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In July of 1976, a Gallup Poll of the American people asked the following question:

As a new way to live in America, it has been suggested that we build our factories in the countryside and run them on part-time jobs.  Under this arrangement both parents would work three days a week and six hours a day, and in their spare time would build their own houses, cultivate gardens, and pursue other leisure-time activities.  How interested would you be in living this way?

Two-thirds of the American public showed some interest in the idea, including forty percent who said they would either "definitely" or "probably" like to live this way. 

Would a similar number of Americans answer the same way if asked this same question today?  Given the state of middle-class society, it seems very likely they would, in which case this pamphlet should find an audience.  For in it the youth who originally commissioned that poll, now grown older and wiser, distills a lifetime of research into possibilities of just such an arrangement.  The result is a democratic manifesto and activists' guide, whose aim is to show a new generation of Americans how they might take the future into their hands and shape it closer to their heart's desire.


"If you will it, it is no dream."

                                      Theordor Hertzl 



Preface

The ideal of a simple life on the land, the vision of a day "when every man shall sit under his own vine and nation shall not vex nation anymore" -- these are, perhaps, as old as history and as broad as humankind.  Yet never has the ideal seemed nearer, or the vision more compelling, than they do now, when thanks to the great Tree of Capital we have for the first time not only the means to realize the dream in substance if we choose, but also the means to destroy ourselves in the event we should fail.  In a sense, then, we may already be living in the judgment day.  The only question is, are we going to try to go on living the way we do now in a world divided between the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor, the educated and the ignorant?  Or shall we strive to seek a fairer and more permanent form of civilization, and a more just division of the world's desserts, in harmony with nature and our fellow man?

It is with this question in mind that I have assembled these notes.  I dedicate them to my daughter Emily and her generation, in the hopes that they may prove to be of some real practical value in the period ahead.  They are very far from perfect, however.  Of this I am sure.  So my advice to readers is to be careful with them, and to keep an open mind.  We all make mistakes.  The important thing is to be able to learn from them as we go along. 

That said, I do believe I have placed before you an open door, and that no one can close it.



                     

 

I.   Introduction  


In the following pages I want explore, as a practical ideal, the idea of factories in the countryside run on part-time jobs.  By in the countryside I mean in areas that are out beyond the exurban fringes of our major metropolitan areas; and by part-time jobs I mean that most of the rank-and-file workers doing routine wage-work would be employed 18-to-24 hours a week.  Now, whether such factories would be profitable is, of course, an interesting question, in many ways the most interesting question, since on the answer everything else must ultimately depend.  But for the moment, at least, what interests me more -- and what should interest my readers -- are not the factories themselves so much as a new type of small country town that might develop around them, and the new lifestyle that would become possible for the men and women who reside in those towns.

                                                      
ii.

The new lifestyle itself is easily imagined.  With an 18-to-24 hour work week, ordinary working people would have a great deal more free time at their disposal than they do today: enough free time, in fact, to be able to participate in the construction of their own houses, to cultivate gardens,  cook and eat at home, and care for their own children and grandchildren from the time they are born.  In other words, they would be in a position to do things for themselves and each other, directly, with their own hands, which now they pay others to do in their stead.  You might call it a compromise -- or, better yet, a trade-off -- between the age-old longing for the simple life and the technological imperatives of a modern society. 

But however you choose to characterize it, I want to sketch in a few pages some of its more important natural advantages: ways it would allow ordinary people to make more efficient use of their limited time and resources, to better satisfy their basic human needs.  These are the soft paths to which my title refers.



 iii.

First, and most obvious, of course, is the advantage for the adult individual.   She (or he) would begin to enjoy a great deal more physical autonomy -- personal freedom -- than she does now, together with a major increase in the scope and variety of activities that compose a working day.  Instead of being tied to the daily grind of a nine-to-five job, repeating the same limited set of routines week in and week out and year after year, she would find herself spending fully half her working life as her own person, leading a much more varied and independent existence than is possible today: one closer in spirit to the one in which we evolved as a species, and to which, presumably, we are adapted by nature.  

I can't help wonder if this is what those words of scripture refer to, where it is written: Thou hast left thy first love; remember, therefore, from whence thou art fallen? 

And is it really a coincidence that those areas of the modern economy which have most stubbornly resisted the techniques of mass-production, or else yielded to them with inferior results  – the building of our homes, the preparation of our food, the care of our children -- are also the ones which offer us the greatest intrinsic rewards: that provide us with opportunities to satisfy our instincts for workmanship, to express ourselves with the work of our hands; and all the while to exercise our manifold human capacities for love and affection? 

