominates Structure, which dominates the Skin, which dominates the Services, which dominate the Space plan, which dominates the Stuff. How a room is heated depends on how it relates to the heating and cooling Services, which depend on the energy efficiency of the Skin, which depends on the constraints of the Structure....The quick processes provide originality and challenge, the slow provide continuity and constraint." A well-designed, adaptable building, he argues, respects the different speeds and different functions of these nested layers. It keeps them separate, allowing "slippage" so that the quick inner layers can change without disrupting the more permanent systems. (You don't have to tear up the foundation to fix the plumbing.)
So it is with rules in a dynamic, learning system. The basic dynamist rules, like a building site or foundation, change slowly, if at all. That is why they must be extremely general. But on top of them, we build increasingly fluid, nested sets of more-specific rules.
The rules of free inquiry, property, and contract that allow universities to form may not change much over time, for example, but the institution-specific codes governing curfews, library privileges, computer use, curriculum requirements, or admissions procedures can evolve rapidly, assuming each institution is free to govern itself. Between the general rules and the institution-specific codes lie other rules: the professional standards that govern scholars, the classification systems that catalog books, the Internet protocols that link computer systems. Nor must every school adopt the same, or even similar, rules. A system of free competition and criticism allows room for fundamentalist Bob Jones University and for freewheeling Berkeley, for requiring senior theses at Princeton and co-op work internships at Northeastern. By choosing a university and leaving if they don't like it, students and faculty decide which rules they wish to be governed by. They don't have to agree on which rules are best for everyone. Nested rules accommodate diversity.
The more that rules must compete for adherents, the more legitimacy they enjoy and the more local knowledge they can incorporate. "We reject kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code," declares the Internet Engineering Task Force Credo, and Internet rules have indeed evolved through trial-and-error competition. Net pioneers are intensely loyal to that process. Against demands for censorship and regulation, they reflexively propose flexible, nested alternatives: filtering software for many different tastes, voluntary Web site "trustmarks" indicating various audited privacy standards, access-provider terms of service enforced by banishing rule breakers. These ideas assume that diversity is valuable and that there is not one best way.
"The value of labels," writes technology intellectual Esther Dyson, "is that people can pick the rules that suit them, rather than be forced to operate in a one-size-fits-all environment where everyone has to follow the same rules....The basic rule is that providers must disclose--label--themselves clearly and honestly. And they must do what they promise to do." Contract, commitment, and competition permit diverse, voluntarily accepted nested rule sets.
Competition makes the distinction between dynamist principles and technocratic rule making all the more clear: Dynamists seek not a world without rules but a world in which rules govern the appropriate level of life. Rachel's rules exist in a dynamist world, infused with the knowledge accumulated through generations of trial-and-error learning. But such rules are the "stuff" of life, the particular maxims through which individuals govern themselves. They are not the "site" or the "structure" to which all of society must conform. Dynamist rules permit complexity and plenitude, even of rules themselves.
]]>He was a Berber from Algeria. And, like many a Washington cab driver, he had a story to tell about politics. The Algerian government had done his people wrong, had done him wrong when he was a student demonstrator standing up for Berber rights. But Americans didn't understand his struggle "Americans won't fight for principles," he said.
Thinking of my country as the would-be world policeman and idealistic guardian of human rights, I demurred. But then he started talking about soccer riots, about how Americans didn't understand the principle behind them, the notion of standing up for your team no matter what. The notion of blind, dehumanizing, clan loyalties.
To the cab driver, "principles" weren't abstract ideals like liberty or equality. They were group allegiances. "Principles" were what set Serbs against Bosnians, Hindus against Muslims, neo-Nazis against Turks. And Americans won't fight for principles. It is one of our defining characteristics.
The cab driver was, I believe, correct. But not everyone is so sure. A lot of very smart people see the Balkans in America's future. They point to the L.A. riots and say race relations are worse than ever. They look at immigrants pouring in from Third World nations and say (on the left) that we must accommodate diverse cultures and (on the right) that we must shut the doors. They worry about a fragmenting nation–too many ethnicities, too many religions, even too many cable TV channels. They're afraid America will disappear. "Unless a common purpose binds [Americans] together, tribal hostilities will drive them apart," says liberal historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., neatly encapsulating the centrist position.
"There is no American heritage," proclaims Rubén Martinez, one of L.A.'s angry young pundits, voicing the multiculturalism of the left.
Writing in National Review, Peter Brimelow declares that Americans, to remain a nation, must have genetic ties. " 'Nation'–as suggested by its Latin root nacere, to be born–intrinsically implies a link by blood. A nation is like an extended family," he writes, and later, "Americans are now being urged to abandon the bonds of a common ethnicity and instead to trust entirely to ideology to hold together their state (polity). This is an extraordinary experiment, like suddenly replacing all the blood in a patient's body."
Martinez and Brimelow are both right, in part. America has more than one heritage, and America is an extraordinary experiment. But it is an experiment that works.
And it will continue to work as long as the multiculturalists of the left and the monoculturalists of the right aren't allowed to impose their visions on America. The United States is neither the Balkans nor Little England, West. And the forces of assimilation–the forces of American culture–are as powerful as they are utterly misunderstood.
Sometimes a picture is worth only a few words. The picture of Thurgood Marshall's funeral said, "We won." On the front page of the Los Angeles Times was Marshall's widow, flanked by their two sons. And they were all, unmistakably Asian. Mrs. Marshall is ethnically Filipina, born in Hawaii. Her half-Asian sons are married to white women.
Thurgood Marshall was, above all else, the lawyer who beat Jim Crow in court. That he became a Supreme Court justice was incidental. And Jim Crow was, above all else, designed to prevent families like Marshall's. Until 1967, it was illegal for an interracial couple to live together in the state of Virginia. The Marshalls bought their home there in 1968.
The old segregationists understood the American character. They knew that if the law didn't keep people apart, common humanity would bring them together. Americans have no principles. Restaurants and hotels and railroads and department store dressing rooms would let the races mingle–all in pursuit of the almighty dollar. Jim Crow was a bulwark against the integrating forces of commerce, education, and, above all, love. Allow the races to mingle, the segregationists said, and you'd soon have mixed-race children.
They were right. In 1970, there were 310,000 interracial marriages in the United States. In 1988, there were almost a million. "But would you want your daughter to marry one?" is now an irrelevant question. Your daughter will do as she pleases. America melts tribal ties. Jewish leaders write and preach incessantly on the evils of intermarriage. And the Jewish intermarriage rate has gone from 10 percent before 1965 to more than 50 percent since 1985–not counting ethnic non-Jews who convert. "We have lost more Jews to intermarriage than to the Holocaust," thundered a direct-mail appeal I once received. (Ah, that Commentary list.)
But most American Jews–most Americans–don't think of assimilation as death. Most Americans, lacking the cab driver's principles, do not disown their children for marrying outside their kind. We teach our ninth-graders Romeo and Juliet. It tells them adolescent love is more important than family loyalty. It says we are all the same kind.
For the last quarter century, the children of the New Deal have been fighting with the children of the '60s over what it means to be an American. Shall we melt everyone down in an Eisenhower-era cultural pot and call it America? Or shall we divide up on principle and get together only to insult each other's ancestors? Shall we protect "the common culture" or champion "cultural pluralism"? On and on the battle has raged–in the schools, in the newspapers, over the airwaves.
The debate over the American character has it all wrong. Assimilation is not an evil (or a good) foisted upon unwilling, unmeltable ethnics. It does not represent a betrayal of the self, a denial of identity. And it does not require public schools.
We misunderstand assimilation, suggests California essayist Richard Rodriguez, because we have denied that American culture exists: "Lacking any plural sense of ourselves, how shall we describe Americanization, except as loss? The son of Italian immigrant parents is no longer Italian. America is the country where one stops being Italian or Chinese or German."
That common-culture advocates like Schlesinger do not understand our common culture shows in their obsession with public schools. America is not France, a nation defined by its state institutions, a uniform culture imposed by law. Richard Rodriguez, the Sacramento-born child of immigrants, did not go to public schools. His teachers were not even Americans but nuns from Ireland. His was the experience of millions of Catholic Americans whose story is missing from the official accounts.
America is not a finished artifact but an irresistible process. The assumptions of America–ambition, tolerance, social equality, the individual pursuit of happiness–do not dictate an outcome. But they produce an atmosphere, an atmosphere that permeates every institution, that undermines every group. Even the Amish lose many of their children.
