Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | P | Public Interest

Forty good years.

Article Excerpt
BACK in 1965, in New York, my old friend Daniel Bell, then a professor of sociology at Columbia University, and I, then vice-president of the publishing firm Basic Books, were deeply troubled. The source of our discomfort was the mode of thought that was beginning to dominate political and social discourse in and outside of academia--an ideological mode that made nonsense of the existential reality of American life.

One of the most egregious examples of this ideological nonsense, popular among sociologists and dramatized by the press, was the idea that the way for the poor to escape from poverty was to organize to "fight city hall" and "gain power." This seemed plausible at a time when socialist and quasi-socialist ideas were still very much alive, prompting many to believe that the cure for poverty was political activism (relying upon the state) rather than economic activism (encouraging entrepreneurial energy in markets).

Both Dan and I had come from poor families, had gone through radical phases in our youth, and were appalled to discover that ideas we thought discredited had acquired a new lease on life. Dan, in those days, described himself as a democratic socialist (he still does, incidentally), while I was a somewhat skeptical liberal. We certainly thought there was a role for government in moving people out of poverty--a much larger role than conservatives thought appropriate. But we did not believe that political activism (a.k.a. "the class struggle") could deliver people from poverty.

Then, there was the scholarly nonsense, promoted by the Ford Foundation and echoed by most of the other major foundations, that "automation" threatened to abolish people's jobs, while at the same time throwing them into a life of affluent leisure for which they were intellectually and morally unprepared. Obviously, these foundations, and the universities and media as well (the media by then being populated by college graduates), had a crucial role to play in rescuing the American people from this ghastly fate. The result was a plethora of conferences on the imminent problem of mass leisure, out of which emerged a plethora of big books.

Dan, who knew more economics than...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!