I do not know the answer to these questions.   But I do know that the new lifestyle I am advocating is one that would make the pursuit of happiness a far more agreeable enterprise than it is nowadays in these United States, and one with far better prospects of success for most of our people.

 
iv.

Let me now examine the likely impact of this new lifestyle on the American family, which is not only oldest and most universal of all human institutions, but also the most fundamental to the transmission and preservation of our culture and civilization.  What would the advantages be here?

To begin with, it is clear that mothers and fathers and their children would start spending a lot more time together than they do now, and be doing something besides watching TV while plunked on the couch.  For under this new dispensation home and hearth would become once again what traditionally they always were: scenes of domestic activity, places where every family member has a useful role to play and real responsibilities to meet.  There would be no shortage of opportunities for parents to interact with their children: to talk, play, and joke around with them as they share in the daily chores of life; or, when appropriate, to engage in more serious conversations about the important things in life.  "Quality time" would be an issue no longer once it has become a regular part of everyday life.  Thus would the institution of the family be strengthened, and not just as a functioning economic unit, but in its age-old role of nurture and support. 

Something similar can be predicted for the institution of marriage, which undergirds the family.  The bonds of matrimony would certainly grow stronger in a world in which two incomes from two part-time jobs plus the contributions of two adult sets of hands are necessary to maintain an independent household.  Contrast this to the current situation, in which both parents work full-time outside the home and can therefore afford to live by themselves it they choose.  No wonder half of all marriages now end in divorce!  But once living apart becomes a less convenient option, fewer families will suffer traumas of divorce, with all this implies for the emotional security of children and parents alike.

 

v.

Another possibility we ought to consider is a return to a more traditional, three-generation form of the family -- not under one roof necessarily, but perhaps under two, at opposite ends of the garden.  For if grandparents live close by, that means they would be in a position to help look after their grandchildren -- infants and toddlers especially -- on those inevitable occasions that arise when both parents have to be away from home at the same time.   By the same token, later on in life when the grandparents themselves have grown old and feeble and are no longer able to live on their own, their children and grandchildren would be close enough by to be able to help look after them. 

As an alternative to daycare and nursing homes, alone, this plan deserves our attention.   For it promises not only a far more natural and humane way to solve these universal problems of care, but one that is infinitely more affordable as well, a crucial consideration for most working-class families. * [* On the issue of affordability, today's younger generation should also keep in mind that their grandparents are likely to have the financial resources (in the form of home equity and their accumulated savings for retirement) to be able to assist them in their initial move to the country.  For more on this see pp. below.]

 

vi.

Or consider the issue of retirement.  We've all read those stories in the newspapers about how Social Security is going broke and may not be there for the next generation.  The aging of the baby-boom generation means that the number of people taking money out of the Social Security trust fund is growing in relation to the number of people who are paying money in, a trend that seems likely to continue.  What this portends, all the experts agree, is either a substantial cut in future Social Security benefits, a substantial rise in the future age of retirement, or else a sharp increase in the Social Security tax on wages.  None of these is an attractive alternative for any of the people involved.

But under the new arrangement we are talking about this dilemma should largely disappears.  Once people have part-time jobs in the country,  work and leisure will have become integrated into the fabric of everyday life.  They will no longer feel the same need to retire they do today.  Instead, as they grow older, they can gravitate towards easier kinds of work and to an even shorter work-week -- a job behind a check-out counter, for instance, instead of a place on the assembly line.  Furthermore, when they do finally reach the point when they can no longer work at all, they will not have to depend upon their Social Security checks alone for their physical support, as we've already seen.  This means their benefits can be lower without compromising the quality of their lives. 

And at the very end of life,  when death finally approaches, instead of being carted off to a nursing home at great public expense, the dying person could be provided with hospice services, in which specially trained nurses come to the house each day for an hour or so to assist the family with the physical and medical care of the patient.  How much better to die this way, at home in one's bed, surrounded by the familiar voices of loved ones, than alone in a nursing home somewhere, cared for by strangers?

 

vii.

 

As individuals are to the family, so families are to the neighborhood in which they find a home.   This raises the interesting question of what kinds of neighborhoods would be possible under this new dispensation?  How might they differ from the ones most of us grew up in?

Let me begin with a simple observation: We are sure to see a great many more grown-ups about during the regular course of the day.  With so much of their working lives centered around their homes, adults will be spending much of their time outside in their yards, tending their gardens, doing routine chores, or engaged in some other useful pursuit: whether it be something as complex as a major home improvement project, or something as simple as painting a porch swing or mending a broken piece of furniture.  The local neighborhood, in other words, would no longer be the deserted village it is nowadays, where most working people get up each morning and drive away to their jobs.