"For the child of immigrant parents the knowledge comes like a slap: America exists," writes Rodriguez. "America exists in the slouch of the crowd, the pacing of traffic lights, the assertions of neon, the cry of freedom overriding the nineteenth-century melodic line. Grasp the implications of American democracy in a handshake or in a stranger's Jeffersonian 'hi.' America is irresistible. Nothing to do with choosing."
Well, choice has something to do with it. We choose America, and we choose which America to choose.
America is a multicultural nation. It would be a multicultural nation if every non-Caucasian vanished tomorrow. New England is not the South is not California is not Utah. Understanding America, and American assimilation, has to start with that fact.
America exists quite comfortably with numerous enduring subcultures. Indeed, the greatest testimony to America's irresistibility may be the persistence of our regional cultures. Though they differ from each other less than America differs from the world, American regions have maintained distinctive cultures through centuries of changing populations. My husband's great-grandparents lived in the shtetls of Ukraine and Lithuania, but he is the unmistakable child of the Delaware Valley. His ancestors are William Penn and Benjamin Franklin.
"On average," writes John Shelton Reed, sociologist of the South, "migrants to the South already look something like Southerners, culturally. In a few respects, they look more like Southerners than Southerners do. They are even less wild than the natives about taxes and federal programs to help the poor, for example....By moving to California and New England, some atypical Southerners have made those places look more like California and New England, and the South more like the South."
My friend Kris, the Indiana-born child of German parents, moved to South Carolina in the ninth grade, having spent the previous few years in France. If you met her today, the only signs of her roots would be her Catholicism and an unusual level of thrift. She drawls and flirts and cheers for Clemson football like any other child of the Carolina Piedmont. She makes the South more Southern.
As do I, by living elsewhere. In the fall of 1978 I left the religious, conservative, biracial, slow-paced culture of South Carolina for the secular, liberal, multi-ethnic, intense culture of Princeton University. Like most immigrants, I was looking for a better life in a place I only half understood. Like many immigrants, I found educational and economic opportunities greater than any in my homeland. And I assimilated–dropped most of my accent, changed my politics and my religion, stopped trying to get a tan. I did these things not because anyone foisted a common culture upon me but because they made me happy.
That is how, and why, most immigrants assimilate. Not because they hate themselves or deny their roots. Not because the government has prohibited their native tongue or forced them to swear allegiance to a new religion. Not because they've gone through the homogenizing experience of public school. Assimilation is a combination of willful self-fashioning (11 percent of the Mormons in L.A. are Latino; they didn't accidentally convert) and unconscious adaptation. I dropped most of my twang because prejudiced people, on hearing it, would think me stupid and a bigot; I replaced it with a hodge-podge of Northeastern strains, because that is where I lived. Happiness and practicality, the pursuit of personal furfillment and financial success, preserve the common culture. A common purpose has nothing to do with it.
America won't crack up in the next 25 years because its mosaic is not the one the Balkanizing multiculturalists describe. America is a mosaic not of groups but of individuals, each of whom carries a host of cultural influences, some chosen, some inherited, some absorbed by osmosis. That mosaic is held together by the pursuit of happiness, the most powerful mortar ever conceived. Left alone, it will long endure.
Unfortunately, intellectuals and activists are obsessed with lining the tiles up in neat, monochromatic rows. Jim Crow has returned, somewhat half-heartedly, to dole out privilege and power according to racial quotas. Politicians address voters as genetic categories, not as people with ideas. Educated people argue, quite seriously, over whether 16th-century Aztec civilization was superior to 16th-century Spanish civilization–as though either form of barbarism proves something about late 20th-century America.
And we are ruining our colleges. Students who have spent their high-school years happily existing in a multicultural stew hit college and are told they can trust only others of their own kind; they are classified by race and expected to join social groups defined by ethnicity. This was true at Princeton, which had the lame excuse of a large number of provincial white preppies, but it's even true at California's state universities, which have no such defense.
"Students moving out of ethnically/racially diverse environments and into the austere university setting come face to face with cultural stratification," writes Lynell George in the Los Angeles Times Magazine. "It is, for many, the first time that they are called upon to choose sides or feel a need to become politically active."
She quotes U.C.-San Diego ethnic studies professor George Lipsitz: "I've talked to many students who are either from racially mixed backgrounds or who have what they consider to be an odd history–maybe they were the only black student in a white school or something like that. Then at the university it seems that there is an inside that they are not part of, and there is no obvious subgroup they can join."
This is terribly unfair to the young. It forecloses options and experimentation. It denies them potential friends. But most survive. And the collegiality of the workplace, with its required teamwork (or its universally hated boss), restores a sense of balance and of mutual interest. College principles vanish before career realities.
People who worry about America's future spend a lot of time worrying about the English language. I don't. The financial incentives to learn English are simply too great. And English-speaking Americans are notoriously pigheaded about learning other languages, even when they're transported to other countries. That obstinacy ensures that those financial incentives will continue.
The more interesting question about language is how we describe ourselves. With what words do we designate our cultural differences? What do they portend? On this front, too, there is good news.
Ethnicity has always been an easier barrier for Americans to cross than race. Oddly enough, we're better off breaking down into lots of little groups than into a few large blocks. The little groups have something to do with actual historical experience and with individual identities. And, more importantly, they are easy to rearrange. Nobody gets excited when Italian-Americans marry German-Americans. The little blocks make interesting patterns; the big blocks only confine. Black and white are ghettos captured in words.
Hispanic was invented to turn the latest wave of immigrants into a new race, and a new race problem. But Latinos stubbornly resist that term (and Latino), preferring to be called Mexican or Cuban or Salvadoran or whatever. Seeing themselves simply as Catholic ethnics (and an increasing number of evangelical Protestants), they act like their forebears–settling first in enclave communities, moving out after a generation or two, and intermarrying. About one-fifth of Latinos marry non-Latinos.
The language problem begotten by tan immigrants has begotten another. Many "Hispanics" are "white," so we have to invent a new term for whites. The term is Anglo–and if you want a fight, just try to slap it on a Jew or an Italian or, worse yet, an Irishman. So we're back to national origins, which leaves out people like me whose relevant ethnicity is regional American. The labels break down in absurdity.
The best news on the language front is, however, the oh-so-cumbersome term African-American. (Yes, it is imprecise–but, seriously, is Colin Powell really "black"?) African-American turns race into ethnicity. It transforms the huge, insurmountable differences of Jim Crow into the small, interesting details of urban neighborhoods. It changes a color into a person, into an American. It is, in fact, a de-Balkanizing term. Eventually, perhaps, we may not even need it. What, after all, do you call Thurgood Marshall's grandchildren?
]]>In the 1970s, Bruce Ames was a hero to environmentalists—the inventor of the Ames Test, which allows scientists to test chemicals to see whether they cause mutations in bacteria and perhaps cancer in humans. His research and testimony led to bans on such synthetic chemicals as Tris, the flame-retardant used in children's pajamas. A world-renowned cancer researcher with a calm, reasoned manner, Ames was an ideal witness in the case against man-made chemicals. As a science writer John Tierney aptly described him in Hippocrates, "he has a quiet, kindly tone of authority as he patiently explains why things are the way they are…He sounds so sensible, which is one reason he made such a good witness for the environmentalists in the 1970s."
But it's a scientist's imperative to change his mind when the data change—and recent data have made Ames deeply suspicious of high-dosage chemical testing and especially of the notion that man-made chemicals are uniquely dangerous. We are, he has discovered, surrounded by mutagens—not only synthetic chemicals but also natural ones—and blindly banning suspicious modern substances can do more harm than good.
Today, Ames, a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of California at Berkeley, stands on the other side of the chemical-ban debate. In 1990, he spoke out against California's Proposition 128, which would have banned many pesticides, and he has been highly critical of the ban on Alar. The best way to prevent cancer, Ames now believes, is to "eat your veggies." Any government action that makes fruits and vegetables more expensive ultimately causes cancer. In recent years, Ames has added a dollop of the economist's sense of trade-offs to the cancer researcher's zeal for prevention.
Ames discussed cancer research and environmental politics with Editor Virginia Postrel at his office in Berkeley.
Reason: You've become well known for saying that we shouldn't worry so much about man-made chemicals causing cancer, that natural carcinogens are far more common and we shouldn't worry about them either. Why is that?
Ames: It isn't that we shouldn't worry about man-made chemicals. In certain occupations, people can be exposed to very high levels. But pollution is pretty much irrelevant to cancer—the kind of pollution that we're getting with water pollution, or with pesticide residues, is in such tiny amounts.
