THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 10, 1996 TAG: 9603120420
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY MICHAEL ANFT
LENGTH: Medium: 86 lines
THE GOOD LIFE AND ITS DISCONTENTS
ROBERT J. SAMUELSON
Times Books. 241 pp. $25.
Americans are awfully disillusioned these days. We air our grievances - crime, schools, the government, the media, the economy - so loudly and often that the shouting has lost much of its meaning. In our quest to achieve a post-World War II ideal of the perfect society, we've expected too much from our institutions, resulting in a malaise-ish disappointment (or ``funk,'' as President Clinton has termed it) that has turned our trademark optimism into utter cynicism.
So argues Newsweek and Washington Post columnist Robert J. Samuelson in The Good Life and Its Discontents. We've turned the government into a bloated, overworked and underfunded bureaucracy that tries to appease everyone while pleasing no one, the author theorizes, while we steadfastly claim we're entitled to the good life.
In what Samuelson provocatively calls ``the Age of Entitlement,'' Americans have bought into the wrong-minded notion fostered by corporate managers and politicians that the economy can be controlled, forever offering growth as it did in the 1950s. We've also expected government to address grievances of all types - racial and sex equality, poverty - that it isn't equipped to fully conquer.
Despite impressive gains in many areas (cleaner air, less discrimination, lower poverty), Americans are unsatisfied. ``We feel that the country hasn't lived up to its promise,'' Samuelson writes. ``But the fault lies in the promise more than the performance . . . We (have) blurred the distinction between progress and perfection.''
True to his roots as an economics reporter, Samuelson proceeds to lay out in very orderly fashion where the economy has gone wrong. Americans' expectations regarding growth are based on the post-World War II glory years, an anomaly that married flawed but temporarily successful Keynesian economics with the United States' pre-eminent position internationally.
But as the high inflation of the late 1960s and '70s attested (as do pesky budget deficits now), the economy could not be controlled by government intervention. Downturns were - and are - a reality that offends everyone's sense of entitlement. People expect Washington to do the impossible: keep things growing at the same rate for eternity.
Similarly, Samuelson argues, Americans want much from government in the way of mediation and remediation. Even though blacks have made substantial gains, we are led to believe by many, he writes, that government policies are failures. On the contrary, he claims, affirmative action and other programs are having an opposite, backlash-like effect because whites' sense of entitlement has been riled up.
On economic issues in particular, The Good Life and Its Discontents is a reportorial marvel of conciseness and sourcing. Samuelson's research (the book is completely annotated) is exhaustive, and his grasp of the subject is admirable. His suggestion, that Americans turn to an ethic of personal responsibility, is hard for anyone to argue with.
Where Samuelson falls short is on issues such as wealth inequity and progressive taxation. He's very willing (as are most of us) to call for means testing for Social Security and Medicare benefits as a way to help balance the budget. But he glosses over the loss in federal revenue incurred when Ronald Reagan lowered the highest tax bracket from 70 percent to 28 (it now stands at 33).
He further hedges on his theories for the growing disparity in incomes. The productivity rate has grown by 50 percent (from one to one and a half percent) in the 1990s, yet the minimum wage has remained a poverty-level one. Samuelson never really addresses this, but he should have. Furthermore, the loss of decent paying jobs with benefits to technology, the global economy and ``downsizing'' helps create genuine insecurity and downward mobility - not empty kvetching based on overblown expectations.
In a political cartoon by Chronicle Features' Ted Rall, a woman asks a man in a suit, ``If the free market economy can't pay decent wages and benefits, then what good is it?'' The suit replies, with unapparent irony, ``Well, it gave us clear dishwashing liquid and the Wonderbra.'' As the woman disgustedly walks out of the frame, he shouts after her, ``Don't forget the Wonderbra!''
Samuelson's analysis is, of course, much more trenchant and sober-minded than that. But one can't help feeling that there are a couple of questions he hasn't asked. MEMO: Michael Anft is a Baltimore-based writer and critic. by CNB