For the children in the neighborhood this would have certain advantages.  In the first place, they would be exposed to the adult world of work to a much greater extent than is possible today, when most real work is done away from the home and out of sight of the children.  And the curiosity of children being what it is, it is inevitable that many of the them would begin to learn by looking, then by asking and helping, and in the natural course of growing up would acquire a certain amount of practical knowledge and a number useful skills which otherwise would pass them by completely.  What's more, those same adults who are outside working in their yards would be well placed to keep a collective eye on the children in the neighborhood as they run and play among the houses, keeping them out of mischief and protecting them from danger -- thereby providing a useful extension to the family itself.  Friendly faces in friendly places, in short, will make the neighborhood a far safer and more congenial environment in which to work or play.

 

viii.

 

Nor should we overlook the many other possibilities for sharing this plan would allow.  With so many adults around in the day, it becomes a simple matter of convenience to go next door to borrow a cup of sugar, or to ask for a helping hand from a friend down the street.  In such circumstances visiting and casual hospitality will spontaneously occur ("Won't you sit down and have a cup of coffee?") as the people in the neighborhood begin to avail themselves of some of their new-found leisure. 



Or consider what would happen if there were to be a central neighborhood mail-drop instead of separate mailboxes in front of each house.  Not only would this save the postal delivery system a good deal of time and expense, but it would provide a convenient spot where neighbors might run into each other, exchange local gossip, and pass along any other local news that might be of common concern. 

Neighbors might even elect to go in together and purchase a small neighborhood tractor, which they could all share in the spring to turn over their gardens. They could organize festive house-raising parties in the old Mid-Western barn-raising tradition as a way to assist each other during the earlier and heavier phases of home construction.  And, of course, neighborhood picnics could be planned as an annual event on Labor Day and the 4th of July, a sure way to create a sense of social solidarity and local neighborhood tradition.

 
ix.


Let me now say a word on the subject of good neighborhood planning.  Given the new emphasis on neighborly relations,  what would be the best way to arrange the houses in the neighborhood in order to take full advantage of these new possibilities?

Here we have a few things to learn from the Traditional Neighborhood Movement (TNM) that is already underway in America.  Maybe the most important thing is that we could get away from the habit of stringing our houses along both sides of the road, like so many beads on a string.  Instead, we could arrange them around a small central open space -- a village green -- which would serve both as a neighborhood park and a playground for kids. 

A second habit we might break is that of placing our houses well back from the street, with wide lawns in their fronts.  Intead we could place them close to the street, facing the park, with screened porches across their fronts.  This would make for easy line-of-sight communication between the houses and the park, and between the porches and any pedestrians who might be passing by on the sidewalk that would run in front of each house.

Of course if the houses were set forward like this, it means the gardens would have to be located behind them, in the long back yards in the rear of each house, with the grandparents' quarters being situated at the far end of the garden, but accessible from their rear by an alleyway. The advantage of this arrangement is that it would afford a space, bounded by the larger house in front and the smaller one in the rear, of relative peace and quiet: a place not open to the street, where a person could sit and read, or sing the baby to sleep, and not be bothered.

 
II  The New Garden City


At this point we need to step back and survey the wider community to which our new neighborhoods would belong.  (I am assuming that a single neighborhood by itself would not have a big enough population to be economically viable.)   There are two possibilities here:  We could build our new neighborhoods on the outskirts of already existing small country towns, of which their are thousands all across America, many of them half abandoned, and almost all of them crying out for new industry and new sources of employment.  Or else we could elect to do something more ambitious: build new towns in the countryside, starting from scratch, in which case our new neighborhoods would become integral parts of a much larger plan.   Each of these alternatives has its advantages, and each presents its own unique set of challenges.

 

ii.

If we choose the first alternative, building on the outskirts of an already existing small country town, the advantages are ones of immediacy and simplicity.  Participants would not have to wait long to begin their new lives once the new factory had been constructed and was ready to begin production.  Nor would the new factory's owners have to worry about the many added complexities and uncertainties that would be introduced if they were if they were to try to coordinate their own project with the construction of a whole new town, including an all-new infrastructure, which may or may not be fully in place on the day they plan to begin operations. 

On the other side of the ledger, our new homesteaders, being newcomers in the community, would have to compromise with the people who already live in these towns: people who are sure to have their own ideas, and will expect to share in the various new economic opportunities that will be created when the new factory opens it doors.  In itself this need not be an insuperable problem.  But to it we must add the disadvantage that our new lifestylers will have to adapt themselves to the physical limitations of a town which was not originally laid out with the idea of part-time employment in mind, and which was not designed to take advantage of the latest advances in transportation and communications technology. 