People got off on the wrong track about man-made chemicals. They said, Look, we know workers can get cancer from high doses of beta naphthalene or vinyl chloride. We shouldn't have thie workers be guinea pigs-we should test these things in rats. And that was reasonable. So they started testing the industrial chemicals in rats.
Reason: And they picked these chemicals because they were known to be associated in high doses with cancer?
Ames: Originally the driving force was high-dose occupational exposure, but soon it came to be testing every synthetic chemical and half of them came out positive in rat tests. I think we're drawing the wrong conclusions from high-dose rat tests. They are testing enormously high doses—the maximum tolerated dose in the rats or the mice, which means you find the level that causes overt toxic effects and back off just a little bit and feed the animal that amount every day for a lifetime. That sends toxicologists up the wall because that's a very high dose, and they are afraid that will do something that isn't relevant to low doses.
But the control, which people should have thought of but they didn't, is what about all the chemicals in the natural world? People got in their head, well, if it's man-made somehow it's potentially dangerous, but if it's natural, it isn't. That doesn't really fit with anything we know about toxicology. When we understand how animals are resistant to chemicals, the mechanisms are all independent of whether it's natural or synthetic. And in fact, when you look at natural chemicals, half of those tested came out positive.
Of course, almost all the world is natural chemicals, so it really makes you rethink everything. A cup of coffee is filled with chemicals. They've identified a thousand chemicals in a cup of coffee. But we only found 22 that have been tested in animal cancer tests out of this thousand. And of those, 17 are carcinogens. There are 10 milligrams of known carcinogens in a cup of coffee and that's more carcinogens than you're likely to get from pesticide residues for a year!
Reason: Why not conclude that you shouldn't drink coffee?
Ames: But half of all the things tested are coming out positive. The point isn't to worry so much about cups of coffee, but to rethink what we're doing with animal cancer testing.
We're eating natural pesticides, which are natural chemicals that plants use to try to kill off insects that try to eat them. And we eat roughly 1,500 milligrams of them per day. We eat 0.09 milligrams of synthetic pesticide residues. So we're talking about incredibly tiny amounts of synthetic pesticides, and yet the same percentage of natural chemicals come out positive.
So then the question is, What's wrong with high-dose animal cancer tests? I've been arguing in the literature that cell division is a risk factor for cancer, as is mutation. A mutagen damages your DNA, and everybody agrees that that's a risk factor for cancer, and cancer can occur with accumulated mutations. But when the cell divides, DNA damage is converted to mutations. So what we've been arguing is that raising either increases your risk of cancer either the rate of cell division or the rate of mutagenesis. So when you test these enormous doses of a chemical, cell division can be caused in various ways. It's like a chronic wounding experiment. When you wound tissue, you get a lot of cell proliferation, because you get signals for the cells to come in and heal the wound and start dividing. So I think that a sizable percentage of the chemicals are only going to be a risk factor in high doses—like saccharin.
Reason: Because they have this wounding effect?
Ames: Yes, at these enormous doses. Saccharin is a carcinogen at high doses, and everything we know about the theory says there's no risk at all at low doses. I think that some sizable percentage of all the chemicals we're calling carcinogens are going to be like that.
Now if something's a mutagen, it can both damage the DNA and kill cells. If you get to high enough doses where it's killing cells as well as damaging the DNA, then you're getting an extra multiplier. For a mutagen there might be a small risk at any level. But in most cases you also get this big multiplier that's only a high-dose effect. So all this says is that the risk numbers people are throwing around are going to just be wrong. And the further you get from the dose you gave the rat, the less you want to worry about it.
Reason: People do want to know what causes cancer.
Ames: That's what I'm very much interested in. Cancer is primarily a degenerative disease of old age. It goes up very sharply with age. [Shows diagram to right.] Rats live about two to three years and by the end of their lifetime, 30 percent of them have cancer. At 1 year old, very few have cancer. Mice have a slightly shorter lifespan, and the curve is shifted to the left. And people show a similar relation, except we live to 80 years. This suggests that cancer is a degenerative disease of old age, in the same way as heart disease and cataracts and all the other things you'll find out about soon enough as you get older. It doesn't mean that external factors can't influence it—we know cholesterol influences heart disease, and smoking is 10 years off your life, so if everybody stopped smoking the curve would move out. But underlying it all, the reason there is more cancer is more people are going up that curve. More people are living longer and longer every year, and as we're living longer we see an increase in cancer.
Reason: The incidence of childhood leukemia would seem to go against the idea that cancer is an aging disease.
Ames: There is some risk of cancer at any age. But what people have recently turned up is that male smokers are more likely to have kids with childhood leukemia. So smoking has genetic effects. With cancer you need a number of hits—a number of different mutations—and if you have one genetically, from a father who smokes, then the other one can occur soon afterwards and show up as childhood cancer.
Reason: Male smokers but not female smokers?
Ames: Studies show that smoking by either parent increases the child's risk of cancer. Reason: Lately breast cancer has started to get a lot of attention in the media. Ames: OK, now with breast cancer, the two best people right now are down in Los Angeles, and they think they are solving it-Brian Henderson and Malcolm Pike at USC, two of the world's leading epidemiologists. They've been studying breast cancer for a long time. It seems to be mainly hormones. It was known for a long time that women who have lots of children have very low rates of breast cancer, and nuns have very high rates of breast cancer. It has to d o again with cell division. Every time a woman has her cycle, she has cell division in the breast, so that seems to be a critical risk factor. Childbirth interrupts that.
We know how to prevent breast cancer: You live like a Chinese peasant who lived 100 years ago. You work in the fields, on a meager diet, so you have your first period at age 17 and then you start having a child every year. It's a good recipe for not getting breast cancer but not very practical. The question is, Can one intervene with hormones? What Henderson and Pike say is that it's known that if you take out a woman's ovaries, it stops ovulation, but that is another solution that is not very practical. But certain birth control pills d o something similar. So Henderson and Pike are coming up with a complex of hormones that they think would make a good oral contraceptive and also cut the risk of breast cancer dramatically. They're trying to test it out and get it through the FDA. If they're right, it's going to be terrific. If they're not right, somebody else will figure it out in five years.
I think people are going to figure out the causes of cancer and heart disease and aging. It's coming very fast, and it's due to science and technology and a healthy economy. Basic science is the child of a healthy economy. The reason you have all these scientists in the United States is because we can afford to spend money on basic research.
Reason: How accepted are your views among cancer researchers?
Ames: Well, we've had a controversy going back and forth in Science recently, and I got fan letters from all sorts of people that I really respect in the world, saying, Keep on, you're on the right track, we agree with you. And there are people who disagree. But I do think I'm winning the scientific wars. Let's go back to what's really causing cancer. If you ask the epidemiologists, after years and years of studies, they say eating more fruits and vegetables lowers the cancer rate.
Reason: Regardless of what kind of cancer?
Ames: Many kinds of cancer. And eating more meat and saturated fats seems to raise the rate of some cancers. There's evidence for this, and I'm more and more convinced. But then the question is, What are the dietary factors? And more and more, it looks like folic acid is very important, which is one of the vitamins you get from fruits and vegetables, as well as antioxidants.
We're doing experiments with mice. You make them slightly folic-acid deficient, and it breaks their chromosomes. There's a little evidence that the same thing might be true in people, and there's some epidemiological evidence that women who don't eat their fruits and veggies have more kids with birth defects.
Reason: Why does folic acid appear to be the crucial thing?
Ames: Because folic acid is involved in making the purines and pyrimidines that go into DNA. And if you're deficient, what happens is deoxyuridine gets into the DNA. The body's balanced between damage and defense. If you leave out one of the vitamins or micronutrients, then you're in trouble. Maybe more micronutrients will turn out to be very important, but right now it seems the antioxidants such as vitamin C are important and folic acid's important.
Reason: What do you mean by antioxidants?
Ames: Among the vitamins you need are a set of antioxidants—vitamin C and vitamin E and beta carotene. We've shown that there is a tremendous amount of oxidative damage to DNA just from living—from normal metabolism.
Just living is like getting irradiated. Radiation is an oxidizing agent. You're adding four electrons to oxygen to make water, you add them one at a time, you make superoxide and hydrogen peroxide and hydroxyl radicals, which are the substances, you get from radiation. If the DNA gets damaged, then repair enzymes, which are always cruising along the DNA looking for trouble, take out the damaged product—this oxidized base—and they repair it. Well, the oxidized base goes into the urine, and we've learned how to fish all these things out of urine and ask how much damage a human gets per day or how much damage a rat gets per day. The higher your metabolic rate, the more damage, so a mouse is battering up its DN 4 at a higher rate than the rat, the rat higher than the monkey, the monkey higher than a human—which fits with lifespan and the cancer rate. So we're all excited about oxidative damage and aging and all these degenerative diseases associated with aging.
