On the Line: Reading Harvey Swados

After the American Century

As part of my research on the history of the assembly line in the United States, I have been reading Harvey Swados for the first time. The name I knew, but not the work, which remains interesting after half a century. His short story cycle, On the Line, describes the lives and aspirations of eight men who work together in a new automobile factory in New Jersey, c. 1956, the year when Swados himself was on the assembly line in such a plant.

On the Line first presents LeRoy, an African American who aspires to be an opera singer, but needs money for more voice lessons, and so goes on the assembly line. An injury cuts off his chance for a musical career, and he remains mired in the job. His partner in the factory is a young Irish immigrant, Kevin, who is at first stunned by the size, the noise, and the bustle of the factory, and saves money to buy himself a car. But then having tasted the material dream and its price, he goes back to Ireland. 

The other characters are a reformed alcoholic, a aging widower, a failed businessman in his 50s who needs the money, a high-school graduate who saves his paycheck for college, a foreman who has worked his way up from the shop floor, and finally Joe, the closest thing to a stand-in for the author - an older man who seems well read. He refuses to get psychologically trapped by any job and drifts from one factory to another. 

Swados is effective precisely because the characters are each revealed in their private as well as their work lives.  We learn of their marriages, children, homes, and problems, as well as see them at work. His goal was to get away from any romantic notion of a unified, rather homogeneous working class. At the same time, however, Swados was writing against the Cold War-inspired notion that the US was fast becoming a society with minimal class differences. This was the sociological orthodoxy for a brief time, but no one reading this book could come away believing it was true then, any more than one could believe it now.

These are excellent stories that can be read separately but gain in power when taken as a whole.
 I found Swados insightful and useful in researching America's Assembly Line (MIT Press, 2013).

Different Default Situations: US vs. EU

After the American Century

Both the EU and the US are struggling with massive public indebtedness, and in each case the problems emerge from bad decisions made during the last decade. The problems are quite different, however.

First, consider The United States. It seems hard to believe now but the US had balanced its budget and was rapidly paying off its national debt in 2000. The current fiscal woes are due to an excessive tax cut that overstimulated the economy, combined with massive military expenditures and a failure to regulate the banks. These problems all came from the White House, which dismally failed to protect the strong economy created in the 1990s. Bush overspent, undertaxed, and virtually abandoned regulation. The country needs years to get out of the mess he created, during which it needs to raise taxes back to where they were in 2000, particularly on wealthy people. But the Republicans, once a party of fiscal rsponsibility, have no intelligible economic program and they seem willing to let the nation go into default rather than compromise with the White House. In short, the American problem is firmly lodged in Washington, rooted in the failures of the Bush years. The problem is not impossible to solve from an economic point of view, but it is hard to resolve politically. The stupidity is, if you will, ideological.

Second, consider Europe. Here the problem is much different. The problem has emerged at the regional level - Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland, all have weak economies and huge deficits. In contrast, some other members of the EU, notably Germany and Sweden, have strongly rebounding economies and do not have unbalanced national budgets. The problem here is that no single banking policy is appropriate for both the strong nations and those tottering on the brink of default. The stupidity in the EU is, if you will, a regional matter.

The US has a problem that could be easily solved by reverting to the tax code of the Clinton years. Possibly, something approaching this will occur, probably at the last minute. As Winston Churchill once said, the Americans always do the right thing in the end, but not before they exhaust all the other possibilities.

In contrast, it is much harder to see what the EU can do to solve its fiscal problems. The failure of Greece to pay its debts could set off a financial tsunami. Even the controlled default now being contemplated (or rather orchestrated in Brussels)  could have dire effects. The unity of the EU will be sorely tested if the fiscally responsible economies have to bail out those, like Italy, that are rife with tax cheating and black market labor. Why should Germans or French tax payers have to endure higher taxes when many wealthy in Greece continue to lie about their assets and pay less than they should?

History is not logical, of course, and it might be that the US will stumble into a completely unnecessary default, while the Europeans stumble through to a somewhat undeserved equilibrium. But the fascinating thing is to see how these wealthy countries have made such a mess of fiscal policy.  In a worse case scenario, default on either side of the Atlantic could trigger a larger world crisis, from which Asia would almost certainly emerge the stronger.

We are in for a perilous three months.