And since these latter are among the considerations that should interest us most -- that promise important new "soft efficiencies" in the way we use our resources -- I shall confine myself to the second alternative, building new towns from scratch, trusting that over time those who choose the quicker path may be able to bring their communities into a closer approximation to the ideal town plan I am about to describe.

 

iii.



This ideal, let me say at the outset, owes much to the genius of a Victorian gentleman named Ebeneezer Howard and his concept of the Garden City: a concept that inspired the English Garden City movement a century ago, and remains to this day probably the single most influential idea in the history of urban planning.  Indeed,  the plan I am about to present is little more than an updated version of Howard's original concept, which I have modified to take advantage of a hundred years of economic progress.



So what was Howard's original concept?  The essential idea of a Garden City, he explained, was to find a way combine the best features of city living and country living, while taking steps to avoid their least attractive qualities.  For example, real estate is extraordinarily expensive in cities, but remarkably inexpensive in rural areas.   Cities may be dirty and crime-ridden, anonymous and impersonal, but they are also places where we can meet a wide variety of people and find diverse opportunities for employment, shopping, and entertainment. Life in the country is sometimes boring and lonely, but the air is fresh, the faces familiar, and we have easy access to open fields and woodlands and to the manifold beauties of nature.

 

iv.

 

The way to achieve the best of both worlds, Howard proposed, was via a unique combination of town-planning ideas and a series of legal restrictions on the ways the land could be used in the future community.  He presented his plan in the form of a narrative*, [*set forth in a short pamphlet, Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, a classic text which remains in print to this day.] the first chapter of which was to assemble a large tract of undeveloped real estate out in the countryside.  Howard specified that the title to this large tract of land would be placed in the hands of a board of private overseers, persons of unimpeachable integrity, who would hold it in trust to the future inhabitants of the new community, and would be vested with all the necessary powers and authority that would be needed to carry his plan into practice. 

It would be bound by two principal requirements: 

The first and most important of these was to set aside a broad expanse of open fields and woodlands completely surrounding the new Garden City.  Howard insisted that this broad expanse of raw real estate was to remain forever undeveloped, apart from certain low-intensity agricultural uses (farming, forestry, pasturage, and the like).  In other words it would be closed to all future residential, commercial, and industrial development.  The purpose of this "green belt," to use the term that has since become popular, was to guarantee that the new community would remain a geographically distinct and identifiable place, thereby establishing its integrity as a town in the country.  It would be a permanent physical barrier against the encroachment of future urban sprawl.

 

v.

 

Howard's second requirement was that the commercial real estate in the future Garden City would be owned by the town itself, and would be leased out on long-terms to private businesses, much as the owners of modern shopping malls lease their properties today.  Howard's intention here was to eliminate commercial real estate speculation as the primary factor driving the town's future development, thereby putting a break on total population growth and future population density.  

To accomplish this second objective Howard advocated placing all commercial real estate in a special trust and using the proceeds to pay off the costs of the commercial buildings along with the original purchase price of the land.  Once thsse debts had been retired, the income from these properties could be used, in lieu of taxes, for other public purposes, as decided by the town. 

This way, Howard reasoned, the big run-up in land values that accompanies the process of urban development -- known since the days of Henry George as the "unearned increment" -- would be captured by the town itself and could be used for the benefit of the community as a whole.  It would no longer be the special prize of private developers and real estate speculators, the traditional boosters of urban growth in America.

 

vi.

 

At this point let me interject a word of caution.  It is possible Howard went too far when he decided to completely eliminate the speculative motive from the equation of urban real estate development.  By denying private developers any share in the rising values of the land, which are a natural by-product of the process of urban growth and development, he was effectively denying to his future townships any chance of benefiting from the talents and experience of one of the most enterprising classes of businessmen in society.   If instead of banning these professionals from the process altogether, he had looked for ways to harness their energies without compromising the essential integrity of the Garden City idea, he might have hastened the day when many hundreds of successful Garden Cities would have dotted the English countryside.  That would have been a better outcome than just a hand-full of half-successful ventures languishing in obscurity, which was essentially all he and his followers had to show for half a century's effort.   I shall return to this question again.


vii.


Let's now look at the spatial lay-out of the Garden City, paying special attention to the placement of the residential neighborhoods in relation to the down-town commercial district and to the various zones of primary and secondary employment.  (See Figure 2) It is here, by the way, that I have made some minor modifications to Howard's original plan, in order to suit it to the realities of the 21st century economy.