The epidemiologists are finding that antioxidants are some of the ingredients in fruits and vegetables. If people don't eat their veggies then they are in trouble. My main interest now is to find what's the optimum level of all these things. Maybe the optimum level is much more than the RDA. We don't know that, but right now people aren't even getting the RDA, the Recommended Daily Allowance.
Reason: Can people take vitamin pills?
Ames: Well, the nutrition people don't like that. They say you should be told to eat balanced diets. Two fruits and three vegetables per day at least. On the other hand, only 10 percent of the population are eating two fruits and three vegetables a day. So I'm coming to the conclusion that people should be taking one-a-day pills. Certainly pregnant women and poorly nourished people and anybody of child- bearing age and older people.
Reason: Activists are very suspicious of you.
Ames: All I can say is I've done good science. In part, I think my talent in this area is I've always been a bit of a generalist and being a generalist is hard, because there's so much specialized knowledge. To be a successful generalist one has to know the best people in each field so that you can call them up on the phone and ask them questions and get feedback on ideas.
I've gotten very suspicious of a lot of the activists because I just feel that they are not good problem solvers. If you push in the wrong direction, then you're counterproductive. If we are spending $125 billion a year on EPA regulation, and it's not effective, that kills people, because it diverts resources from important things and it takes money that could be used for starting new companies and generating wealth and generating money for science.
I'm not saying you shouldn't have rules. You don't want every chemical company dumping its garbage out the back door. But what we're telling companies is, Well, air is free and water is free, but be good guys, don't pollute. That isn't how capitalism works. You want to have an incentive in there, so what we should be doing is charging people to pollute. Any time anybody wants to pollute—whether you drive your car or put a log in your fireplace—you should have to pay for pollution cost. Then there are incentives to figure out how to make cars that put out less pollution.
Reason: Within the academic research community, how do people look at people who have gotten involved in public- policy debates?
Ames: Most scientists tend to steer away from that. You get promoted and you get recognized by your peers, you get to go to international conferences and all that, by doing good science. And if you make a mistake, then everybody jumps on you. There's no incentive for scientists to be getting involved in policy, though people do it when they feel a responsibility.
Reason: Are there incentives not to do it? Ames: Yes, I would say probably so. If I spent 5 percent of my time talking to you or talking to Omni or other people, then it's time I'm not spending working on what causes aging and maybe I'm better off being in a lab trying to do that.
Reason: Do you see yourself at this point as something of a popularizer as well as a researcher?
Ames: Yes, a little bit. I feel it's partly my duty. I'd really like to prevent cancer. The best way to go about it is prevention rather than trying to find a cure for cancer, because that's so elusive, though we need to work on that, too…
Reason: You mean on treating it?
Ames: Yes. I'm much more interested in preventing cancer. Then we have to get out to the public what's important. If you tell them about trivia all the time they get completely confused, and it's counterproductive. I just think all this business of organic food is nonsense basically. We should be eating more fruits and vegetables, so the main way to do that is to make them cheaper. Anything that makes fruits and vegetables more expensive may increase cancer.
Reason: Do you think there might be legitimate concern for worker exposure?
Ames: Worker exposure is very different. I think you want strict rules, because there people can get very high doses. We were having some guy paint our house. He was up on a ladder with a spray can, spraying the house. I said, "Hey, you have to wear a mask. You just can't be in a cloud of that. Don't you know you shouldn't be breathing all that stuff?"
"Oh, I can't wear a mask. I need to stop every once in a while and smoke." So he stopped and took out a cigarette and smoked. So partly it's hard to convince people. It's a macho thing or whatever. But we do need rules, and people whose occupations expose them to high doses of chemicals need to follow the rules.
Reason: Aside from the specific scientific issues where your research has a direct bearing on policy, how would you describe your own political views?
Ames: Well, I guess I feel I'm neither a leftist nor a conservative. It's probably more libertarian. Again, I'm not a fanatic. I feel we should give people the maximum choice possible and let them pay for their mistakes. I think if the government starts trying to insulate everybody from their mistakes, from the consequences of their acts, we're in trouble, because that's a constant feedback in people's lives. If somebody doesn't save his money, should you really then have to provide for him, when the person who saves is skimping now and thinking long term? Of course, with kids, you educate them. But we have to treat adults as adults. Reason: Do you favor any kinds of regulations to restrict smoking?
Ames: Smoking is 10 years off your life. If somebody voluntarily takes 10 years off his life, fine. But the rest of us shouldn't have to pay for it. Now second-hand smoke I don't think is a big deal in terms of causing cancer. But a lot of people just don't like second-hand smoke around them. I don't either. It seems to me it's reasonable that, if someone is polluting the air, then he should do it in his own little cubbyhole or some part of the restaurant that doesn't get to the rest of us. But on the other hand, I walk to work, but I don't think everybody who drives to work should be prohibited from using his car because he's polluting the air. Life is full of trade-offs.
Reason: Do you consider yourself a very political person? Ames: Well, I like to read economics and think about these things. I'm trying to be a wise man in my old age, which is hard because everything is so specialized, so again maybe it's part of being a generalist.
Reason: Are there particular books or thinkers...
Ames: I was influenced by reading [economist EA.] Hayek and people like that and thinking the way economists think about trade-offs and optimizing. There is an optimum level of pollution, but most environmentalists throw up their hands. They want no pollution. Having dealt with EPA and FDA and these government bureaucracies, I'm fairly disillusioned. When we developed our test system for detecting mutagens, I thought industry would fight it and the government would have everybody using it. It was just the reverse, because industry has an interest in not making mutagens and carcinogens. It's bad for the business. And government bureaucracies are hard to turn around on anything.
Reason: You accept no money from industry.
Ames: No. If I give a talk at Du Pont, I have them send the honorarium to charity.
Reason: So the research money comes from the government?
Ames: My research money all comes from the government. It's fiercely competitive.
Reason: Over time, the government, especially the federal government, has acquired a near monopoly on the funding of scientific research ...
Ames: As a sort of crypto-libertarian, I worry about that. And in a way, scientists have a self-interest in jacking up the government funding of science. But I think the people get their money's worth from it—the U.S. has the strongest science in the world, and all kinds of industries come out of research, so it's good for the economy, it's good for human knowledge, it's good for our health. I once had dinner with Milton Friedman, and he started off the conversation saying that he thought they should abolish the EPA, the FDA, and government funding of science. The first two I could have at least considered, but the government funding of science didn't fly. Probably what Friedman would say is if you didn't have government funding of science, industries would think much longer term and they'd fund basic research, because it would be in their interest to do it in a technological society. But there are some things that are very long-term, and in a way having government funding is good. As long as it's competitive.
And so far it's been fiercely competitive. You have committees of your peers judging all these things. They don't always make the decisions that I think that they should make, but at least it's a reasonable system where merit wins out. Now you could politicize that and start getting one representative from each state or whatever. But then it becomes less a meritocracy, and if there's too much of that the system's going to go down.
Reason: You seem extremely optimistic both about scientific research and about understanding cancer.
Ames: I'm incredibly optimistic because science is growing so fast. There are millions of scientists in the world, and every new rich country needs them and trains them. And everybody's communicating. Life expectancy gets longer every year, and it's going to get even longer, and it's due to modern science and technology. All these romantics are trying to paint science and technology as the thing that's dooming the world—I just don't believe that either. Everything I know says the opposite.
Reason: Do you think that science is threatened by those kinds of ideas?
Ames: Oh yes. In some fundamental way, a lot of environmental extremists are anti-science, anti-technology. They want to go back to some imagined, idyllic world that never existed.
Reason: Does the general public's lack of understanding of science bother you?
Ames: Sure, but nowadays people are sitting in front of the TV, and they get what they get on the TV, which isn't very much science.
Reason: How much is it just a function of specialization that people don't know science?
Ames: You can't know everything, but you can read about some of it, and science is so much fun. You'd think people in the modern world would want to know how the cell works, what DNA is doing and all of these things. It jus t seems so exciting.
Reason: You've written a piece for the Social Policy Research Center about science as a spontaneous order. What do you mean by that?
Ames: It's not being planned from on top. Everybody has his enthusiasm. If I decide I want to go off on this tangent and that tangent, I can do it. Scientists are always thinking of a way to get new knowledge cheaper or faster or whatever, and so it tends to come up from the bottom. It's not some bigwig saying, I thought it all out—you do this, you do that.
