There was a day when the meaning of economic efficiency was reasonably clear. An objective met up with a technician. Efficiency consisted in meeting the objective at the lowest cost or in obtaining the maximum amount of the objective for a specified amount of resources. Let us call this “pure efficiency.”
Liberals have been moaning those empty-head blues. They feel bad. They know the sky is about to fall in. But they can’t think of anything to do. Having been too sanguine and too self-righteous about their part in the civil rights movement, they are too easily prey to despair when their contribution is rejected by those they presumed to help. Torn between a nagging guilt and a secret desire to turn on their black tormentors, white liberals have become spectators watching with frozen horror as their integrationist ideals and favorite public programs disintegrate amidst violent black rebellion. How did this maddening situation come about? What can be done about it?
THE individual versus the state; freedom versus dictatorship; private enterprise versus state control; price systems versus hierarchical e0mmand; rational economic choice versus irrational political interference. The debate over national economic planning in the past four decades has been conducted largely in terms of these dichotomies. The great questions were: Could state planning be reconciled with personal liberty? Was central planning through administrative command a better or worse mode of decision-making than Utilization by planners of prices determined in economic markets? Would rational modes of economic thought, designed to increase national income in the long run, be able to overcome irrational political forces seeking to accumulate power in the short run? All these questions assume that national economic planningnas distinct from mere arbitrary political intervention—is a real possibility. Obviously, if planning itself did not work, there would be no reason to worry about the things it did not do or the effects it did not cause.
WHY does a President whose administration is responsible for a deficit of over $30 billion in the last fiscal year suddenly appear as a protector of the purse? Why do Congressmen who vote for their share of spending increases express unhappiness with the collective results of their individual actions? How can a President get away with impounding funds when Congress has the power of the purse? The answer to all these questions is the same: because Congress is losing faith in its appropriations process. If Congressmen believed in what they were doing, they would support each other enough to get their way. The President prevails because secretly Congressmen think he is right. Since they do not believe in themselves, they espouse the heresy that it is the President who knows best.
IN the third volume of The American Commonwealth, Lord Bryce wrote, “Perhaps no form of Government needs great leaders so much as democracy.” Why, then, is it so difficult to find them? The faults of leadership are the everyday staple of conversation. All of us have become aware of what Bryce had in mind in his chapter on “True Faults of American Democracy,” when he alluded to “a certain commonness of mind and tone, a want of dignity and elevation in and about the conduct of public affairs, an insensibility to the nobler aspects and finer responsibilities of national life.” If leaders have let us down, they have been helped, as Bryce foresaw, by the cynical “apathy among the luxurious classes and fastidious minds, who find themselves of no more account than the ordinary voter, and are disgusted by the superficial vulgarities of public life.” But Bryce did not confuse condemnation with criticism. He thought that “the problem of conducting a stable executive in a democratic country is indeed so immensely difficult that anything short of failure deserves to be called a success...“ Explaining “Why Great Men Are Not Chosen,” in the first volume of his classic, Bryce located the defect not only in party politics but in popular passions: “The ordinary American voter does not object to mediocrity.”
MOST decisions are reactions to what has already happened. When evils are perceived, we attempt to mitigate them. Then our security depends on our capacity to cope with changing circumstances. Suppose, however, that collective confidence wanes, either because of decreasing trust internally or increasing menace from without. The institutions through which people relate may be in such disrepute or the environment perceived as so precarious that the slightest error could ramify throughout the system to cause catastrophe. In this situation we would need to anticipate difficulties from which we could not recover, rather than just reacting to those that can be overcome. Now, the evils that do appear are limited, if by nothing else, by our capacity to recognize them. But the nightmares that might occur are potentially limitless. Shall we err by omission, then, taking the chance that avoidable evils might overwhelm us? Or shall we err by exhaustion, using up our resources to anticipate evils that might never happen, in order to forestall those few disasters that might actually do us in?
WHEN Betty Furness said (after a White House meeting with consumer groups) that no one ever talked to Lyndon Johnson like that, was she suggesting that Jimmy Carter lacks a presidential personality or is it that his Democratic predecessors still had the semblance of a political party behind them? If citizens suspect that the President might fail to be renominated almost out of embarrassment, as ff the country called a primary and no one was interested enough to show up, could that conceivably have occurred to a president who wasn’t only a particular person but also a political party? Is it true that the number and importance of single-issue “special-interest” groups has risen way out of proportion to their past power, or is it that the political parties that used to contain them (enforcing moderation and compromise, as those who felt the absence of clear and consistent issue positions used to complain) have declined? If those conniving old party bosses and their smelly smoked-filled rooms have disappeared, if a transparent participatory democracy, in which every activist has a say, has taken their place, if “open nominations openly arrived at” have fulfilled the Wilsonian insistence that parties serve leaders rather than the other way round-why are we so unhappy with the outcome? Has participation suddenly become a bad thing? Why is it that direct party democracy, in which the participants are activists who turn out every four years at primary time, arrayed according to biological attributes like age, sex, and race, has left the nation devoid of effective leadership?
ALL sensible people disdain “policy analysis” some of the time, and some intelligent people disdain policy analysis all of the time. Members of the latter group would be forced to reconsider their prejudice if they could be persuaded to read Aaron Wildavsky’s fine book on “The Art and Craft of Policy Analysis.”