Check out Analogue Books in Edinburgh

After the American Century

On a short trip to Edinburgh last week I happened on a lovely small bookstore in the old part of the city. Located below and behind the Elephant Cafe, where many Harry Potter fans go to see the pleasant rooms where that series was begun, Analogue Books offered me the rare, almost unheard of pleasure of a carefully selected collection that had no best-sellers or media-driven titles at all. Indeed, I had never seen or even heard of a single book in the shop. It is a fantastic and engaging place. It may be small, but it still seems large when every book is an unknown.

I bought a fine non-fiction book that explores the history and aesthetics of type fonts. Written by Simon Garfield, Just My Type discusses the font preferences of famous people, including President Obama and Amy Winehouse, but it is far more than that. I am sure anyone who lays out a webpage or a term paper or a company brochure would learn useful things from it. There were many other interesting books, in a wide range of genres, all from small publishers as far as I could see.

I only wish I had found this bookstore sooner. I only spotted it an hour before leaving town, and by that time my suitcase was stuffed with other things. But on another visit, I am certain to go by 39 Candlemaker Row, and see what else I don't know.

Bankruptcy Not Needed: Greece can lease islands to banks

After the American Century

At first I thought of this as a joke, but it is beginning to look reasonable. The choice for Greece is not either go bankrupt or borrow more money. There is a third choice, a typical capitalist choice, the choice to lease parts of the country for 50 to 100 years. China leased away Hong Kong and got it back, with considerable improvements. Greece could lease a large island like Crete to the German banks, in exchange for wiping out their debts to those banks. The French banks could get Lesbos. I want my bank to lease Corfu.

Even more radically, Greece could sell off some of its smaller islands, with the proviso that the buyer could not sell to anyone else without Greek government permission, and reserving the right to purchase the island back at the market price.

Such plans would make it official. The banks already call the shots in Greece.

I know this sounds a bit strange, but it is somewhat like a corporation selling off some of its divisions in order to survive. No doubt offense to patriots, but surely this is better than bankruptcy.

Don't like that solution? How about this one? All European countries could copy Greece, spending way over budget, and then the Euro zone could devalue by, say 35%. The idea being, if the train is going off the cliff, let's get into first class and enjoy the ride while it lasts.

Academic Freedom of Expression? Not in Copenhagen

After the American Century

In Denmark at the moment academic freedom of expression is an issue. A professor at Copenhagen University criticized a proposed new law that will reestablish intensive border controls. The right-wing party that is pushing for these controls immediately attacked her through the media. The chairman of her department then ordered her to stop making public statements about the matter - or take a "media break" for an unspecified length of time. He also told all members of the department of political science at the university that they should refrain from making any public statements about this controversy to the press unless they first consulted him and the Dean. [update: the proposed law was passed, millions of kroner were spent on instituting more border controls, but they had almost no effect on anything in the real world. After the right-wing coalition that had forced through this change was voted out in the September, 2011 election, the new left-leaning coalition quickly abandoned the policy. Thus a professor was silenced for saying what the majority of politicians now agree was correct.]

This is a pathetic spectacle. The political scientists of all people should not be silenced in public debate on controversial proposals for new laws. In this case the Danish foreign minister is running around Europe trying to reassure governments that the new law will not violate treaty obligations. I am not an expert on EU law, but this is a matter of freedom of speech. If the entire department of political science at the largest Danish university has been silenced by its own administration, then that leadership ought to be removed. They have violated the most fundamental academic values.

Danish politicians and academic leaders will discover that there is a high price to pay for such outrageous cowardice. The best young minds will see the hypocrisy for what it is and seek careers elsewhere, some of them outside the country. The international evaluations of academic quality will undoubtedly hear of such behavior. It will hurt Copenhagen University in the yearly evaluations. Last year, even before these events, the university's rating fell far down the league table. Its fall can only continue in 2011.

The current crisis further worsens the university's reputation, already tainted by an on-going research scandal in the natural sciences. This "Penkova" case involves scientific fraud, abuse of research funding, and falsification of findings published in international journals. Several published articles have been withdrawn. Since most scientific articles have multiple authors, damage has been done to several individual reputations, as well as to the university as a whole. In that case, the university administration did not want to listen to its faculty, and those who tried to warn them that Penkova's research findings were problematic were ignored, if not silenced.

The vast majority of the faculty are not at fault. They are the victims of right-wing politicians and short-sighted university administrators. The University of Copenhagen has become a demoralized shambles.