The first thing to note is the relatively compact nature of the township itself, once we are inside the inner perimeter of the surrounding green belt.  If we stipulate a radius of, say, two-and-a-half miles from the center of town to this inner perimeter, then we are talking about a total area of development encompassing approximately 12,000 acres, more than half of which would be occupied by residential neighborhoods. 

The residential districts, as you can see, tend to be concentrated in the more outlying areas and are interspersed  with a variety of small industrial and commercial parks.  It is in these parks that many of the factories and other light industries would be built, together with a variety of local convenience stores and the neighborhood schools.

 

viii.

  

Thus right away we grasp one of the most important advantages of the new Garden City: the distances between the places where people work and the places where they live, shop, and go to school will tend to be short.   In many cases they will be so short as to be easily traversable on foot or by bicycle.  And even in those cases when one needs to go all the way into the center of town to shop or pick up supplies at the local Home Depot -- or clear across town to visit a friend, -- the distances involved would not be so long as to justify the purchase of a high-speed automobile.  Instead much lighter, slower, and, no doubt, cheaper and more efficient vehicles could be used: something along the lines of an electric golf-cart or a low-speed version of a dune buggy with hybrid technology. 

Of course there will still be occasions when one will need to drive on the freeway in order to go into the nearest big city or get to an airport.  But even in those cases, provided they are not too frequent, it would be more economical to rent a high-speed automobile than to own one outright.  Or better yet, our new town might avail itself of the opportunity to organize a system of small shuttle vans and buses for just such occasions, as has long been the custom in less-developed parts of the world.

The bottom line is that the new Garden City promises a way to cut down dramatically on the amount of money and energy we spend for personal transportation, with all this implies for our new family budget -- to say nothing of the reduced amounts of green-house gases and other pollutants we emit into the atmosphere.  All serious environmentalists take note.

 

ix.

 
Last, but not least, we need to consider the physical layout of the down-town commercial center, something every town needs. A traditional courthouse square would be a charming possibility, at least in a nostalgic, small-town sort of way.  But for sheer convenience and comfort in all kinds of whether, nothing can compare to a modern covered shopping plaza. 

Let us therefore consider the possibility of something in between: a new hybrid architectural form, combining the best features of a traditional town square and a covered mall.  In addition to the courthouse and a number of offices, it  would be anchored by several major discount department stores (Wal-Mart, Costco, Target, Sam's, K-Mart) plus two or three major grocery chains.  The central covered portion would contain a variety of smaller shops, cafes, theatres, children's play areas, and the like.  And unlike today's shopping centers, parking could be mostly underground, which means that instead of acres of asphalt the complex could surrounded by a large public park containing shaded pathways and picnic areas, landscaped gardens, water features, outdoor cafes, a public swimming pool, merry-go-round, ferris wheel, and plenty of places for people to sit.

The whole idea, of course is to create an attractive central location: a place where old people can sit and watch the world go by, where teenagers can congregate, young couples court, and families repair to during their weekly shopping expeditions, or whenever they need to go into town on business.

 

x.

 

No doubt some people will object that such a hybrid town-square/shopping plaza, no matter how well designed,  will fail to supply the full range of social and cultural opportunities one finds in a big city.  No doubt they will be right about this.  How could it be otherwise when we consider that the entire population of the town in the country is unlikely to exceed thirty thousand inhabitants?
 

On the other hand, we need to take into account of a number of off-setting developments that have recently come into play.  With Amazon.com and UPS it is now possible to obtain, on relatively short notice, virtually any book in print.  The same goes for an enormous variety of other merchandise, from computers and cameras, to the latest fashions in consumer design.  Netflix can deliver to our doorstep an endless variety movies, no matter how obscure, and the day is not far off when these same movies will be instantly down-loadable over the internet.  I-tunes provides us with similar access to the latest in popular music along with the best classical performances ever recorded.  Google puts at our fingertips a range books and information on every conceivable subject, something that until recently only the largest libraries in the world could approach.   And last but not least, the new world of internet blogging and social networking makes it possible to find and communicate with people all over the world who share our particular interests and concerns, no matter how obscure.

Big cities, in short, are rapidly losing the advantages they have long enjoyed in matters of culture and social opportunity.  Hick towns across America now claim better access to a wider range of cultural and educational resources than did New York City a decade ago.  For the first time in history, we can live in the country and cultivate our minds as conveniently as we cultivate our gardens.

 

xi.