Reason: How does government being a big source of funding affect that?
Ames: Well, the government does say, We're giving money for heart disease, we're giving money for cancer. So in that sense it's from the top down. But they've always been relatively good about saying, Well, since cancer is so complicated, anything that helps the understanding of general knowledge of how cells work we'll call cancer research. So it wasn't directed, which is a good thing, because all the advances come from people following their individual enthusiasms.
Reason: What would be an advance that no one would have planned?
Ames: Well, I was working in bacteria and got interested in mutations and mutagens and thought I'd set up this test system in bacteria. And then I thought that carcinogens might be working as mutagens, so that turned out to be an advance in cancer research. But I couldn't get funded from National Cancer Institute because people in the National Cancer Institute in those days weren't interested in mutagens or they weren't thinking along that line.
Reason: So you got funding from ... ?
Ames: Eventually from the Atomic Energy Commission.
Reason: So the fact that it's chopped up into all these different places is a positive?
Ames: The more sources of funding, the more different people with different views, the better it is. Because it's not directed from on top.
Reason: What about the criticism that a lot of scientific research is just waste?
Ames: A lot of scientific research is unimaginative. But that's part of the nature of it. It's hard to know beforehand. If you could weed out all the research that would never lead anywhere, then we would know everything before we started. It's a discovery process and you don't know where everything is going to go. People who are doing the research always think, Ah, that's an important experiment.
Reason: Do you ever worry that your critics are right and you're wrong and you account for cancer deaths by making these arguments?
Ames: All the time. I mean a good scientist is always thinking, where could I have gone wrong? So I'm always kicking all my assumptions and one of the reasons why I'm successful is I'm always challenging assumptions. If there's a paradigm around and somehow too many uncomfortable facts start coming up, then you say, Ah, how do I knock it down? What's better? So one's always doing that. But I'm as sure of these ideas as anything I've ever done in science.
Reason: Thank you.
]]>You expect it from Jeremy Rifkin. He calls himself a "time rebel," at war with modernity, and denounces "our flogligate way of life." He writes, "We boast that we are the first consumer society in history and even tout a consumer movement, apparently unaware of the irony implicit in the word. The term 'consumer' dates back to the fourteenth century and, in both its English and French form, has meant 'to devour,' 'to lay waste,' 'to destroy,' and 'to exhaust.'" When Jerey Rifkin tells shoppers, "Remember, if it's disposable and convenient, it probably contributes to the greenhouse effect," you can figure he has more on his mind than the atmospheric impact of Bic razors.
But what about Thrifty drugstores? These no-so-green purveyors of bubble-wrapped jars of makeup, single-serving candy bars, disposable diapers, and lead-acid batteries are handing our green-and-white leaflets (printed on recycled paper) that urge shoppers to "Reduce-Reuse-Recycle." The environmentalist mantra has gone commercial.
It has also gone political. And translated into policial language, Thrifty's homily becomes an economic agenda that extends cetnral planning backwards from the trash can to the kitchen shelf to the supermarket to the wholesaler to the manufacturer. Under the guese of managing our solid waste, we are adopting bit by bit, a national materials policy based on the ideal of soncuming no materials at all.
As the Source Reduction Council of the very-establishment Coalition of Northeastern Governors puts it, "the basic objective…is to eliminate, to the maximum extent possible, packaging as a waste product." CONEG's "preferred packaging guide-lines" put "no packaging" at the top, followed by "minimal packaging," "returnable, reusable, refillable," and "recycle content, recyclable."
David Morris, director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a radical but widely cited prorecycling group, writes, "We must keep our eyes on the prize: a drastic reduction in our per capita consumption of materials.
The agenda enunciated by Morris and the CONEG Reduction Council is founded not merely on anticonsumption zealotry (with a dollop of corporate opportunism thrown in). It is based on widely held misconceptions about Americans and their garbage. The United States does have some real solid waste problems, but they are amenable to fairly simple solutions that require less, not more, government planning.
Perhaps it all started with Mobro, the Islip, Long Island, garbage barge. Back in 1987 the barge wandered from port to port, searching for some place that would accept the garbage it carried. After six states and three countries rejected its load, Mobro returned to New York. A Brooklyn incinerator burned the trash, and the waste ash went home to a landfill in Islip.
The Northeastern landfill shortage became a national story. Newspapers and TV shows told tales of the nation's impending garbage crisis. Landfills were closing. Waste was mounting. Soon every city in the land would have a garbage-filled barge roaming the seas.
The reports scared people. Politicians who had been content to leave garbage management to specialists decided something had to be done. So they passed laws. In the early '80s, only 140 American cities had curbside recycling programs. Today, however, more than 2,700 communities nationwide pick up residents' cans, bottles, and newspapers for recycling. In most of these places, recycling is mandatory for at least some residents.
More important, 28 states enacted recycling or waste-reduction quotas—Florida, for instance, will require 30-percent recycling by 1994, a demand that has solid-waste managers there in a near panic. Another five states have set nonmandatory goals. (The Environmental Protection Agency recommends a 25-percent diversion of the solid-waste stream by 1992, 50 percent by 1997.) Once enacted, these increasingly common laws drive all solid-waste management decisions in their states. They shift the policy emphasis from safe and efficient waste disposal to reducing consumption.
Although its targets are only recommendations, the EPA has played a major role in that shift. In 1989 the agency issued a report, The Solid Waste Dilemma: An Agenda for Action, in which it identified four means of managing solid waste: 1) source reduction; 2) recycling; 3) incineration; and 4) landfilling. These are, in one form or another, the options people have had since the Stone Age. But the EPA didn't just list the options. It ranked them. It created a waste-management hierarchy, with source reduction at the pinnacle, flanked by reuse and recycling. Incinerators and landfills were left groveling in the dust, grateful that they were allowed to exist at all. Although it acknowledged that sound solid-waste management would involve all four options, the EPA made it clear that in all situations source reduction and recycling are preferable to burning or burying trash. "Reduce-Reuse-Recycle" became the national standard.
The EPA hierarchy diverts government policy from "integrated waste management," the technocratic way of mixing the four options in whichever combination best fits local needs. Instead, it has prompted—and given political support to—a mania for aggressive recycling and source-reduction efforts, regardless of cost, overall resource use, or local conditions. The EPA has lent respectability, even urgency, to calls like David Morris's to "demand an immediate halt to policies that promote materials destruction. That would include not only stopping incinerators, but ending the promotion of degradable plastics whose destination is not the recycler but the landfill.''
In the wake of the EPA's report, members of Congress have Proposed amendments to the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) and Solid Waste Disposal Act (SWDA) that would, among other things:
RCRA, better known for its hazardous waste provisions, is up for reauthorization this year, so Congress will soon be seriously considering amendments. (See "A Hazardous Waste," November 1989.) So far, however, most of the action to move the country toward a national materials policy has occurred on a piecemeal basis, at the state level.
"If you don't recycle, Santa Monica will look like the inside of this truck," read the signs on the garbage trucks that rumble through the city's streets. Santa Monica California, is the kind of city that paints its garbage trucks sea blue, instead of the usual grunge-hiding dark green. And it's the kind of city that started a recycling program in 1981, a decade before it was fashionable. Recycling costs the city about one-and-a-half times as much as ordinary garbage collection and landfilling. "These guys drive an awful lot of miles sometimes to pick up very little," says Thomas Dever, Santa Monica's solid-waste manager. After nearly a decade of practice Santa Monicans recycle about 12 percent of their garbage—through a curbside recycling program, a buyback center, and various small recycling companies.
Dever's job is to push that recycling rate up—way up. The state of California has decreed that all cities must cut the amount of trash going into landfills or incinerators by 25 percent by 1995,50 percent by 2000.
Dever is a can-do guy, and he says he can get Santa Monica to 25 percent recycling by '95. Of course, hitting that target will mean more expense—for a plant to sort and process recyclables and an expanded recycling program. Two-thirds of the city's refuse is commercial, and about 40 percent of that, mostly corrugated cardboard, can be recycled. If the city's many small businesses will turn in their cardboard and office paper, and if a combination of economic incentives and jawboning can raise residential recycling rates from the current 4 percent ("tokenism," says Dever) to around 7 percent, the city can make the 25-percent quota.
But 50 percent—that's a different story. To meet that target, he says, will depend on "source reduction." There's only so much you can recycle, even when cost is no object.
