THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 26, 1997 TAG: 9701270202
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: Bill Ruehlmann
LENGTH: 74 lines
Here we are propelled into 1997, hanging onto Spaceship Earth for dear life as the pace of change continues to accelerate, and a lot of the signposts hurtling past our windscreen seem to be telling us to slow down.
Remember Rod Taylor, seated upon an armchair in ``The Time Machine,'' witnessing fashions flash by in the shop displays across the street?
Of course that movie came out in 1960, based on a book that came out in 1895, written by H.G. Wells, who also wrote The Outline of History, which stopped at 1920. Wells himself ended in 1946. And today Taylor is 67.
But in 1997 you can rent the videotape, sit upon your own armchair and be Taylor watching Taylor be Wells.
The food we eat isn't good for us, the signposts say, nor is the stuff we watch on TV. Blood pressure is up, the dollar is down, and which is your scoundrel of choice - Clinton or Gingrich? Our employers no longer care a rap for us, the Soviet threat is gone but the consequences of it are not, and Boomers have now lived long enough to see their automobiles priced higher than the houses they grew up in.
This sobering month after Christmas, good news is as scarce as an unencumbered credit card.
So the stubborn optimist turns with some gratitude to Michael Moynihan's new book, The Coming American Renaissance: How to Benefit from America's Economic Resurgence (Simon & Schuster, 320 pp., $23).
Moynihan, formerly a Robert B. Seamans Fellow in Technology and Public Policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, is a senior policy adviser in the Treasury Department. He also has family on North Carolina's Outer Banks.
He says we have been misinformed by doomsayers.
They are the ones on the left who ``focus on stagnant wages and the gap between the rich and poor.'' They are the ones on the right who ``see America as crumbling beneath the weight of taxes.'' They are the ones all over the place who ``proclaim that people without skills . . . will not survive in the new economy.''
No, no, no, says Moynihan.
``The America that actually exists,'' he writes, ``the one described by objective statistics and that you see when you walk out the door, is not in decline or on the verge of catastrophe. By any objective measure, the U.S. economy is thriving. Economic performance in recent years has not just been good, it has been better than in any comparable period of the postwar era.''
Of course, the America I see when I walk out the front door could use a new lawnmower - among other things - but I'll get around to it, don't rush me.
Three heartening predictions by Moynihan:
1. Trade of goods will become less global and more local, trade of services the opposite, reversing the current situation and helping the service-oriented U.S. economy to improve its balance of trade.
2. Using new network technologies and improved accounting, U.S. companies will continue to reinvent themselves as more efficient organizations, adapting faster than their foreign competitors.
3. Work in the United States will become less labor- and more knowledge-intensive as the labor market tightens now that Baby Boomers and women have been absorbed into the work force and immigration may soon be constrained, removing a cap on the growth of wages.
I called my friend Fred Weiss, noted Virginia Beach gourmet, world traveler and professor of accounting and international business, to get his professional spin on Moynahan's vision.
``I don't see it,'' he said.
My definition of a dispute: two economists.
I would like to be persuaded by Moynihan's book, but my own vision of the future has a mortgage in it, and I am not one of the exuberant CEOs on the dust jacket cheerleading from the comfortably elastic harness of a golden parachute. The future is a thing no journalist can credibly cover. And if we think we see it with any clarity at all, we can become victims of yet another calculated PR campaign informing us that we may already be winners. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia
Wesleyan College.