 
In the following two chapters I want to explore, from a businessman's point of view,  the money-making potential of the new Garden Cities as vehicles for investment.  But before we enter into that discussion, let me briefly summarize their money-saving potential for families who might choose to live in them, by recapitulating the most important economies I have identified so far.  Here is the list:

 

1. The costs of homeownership would go down to the extent that residential real estate is cheaper outside the big cities, and to the extent that families can substitute their own labor for that of professional carpenters, plumbers, electricians, and the like.  (Still to be mentioned is the fact that if they elect to build their houses in stages instead of all at one time, the costs of financing can be cut dramatically, a subject I shall return to.)

 

2. The family's spending on food would be reduced to the extent that cooking and eating at home is cheaper than eating out (which it is by a factor of three).  In addition, fruits and vegetables grown in one's garden are less expensive than produce purchased in a grocery store -- though, to be fair, the issue here is less a matter of price than of quality and the innate satisfactions of gardening (which, lest we forget, are also important components of one's standard of living). 

 

3. The costs of childcare would drop dramatically when professional daycare services are no longer required.

 

4. The costs of personal transportation would decline to the extent that the total number of miles that are traveled each day goes down, and to the extent that people can substitute cheaper forms of transportation -- feet, bicycles, electric vehicles -- for high-speed automobiles.

 

5. The costs of old age would diminish to the extent that retirement can be delayed, retirement benefits reduced, and nursing homes avoided.

 

Now, anyone familiar with today's family budget knows that these are all big-ticket items.  They are major contributors to today's high cost of living.  But even so, it is reasonable to ask whether all of them put together could compensate for the total loss in wages resulting from such a radical reduction in the hours of employment?  True, throughout the 1950's and '60's middle-class families could afford to live on the earnings of a single 40-hour-per-week job.  But we live in a different world now.  Could something similar be possible again?  Would people voluntarily choose it?

Such skepticism is in order, in my view, and that is why I shall be returning to this issue several more times, including at the end of the next chapter, where we estimate the changing productivity of a part-time workforce.

Now on to the dirty work.

 




III.    WHAT PROFIT IT

In a capitalist society, the pursuit of private gain is the motive force that organizes the economy and drives most of the economic activity within it.  This is a simple fact of life, and one of the most important realities of the world we live in.  To ignore it is a sure recipe for failure and frustration, as generations of would-be reformers of Western society have learned the hard way.  Indeed, it would be difficult to list all the failed utopian experiments in Europe and America that have foundered on this one bitter truth: from the dozens of small-scale cooperative communities so naively launched in the early decades of the 19th century, to the much more elaborate theoretical plans for a centrally planned economy dogmatically pursued by generations of Marxian-inspired socialists, right down to the hopelessly sloppy and disorganized hippy communes of the Sixties generation.

Is there nothing good we can extract from this 200-year-old record of failure and frustration?  No way we can redeem the pains of so many generous, good-hearted souls, including my own dear father, a man of unquestioned integrity and considerable intelligence, who suffered the misfortune of never having read Adam Smith in college? 

As a matter of fact I think there is a way to do them credit.  We can profit from their unhappy experience and at the same time honor their memory by taking a more realistic approach to the problems they were trying to solve from the outset.  Even my father eventually came around to this conclusion by the end of his life, no doubt partly as a result of 30 years of good-natured debate over the dinner table with one of his sons.

In other words, it is time to realize that if we seriously expect to see factories in the countryside run on part-time jobs, it will be necessary to persuade America's large industrial corporations that it will be in their interests to build them.  And if we expect to see new towns and neighborhoods springing up around these factories, we are going to have to convince the American real estate industry -- or at least a big chunk of it -- that it will be in its interest to help us build them.  I want to explore each of these two challenges in turn, starting with the factories.

 

ii.

 

Imagine you are the CEO of a company engaged in the business of manufacturing some useful product.  It could be a tangible item, something you can actually touch or hold in your hands, or it might be something intangible, like processing insurance claims.  The important point is that there be a large enough market for this product to justify the techniques of modern mass production, by which I mean the employment of a sizable workforce in specialized facilities containing lots of expensive equipment and machinery.  In other words,  which require considerable amounts of labor and capital investment.

Assuming you face significant competition from other companies, your job as a manager is to produce as much of the product, at the least cost, and of the highest quality, as possible.  That way you can maximize your return on investment and, if you are better at it than your competitors, secure a market for your product in the years ahead.



iii.