Although it can just mean using less material—say, cutting the weight of a plastic milk jug from 95 grams to 60 grams, as manufacturers did over the last 20 years—"source reduction" as a policy goal often leads to product bans. North Carolina will outlaw polystyrene foam (such as Styrofoam) food packaging after October 1, 1993, if it isn't being recycled at a 25-percent rate. Several cities, such as Portland, Oregon, and Newark, New Jersey, have already effectively banned the stuff. A bill in California would prohibit the sale of compact-disc "longboxes." In 1989 Maine banned aseptic packaging—the small, rectangular beverage boxes especially popular with children. (The ban exempted Maine apple juice.) Other cities and states have proposed bans on disposable diapers. Indeed, one proposed law in Oregon would make possession of disposable diapers a criminal offense.
Such bans usually have little to do with actual solid-waste problems, much less overall environmental impact. An aseptic drink box, for instance, is among the most "source-reduced" containers on the market, tipping the scales at a mere 10.3 grams. By contrast, the traditional gable-top drink carton, which requires refrigeration and takes up more room in transit, weighs 90 percent more, or 19.6 grams, and holds slightly less juice, 8 ounces versus 8.45 ounces. Similarly, the much maligned polystyrene foam is one of the lightest container materials around. In both cases, the materials can theoretically be recycled, but accumulating enough stuff to make recycling economical is quite difficult. By the same token, these lightweight, low-volume materials take up very little landfill space: 0.02 percent for drink boxes, only 0.002 percent for polystyrene food containers.
Solid-waste policy used to be left to calm problem solvers like Tom Dever. But the chance to pick and choose which products people should use—and dispose of—brings out emotional paternalists like California state Sen. Daniel Boatwright.
It's a Wednesday afternoon in early May. The state Senate committee on which Boatwright sits has been hearing testimony on a proposal to levy an excise tax on disposable diapers. The hearing has been perfunctory, with only two witnesses allowed to speak on each side. Another 10 or so have gone on record against the bill, many submitting written materials. To show how the tax would hurt poor mothers, for instance, Gloria Torres has given the Senate committee a breakdown couple of family budgets. Each family spends $84 a month on disposable diapers.
It's Sen. Boatwright's turn to speak. The quiet committee room explodes with his anger. "These are AFDC mothers, they have other clothes to wash, and if they're spending that much money, I would certainly urge those people to go to cloth diapers to save $84 a month." Boatwright gets madder, his voice more contemptuous. He points to committee members. "He, he, he, she, we raised our kids with cloth diapers. And you know, it didn't kill 'em at all. It didn't kill 'em. Got your hands a little dirty, maybe, but it didn't kill 'em. It's a hell of a lot more convenient to use disposable diapers, but you know what—you save a lot of money when you use cloth diapers."
Boatwright is a liberal Democrat, not especially prone to frugality. He doesn't begrudge the mothers the money they get from the state. He just doesn't approve of the diapers. Like Grumpy Old Man on "Saturday Night Live," he remembers the old days, when life was lousy "and we liked it that way." Despite Boatwright's outburst, the bill dies, failing to get a motion in its favor.
The diaper bill, and the outburst, are minor but indicative. Disposable diapers account for less than 2 percent of the nation's solid-waste stream. But they make great symbols. Mankind—or, more accurately, womankind—managed to do without them until about 1970. They're highly artificial, engineered of plastic and synthetics and paper. You use a diaper once, then discard it. Disposable diapers seem self-indulgent, the kind of silly convenience that puts the waste in solid waste. On similar grounds, Greenpeace has attacked facial tissues, and Hannah Holmes, an assistant editor of Garbage magazine, has denounced tampons.
In the water-short West, of course, it's easy to counter that cloth diapers consume a resource far more precious than landfill space. And much public debate has focused on whether, in fact, disposable diapers really are "worse" for the environment than their predecessors. Several life-cycle assessments—studies that try to look at all of a product's environmental impact from manufacture to disposal—have examined disposable diapers, each with somewhat different results. One assessment gave disposables a better environmental report card than cloth diapers; others showed the opposite. And so the debate goes on.
But arguments over cradle-to-grave studies miss the point. The study shows the cost of various options, the trade-offs between water use and energy needs and air pollution and solid waste. They don't show the benefits. They don't consider why consumers buy disposable diapers or why juice makers use aseptic packaging. Pampers or Huggies or, for that matter, Kleenex tissues may fill up landfills faster than cloth diapers or handkerchiefs. But the people who buy them care about other values, too—convenience, or health, or comfort. When it switched from polystyrene to paper wrappings, McDonald's improved the environmental impact of its packaging. But it now risks losing customers who want to keep their hamburgers hot on the way back from the drive-through or whose kids like the old Happy Meal box better than the new paper sack. While McDonald's presumably weighed these trade-offs, legislative proposals to ban or regulate disposable products seek to replace such weighing and balancing with political diktats. They seek to tell McDonald's competitors that they must also switch, even if they value their takeout business—and the polystyrene containers that keep it hot—more than they fear environmentalists' attacks.
Production regulations also treat similar products as though they serve identical needs, differing only in their environmental impacts. This may be true of some products—it's hard to see any substantive difference between bleached and unbleached coffee filters—but it isn't true of most. Both kinds of diapers cover Baby's bottom, but each offers a distinct bundle of other qualities. Cloth diapers are less expensive and, if changed promptly, may be more comfortable.
Disposables, on the other hand, appear to prevent diaper rash, leak less, and are much more sanitary and convenient for use in day-care centers. Indeed, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Public Health Association's day-care program performance standards state "that to protect the public's health, cloth diapers should not be used in day-care centers." Most state day-care regulations forbid caregivers to rinse cloth diapers, so that not using disposables means sticking dirty diapers in plastic bags or diaper pails and sending the whole package home with Junior. Needless to say, day-care providers have been vocal opponents of bans or taxes on disposables.
Or go back to Gloria Torres's welfare mother. She has four kids, no washer, no dryer, and no car. Once a week, she does three loads of clothes at a laundry; each load costs $1.25 to wash and dry. Her kids go through 288 disposable diapers a month, about 10 a day. Since disposable diapers are more absorbent than cloth diapers, we can assume she'd need at least a dozen cloth diapers each day—and would probably wind up going to the laundry daily. (This is a conservative estimate; it often takes two cloth diapers to replace a single disposable.)
This mother already pays $100 a month for people to take her places. Dragging a heavy pail of dirty diapers to the laundry every day or two would mean more rides. It's true cloth diapers would probably still save at least some money, perhaps as much as $50 a month. Nevertheless, it's hardly surprising that poor mothers choose to sacrifice other purchases to buy disposables. Time and trouble, even a welfare mother's time and trouble, are also limited resources.
Products don't exist in isolation. The economy is a complicated web of interactions. Disposable diapers are substitutes for laundry facilities. They are complements to day care, as are drink boxes that let even tiny kids brown-bag it. On the manufacturer's level, packaging can substitute for warehouse space or factories. The exotic layering of metals and plastics that keeps Keebler cookies fresh for as long as nine months after they leave the oven lets the company distribute them throughout the United States without having a plant in every city. Combined with new recipes, the packaging lets you buy cookies that are still soft months after they're made.
And packaging often reduces waste. When William Rathje, of the University of Arizona, took his garbage-archaeology team to Mexico City, they found that the average household in Mexico City "discards 40 percent more refuse each day than the average USA household." Rathje writes, "This difference—1.6 pounds per household per day—is food debris, the skins, rinds, peels, tops, and other inedible parts discarded in food preparation."
For instance, in Mexico City, most consumers squeeze fresh oranges to make orange juice. The peels are then thrown away. Americans, by contrast, tend to buy packaged frozen concentrate. As a result, the typical Mexican household tosses out 10.5 ounces of orange peel each week; the typical American household throws out 2 ounces of cardboard or aluminum. Meanwhile, back at the orange juice factory, the peels are collected and sold to make animal feed and other products. If all the orange juice drinkers in New York City individually tossed away their orange peels, one day's haul would weigh as much as two ocean liners.
This isn't to say that people shouldn't drink fresh orange juice. Certainly, it tastes better than processed juice. But the notion that "no packaging is the best packaging" fails even the dumpster test.
The economy's complex interactions can produce surprising results. Consider a study by the research group GVM that examined what would happen if all plastic packaging were eliminated in the Federal Republic of Germany. The report found that materials usage by weight would increase fourfold, as substitutes replaced plastic. Packaging costs would more than double. Energy consumption would almost double. And garbage would increase by 256 percent. The report comments, "all of the cost-intensive endeavors, over many years, to reduce the use of material through more suitable packaging and 'slimming down' individual packaging materials would be [reversed] with one stroke."
Richard Pence isn't at all happy with Ohio's new requirement that 25 percent of all garbage be recycled by 1994. His family business, Pence Refuse Service, has been hauling trash since 1958. Now the state says they have to get into the recycling business: "They want you to get started right away. There's not much chance to gear up for it." What's more, the company is required to weigh the trash it collects at each stop—not in order to charge customers by the pound but to see whether they're meeting the 25-percent target. "The bookkeeping is unreal," says Pence.
The nine-employee company is struggling to adapt. It is separating and baling cardboard, milk jugs, and such, despite the lousy economics. Baling 900 pounds of corrugated cardboard costs $25, not including collection and sorting, but buyers will only pay $20 to $30 a ton for it. Recycling, says Pence, "takes a lot of money to operate, and there's no money in it. It's rough on a little company."
The work is hard and, Pence fears, dangerous. A few years ago, he suggests, the government probably wouldn't have even let you do it: "You handle all these pop cans, all these food cans." Using a new can baler, "I got cut twice yesterday. That has to be a health hazard." He's afraid for the family members who work with him. Some of his fears aren't well grounded—nobody ever got AIDS from a used soda can—but it doesn't seem crazy to wonder what evils might lurk in a used milk jug or the rim of a tin can after they've sat around in the good old summertime.
So far, Pence Refuse has managed with its regular trucks and small building. But Dick Pence expects he'll need to invest in more-specialized trucks and add a $200,000 building to use as a processing center. The costs, he figures, will be passed on to the businesses whose trash the company hauls away. Contrary to The Recycler's Handbook (from the folks who brought you 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth), it is not true that "recycling saves towns and consumers money."
In fact, the move to recycle rather than dump or bum trash can cost plenty. A survey of Rhode Island communities found that the total cost of recycling—including pickup and processing, minus revenue from the sale of recycled materials often runs more than $180 a ton, compared to the $120 to $160 a ton for ordinary waste collection and disposal. The outlay is especially high in cities with many multifamily dwellings. In Chicago, for instance, curbside recycling costs from $625 a ton to more than $1,100 a ton, depending on the area of the city; from that fee, the city can deduct about $110 a ton in sales and the $38 a ton it would have paid the landfill.
Generally speaking, landfill "tipping fees," the price of depositing debris, have to be more than $50 a ton—compared to a national average of $30 and a median of around $15—to make recycling economically competitive for most materials. There are, however, notable exceptions. More steel is recycled in the United States than any other material. Scrap metal dealers and steel minimills, not government mandates, drive this profitable recycling.
Aluminum cans fetch $900 a ton on the open market, and more than half of empty cans are recycled; the first major aluminum recycling plants opened in 1904. The reason is simple: It takes only 5 percent as much electricity to produce aluminum from old beverage cans as it does from bauxite ore. And electricity is the major cost in making aluminum. "Aluminum recycling exists today as a viable industry not because the aluminum industry is interested in saving landfill space, but because it has had a variety of economic motivations to recycle aluminum," write Jennifer Gitlitz and Paul Relis in a report summarizing a 1988 California recycling conference.
Once states make people recycle materials for which the cost of recycling is greater than the recovered value, officials have to figure out who will pay for the difference. Certainly, Dick Pence doesn't plan to absorb the total cost of complying with Ohio's mandate. If he had to, he'd go out of business. Improving the economics of recycling, to would-be materials planners, requires more new laws and more regulations.
In some cases, the laws seek to create bigger markets for all the near-worthless stuff collected. Old newspapers—which make up about 7 percent of a typical city's solid-waste stream—are a particular problem. They would be cheaper to dump. But to build a resale market, California, Connecticut, Maryland, Missouri, and Wisconsin have passed laws requiring publishers to increase their use of recycled newsprint. Similar laws have been proposed in Illinois, New Jersey, and New York.
Beginning January 1, 1994, the District of Columbia will require anyone who distributes within the district a publication with a circulation of more than 30,000 or who sells more than 500 tons or $100,000 of paper a year to use only recycled paper. Only if the company can prove that using recycled paper would increase its paper costs more than 10 percent over virgin stock can it apply for an exemption. In deeming a 10-percent higher price "competitive" with virgin paper, "They don't understand that huge newspaper deals are made on the basis of a fraction of a percent," says Jack Schafer, editor of the weekly City Paper; which has a circulation of 89,000. The penalty for law breaking: a 15-percent "recycling surcharge" over the price of the illegal paper.
The law also specifies just how much recycled material different kinds of paper must contain: 50 percent for high-grade printing and writing paper; 40 percent for newsprint; 5 percent for facial tissues; 20 percent for toilet paper; 30 percent for paper napkins; 40 percent for paper towels; even 40 percent for doilies. In many cases, the recycled material must be "post-consumer," meaning that reusing factory scrap doesn't count.
The ordinance's content requirements "will stifle rather than encourage recycling," says Carol Melamed, director of government affairs and associate counsel for The Washington Post. The reason lies in the technical and economic limits of paper making. The mills that can produce recycled paper with 40-percent old newspaper stock are mills that were built originally to make recycled paper. But more and more virgin-paper mills want to get into the recycled-paper business. Rather than build an entirely new plant, at a cost of some $400 million, they add a deinking line, which costs $30 million to $50 million; this retrofitting lets them make paper with between 15 percent and 25 percent recycled content. That may not meet D.C.'s lofty goals, but its impact on the waste stream is significant.
Before the law passed, the Bear Island mill in Virginia which produces paper for the Post, The Washington Times, and other local newspapers—had plans to add a deinking line that would have absorbed 60,000 tons of old newsprint a year. But the recycled paper produced at Bear Island would have contained only 20 percent recycled content. Since the D.C. ordinance would wipe out the market for its recycled paper, the mill has indefinitely postponed adding the new capacity.
Both content mandates and product bans can become vehicles for favoring some corporations or industries over others. Diaper services have lobbied heavily for bans on disposables. And paper interests have had some notable successes in their decades—long struggle to beat out plastic—McDonald's switch, for instance, and a Maine law requiring retailers to use paper bags unless the customer requests a plastic bag. "Within a week of passage of that law, virtually all the orders for retail-store plastic bags were canceled if they were active, and if they were under consideration, they were rejected," says George A. Makrauer, president and chief executive of Amko Plastics Inc., a bag manufacturer.
Oddly enough, one way for plastics makers to fight back is to support content requirements like D.C.'s. With their emphasis on "post-consumer'' content, such requirements raise paper costs. They also strip the "recycled" label from paper that contains factory scrap. Like orange-juice makers selling peels, both paper and plastic makers reuse their wastes-usually by putting them back through the production process. Paper manufacturers have long touted such paper as "recycled," while plastic makers haven't capitalized on the label.
Even within a single industry, bans and mandates get tangled up with corporate opportunism. Conservatree Paper Co., a distributor of post-consumer recycled paper, is a prominent lobbyist for laws that would mandate recycled content and forbid using the term "recycled" to describe paper made with factory scrap. Laws like D.C.'s increase the market for the paper Conservatree distributes. Mandates that lead paper manufacturers to invest in more recycling capacity should increase Conservatree's supplies—and the competition for its business—and lower its costs.
Although the company maintains its innocence—"once the E.P.A. or Congress adopts our proposal, we will no longer have a comer on the market of selling honest-to-goodness recycled paper"—it's hard to believe that it doesn't recognize the advantages of having already established a beachhead in the market. None of this is to say that Conservatree's managers aren't motivated by a zeal for recycling, only that they also stand to gain financially by seeing their ideas made law.
Similarly, paper companies that invest in deinking plants and other recycling facilities develop a vested interest in recycled paper. Despite a virgin-paper glut, Champion International, for instance, is pouring some $80 million into new plant capacity—to make recycled paper. Behind this curious investment: the company's expectation of more laws mandating recycled paper content and recycled-paper use. If it guesses right, Champion will have a jump on the competition. If the mandate mania fades, we may find Champion lobbying for new laws to protect its investment.
The most grandiose plans to regulate materials involve something called "advance disposal fees." Although these fees would require central planning on a scale unknown in this country since World War II, their proponents speak the language of markets, and some of them probably believe their own rhetoric.
The idea behind ADFs is that garbage represents a market failure. Manufacturers don't consider the costs of disposal when they make products. In theory, then, the government could charge manufacturers ADFs that would take into account such factors as: the actual collection and disposal costs of each product type or material; the actual collection and disposal costs in each different jurisdiction where a product is thrown away; current recycling rates; the actual length of product use per household; the actual consumption and disposal path of each product by household; recycling and other behavior in response to new charges, which would change the cost picture over time. One ADF scheme envisions using bar-coded information on each product to create a national database that would be used to regulate charges.