Let me now state, as concisely as I can, the case for factories in the countryside run on part-time jobs.  Such factories will run faster and more efficiently than similar facilities in urban areas employing full-time workers.  For two reasons:


Firstly, because part-time workers can work faster and more efficiently than full-time workers -- just as in track-and-field the short-distance runners always run faster than the long-distance runners. And secondly, because our part-time workers will, if anything, have slightly fewer hours in the week than they might voluntarily prefer.  This means they will be eager to earn every penny they can.  Therefore, provided wages are tied to output by some equitable formula, they can be motivated to exert themselves to the maximum possible degree.

In other words, by using what we might call "incentive-based work-sprints" and with the important proviso of equitable shares (to which I will return), you should be able to induce your new part-time workforce to work faster and more efficiently than your old full-time workforce in the city.  A factory employing this technique will show a commiserate improvement in its overall rate of return on investment.

This is the intuitive argument in a nutshell, in terms that a businessman can understand.

 

iv.

Let me now restate the argument in a more scientific way, using language that a political economist can understand. To do this I shall have recourse to a set of analytical tools that were originally developed by Stanley Jevons, probably the most underrated political economist of 19th century, and certainly one of the greatest. 

In arriving at the modern neoclassical theory of labor, which he pioneered, Jevons made a simultaneous appeal to two of the best known and most firmly established empirical "laws" of economics: the diminishing marginal utility of income, and the increasing marginal disutility of labor. To see appreciate the power of his results we need only understand what each of these laws says, and how they relate to each other.

First, the law of the decreasing marginal utility of income.  This is just a fancy way of describing the fact that workers tend to value the first dollars they earn a lot more than the last, and that each additional dollar they earn tends to mean less to them than the dollar before.  In other words,  people purchase necessities before luxuries.  Basic food and shelter mean more to them than fancy clothes and toys for the kids.  The more money we earn, the less satisfaction each additional dollar buys.  It is a special case of the law of diminishing returns, which is ubiquitous in nature and human experience.


The law of the increasing marginal disutility of labor, on the other hand, is a sort of mirror image of the first, but unique to our animal physiology.   It refers to the fact that work tends hurt more the longer we work and the harder we exert ourselves.  In other words, the last hours on the job are a lot more unpleasant than the first ones, and a slow pace can be maintained longer than a fast one.  Why?  Well, it has to do with the accumulative nature of fatigue, and with the fact that it is a progressive and not a linear phenomenon, something each of us knows from first-hand experience.

It was Jevons's peculiar stroke of genius to plot these two empirical laws of human psychology and physiology on a single graph, one superimposed on top of the other. On the vertical axis he plotted the utility wages against the disutility of wages, and on the horizontal axis the number of hours worked (see figure 4).   In other words, the declining marginal utility of income is represented by the sloping curve above the horizontal axis, and the increasing marginal disutility of labor by the sloping curve below.

Jevons reasoned that a worker would voluntarily continue to work at a given pace only so long as the utility of his wages exceed the disutility of his labor. The point at which that ceases to be true is the point beyond which he will not voluntarily continue to work, at least at that pace.  In other words, once that magic line is crossed workers will begin to slack off, and they will continue to slack off unless and until they are threatened with penalties or the loss of their jobs.

 

v.

 

Let us now apply these tools to the situation at hand.   But before we begin we need to take note of three unspoken assumptions which underlay Jevons' analysis.  First, he assumed that the length of the working day was fixed by custom.  Second, he assumed that the pace of work was also fixed by custom.  And third, he assumed that the workers would receive a fixed hourly wage, which would have been publicly agreed to ahead of time by their employer. It is hardly surprising that Jevons made these assumptions, seeing as all three were firmly established by custom in his day, as indeed they continue to be established by custom in most industries today.

But look at what happens when we relax these assumptions.  A wholly different picture emerges -- one whose remarkable implications are not at all obvious, or at least they are not obvious until we point them out using the tools of Jevons's analysis.  

First, if we cut the length of the customary working day roughly in half, which is what we are proposing, we will in effect be moving our workers well to the left on our diagram, to a point where the utility of their wages greatly exceeds the disutility of their labor, assuming they continue working at their old customary pace. 

But what if instead of paying them their old fixed hourly wage their employer agrees to link their wages to their output by a formula that has been mutually agreed to ahead of time, as being fair to both sides?  In that case these workers would have a way open to them by which they can move closer to that point of natural equilibrium where they would be happiest.  How can they move there?  Simply by quickening the pace and intensity at which they are willing to work.  In other words, by acting more like sprinters and less like long-distance runners.

So we arrive at the same conclusion by means of an abstract theory as was reached by simple intuition: workers will be willing work harder and more efficiently when their pay is tied to their output and the number of hours that they work each week has been significantly reduced. 

 

 vi.