So far, such an elaborate system has yet to become a bill, much less a law. But more-stylized ADFs have been enacted. In late 1992, Florida will begin imposing fees on packaging materials that aren't recycled at a 50-percent rate. Rhode Island has introduced ADFs on items, such as tires and motor oil, that are difficult to dispose of. And in New Jersey, the governor's Solid Waste Task Force has recommended a pre-disposal fee to be assessed on manufacturers when they use virgin materials.
California Assemblyman Byron Sher has introduced a bill to tax materials used for packaging and nondurable goods unless their scrap values cover recycling costs. The bill draws its raison d'être from the 1989 law—also sponsored by Sher that created the mandatory waste-reduction targets: "The costs of implementing the Act to local government, waste haulers and others are significant and should be borne by generators and disposers of solid waste."
Under the Sher bill, the California Integrated Waste Management Board would levy "recycling incentive fees" equal to at least the difference between the scrap value of an item and the average cost of collection and processing it for recycling, plus a "reasonable return" to the companies that do the work. Suppose it costs an average of $100 a ton to run curbside recycling for newspapers, and the newspapers fetch $10 a ton on the resale market. Allowing for a 5-percent markup on the $90 net cost, the advance disposal fee would be $94.50 a ton—or 2.4 cents for a half-pound Los Angeles Times. If that tax isn't high enough to cut down on newspaper production, the board is supposed to raise it.
The Sher system illustrates a typical planning dilemma. Since it would be too complicated to trace the actual recycling costs of individual items, it uses state averages. Without this simplification, the program would be impossible to operate. With it, however, the price signals are completely distorted. Consumers who live in places where recycling is cheap will pay too much for products. Those who live in places where recycling is expensive will pay too little. And the program leaves plenty of discretion altogether outside the market: A state board decides when the fees are high enough and gets to compute the reasonable rate of return due recyclers.
The Sher bill, like many such schemes, represents not a "true cost" system but an elaborate way to subsidize recycling. It seeks to penalize materials not because they actually harm the environment (by, for instance, releasing toxic gases) but because they can't be affordably recycled. The bill's backers speak the language of economics, but they don't understand it.
The basic problem with such schemes is that they start from a false premise. There is no market failure in solid waste. The economist will find no externalities in your garbage can, unless government subsidies put them there. But that doesn't mean there are no problems.
Take landfills. They really are closing. In fact, more than half the 18,500 landfills that existed in 1979 have shut down the past 10 years. This is nothing new. Landfills have always had limited lifespans, usually about 10 years. What is new is that the old landfills aren't being replaced. The number of new landfills built from 1985 to 1990 was almost 50 percent lower than during the previous five years, the lowest level in 20 years. New landfills are much larger than old ones, but not large enough to make up the difference. As a result, it's hard to find space for trash. In a mini-version of the garbage barge, Santa Monica's trash haulers drive around in their trucks, calling each other on cellular phones to find out who's open to take their loads.
The cause of the landfill shortage isn't that we're "running out of space." A. Clark Wiseman, in a Resources for the Future study, calculates that "all municipal solid waste for the next thousand years would require [a landfill 120 feet deep in] a square area having 44-mile length sides." In other words, a hypothetical landfill that could accommodate the next 1,000 years of U.S. waste would take up less than 0.1 percent of the continental United States.
What's missing isn't land—it's prices. Cities used to be able to shove landfills anywhere they wanted. When surrounding communities rebelled, using lawsuits and environmental regulations to drag out the siting process, solid-waste managers griped about the NIMBY (not-in-my-backyard) syndrome and environmentalists declared landfills (and incinerators) remnants of a passing age of waste.
But entrepreneurs have found a way around NIMBY. It's called YIMBY-FAP: Yes, in my backyard—for a price. This new approach has two components. First, the landfill developer picks up the full costs of protecting the surrounding community from environmental harm. This includes such technical components as double landfill liners and leachate collection systems (to protect groundwater from the gop produced by decaying garbage) and methane-removal systems (to keep gas from building up underground). It also includes inspections, record-keeping, a detailed closing plan, and various monitoring systems.
Robert T. Glebs, a former city waste manager who now runs a business siting landfills, estimates that such a state-of-the-art landfill would cost about $55 million to build in the Midwest including such additional costs as running local recycling programs and offering financial guarantees of local property values. Adding in a 25-percent margin-profit for private landfills, replacement cost for public ones—the tipping fee to cover such a landfill comes to $25.62 a ton, way, way below the cost of recycling programs.
The second component of a YIMBY-FAP landfill is to share the wealth—to pay the surrounding community. Charles County, Virginia, for instance, collects $5.00 for each ton of garbage dumped in the landfill Chambers Development Co. runs in the rural county. Chambers also picks up local garbage for free. "We're good capitalists; we realized there was money in garbage," county Administrator Fred Darden told Forbes. Thanks to the landfill, the county collects more than $1 million a year, enough to cut property taxes by 20 percent while spending more on local schools. Such "host community fees" make landfill siting a win-win proposition.
They also bring the full cost of landfills into the market-place by making the landfill operator pay not only to install safety measures but to compensate the people most directly affected by the landfill. The next step to internalizing garbage costs is to bring landfill costs back to the person with the bag full of trash.
That means getting rid of free garbage service- the subsidy at the root of the "solid waste crisis." And it probably means charging more to people who generate more trash.
Cities like to give people free garbage service. Suggesting that Los Angeles might charge for trash, political wisdom has it, brought down Mayor Sam Yorty. In a 1990 survey of 246 U.S. cities—ranging from 5,000 to 1.75 million in population—more than one-third didn't charge any fees for garbage collection. Of those that did, about half charged flat rates, regardless of how much trash residents generated.
Now it is possible that a private trash collector paying full freight to a YIMBY-FAP landfill might charge all customers a flat fee for garbage pickup. But it isn't very likely. What seems more realistic is a system something like the one MCO Re-Cycling devised for Freeport, Illinois. For $5.75 a month, residents get weekly pickup of one 30-gallon bag of garbage and unlimited recyclables. For 60 cents, they can buy a sticker good for another bag of trash; the average household uses about one sticker a month. Customers have an incentive to reduce, reuse, and recycle, but they also have a choice. And, in contrast to ADF schemes, this system allows prices to be set by people who actually know what the costs of garbage are.
Unlike most city-run recycling programs, MCO uses a single truck for both garbage and recyclables, picking both up at the same time. That saves on the extra trips that make recycling costs prohibitive most places. Customers don't have to hang on to their bottles and cans forever and don't have to sort every- 2 thing into a million different bins. "All we ask is that the stuff be clean," says MCO owner Bernard Mrugula. Though it's too early to be sure (the program is less than a year old, and trash composition swings wildly from month to month), the percentage of trash that gets recycled seems to be on an upward trend-hitting 23.7 percent in April.
Mrugula clearly hates to see any good stuff go to waste; he sounds genuinely stricken at the thought of the television sets they had to dump last "spring cleaning" without stripping them of valuable metal. He is a resource recovery enthusiast, but he thinks recycling promoters are often unrealistic about how much people have to recycle. "There's not a lot there," he says, "and we're getting darn near all of it."
Mrugula understands what the materials czars and a lot of city managers miss: Recycling is simply another way to get rid of trash. To make it work, you have to make it easy on the customer and treat it as part of regular garbage pickup. Efficiency, not suffering, not a war on consumption, is the name of the game.
Looking through a nation's garbage, you can tell much about its people—how much they read, whether they're too poor to own refrigerators or rich enough to buy microwave ovens, whether they prefer gardening or fixing their cars. You can figure out how much their time is worth and whether they have a lot of kids. But it's hard, very hard, to see how everything fits together—how a Uneeda cracker box, resealable and lined with wax paper, could lead to national brands and mass marketing, how disposable diapers could make small-scale day care more feasible, how floppy disks could produce more paper waste.
Facing a solid-waste crisis, we have a choice. We can manage our garbage, getting rid of the barriers that keep people from seeing what their habits cost. Or we can assume omniscience and, thinking we know everything about the intricate connections between people and materials, we can try to manipulate both. If we choose the latter course, we will run into the old planner's problem. We just won't know enough to do the job. Garbage in, garbage out.
Virginia I. Postrel is editor of REASON. Lynn Scarlett is Vice President for research of the Reason Foundation and the author of several studies on solid-waste issues.