 

Employers might also ponder the issue of on-the-job morale .  One of the ironies of the contemporary workplace is that workers appear least satisfied in precisely those industries with the best pay and benefit packages.  It is in these seeming bastions of industrial privilege that the unmistakable signs of alienation and disaffection are most pronounced: high rates of absenteeism and tardiness, feather-bedding, gold-bricking, goofing off on the job, even occasional acts of theft and vandalism.  Why is this?

The most parsimonious explanation is that many of the most highly-remunerated operatives in our society are working beyond the point of natural equilibrium: they are somewhere to the right of that line in our Jevons diagram where the marginal disutility of their labor begins to exceed the marginal utility of their incomes. They may not be conscious that this is where they are at, having never been given a choice in the matter. But when you look at the way they spend the money they earn -- on brand new automobiles, 60" flat-panel tv's, expensive jewelry, designer labels, and bass boats powered by 200 horsepower outboard motors-- it hard not to believe that something like this is going on.  Many of the most privileged of the working classes appear to have more discretionary income than they know what to do with -- or, rather, the marginal utility of their incomes appears to have sunk rather low.


Contrast this to the situation of our new part-time workforce.  Needing all the dollars they earn to support their new lifestyle, the marginal utility of their incomes will remain very high.  This doesn't mean they won't be able to afford a few luxuries now and then, but only that these luxuries will tend to be small.  Indeed, their one big luxury is the new lifestyle itself, which, being an all-or-nothing proposition, will retain the character of being a necessity as well.  It's hard to put a price on one's whole way of life.  That's why these workers should show up for work ready and eager to give it their all.




vii.

 

But let's get down to brass tacks.  Just how much harder and more efficiently are our new part-timers going to work for us?  How big of an increase in output-per-man-hour can we reasonably expect to see? 

This is, of course, an empirical question.  No amount of theoretical speculation can answer it, not even approximately.  Furthermore, there is not a lot of empirical evidence out there which bears on the issue. So let me summarize the little I have been able to turn up over the years, and then conclude with the results of my own little experiment as a small business owner employing part-time labor over a period of decades.

In all my researches I have been able to discover only three companies in America who have hit upon the idea of combining an incentive-based wage system  with a shorter work week.  One is UPS, the package delivery company, which uses a variant of the idea in its package sorting centers, some of which happen to be located in rural areas.  The two others are conventional manufacturers, SteelCase, Inc., and The Lincoln Electric Company, both of whom combine profit-sharing and work-sharing agreements in certain of their facilities, in a manner which has resulted in a shorter workweek and much higher wages for their rank-and-file workers.

Without going into the details, each of these three companies has managed to consistently produce a 30-to-40 percent improvement in output-per-manhour (and wages) when compared to the norm.  And as anyone familiar with the history of American enterprise knows, all three are highly successful companies that have tended to dominate the industries they are in.

 

viii.

 

 

These results are broadly consistent with my own experience as a private employer.  For a quarter of a century my wife and I ran a small landscaping business out of our house.  When we first began, she was already a trained horticulturist and talented garden designer, while I was a journeyman carpenter who was used to a certain amount of hard physical labor.  Our plan was that she would bring in the jobs and I would get them installed, with the assistance of two or three common laborers whom I would hire for the purpose.  

Thanks to my talented wife, our little operation was reasonably successful from the start.  After a couple of years, however, I proposed that we test out my new theory of labor, which I had been playing with as a theoretical idea for a number of years.  She was naturally dubious, as any sensible person would be.  But I explained that we were already working part-time -- owing to inclement weather, and the seasonal nature of our industry -- and we could begin by paying our workers the same percentage of our net proceeds which they already got, on average, with their current hourly wages.  That way, I assured her, if they didn't begin to work harder or more efficiently than they already were, they wouldn't make a penny more, and nobody would be the worse for it. So she reluctantly consented.

Several days later I sat down with my crew (all three of them) with job sheets in hand, and went over the last dozen or so installations we had done together.  On the front side of each sheet was a carbon copy of the actual contract signed by the customer; it listed all the plants, soil, stone, mulches, and other materials that were to be installed, and the total price of the job which the customer would pay once everything was complete.   On the back side was a list of the wholesale prices we had paid for those same materials (with supporting receipts), together with a list of each worker's number of hours on that job and his hourly wage rate, my own included. 

With this information before us, it was easy to calculate the "net product" for each job, it being simply the difference between the total price of the job and the total cost of the materials.  It was equally easy to calculate what labor's total share was as a percentage of that net.

So I asked my crew what they thought of the idea that I simply pay them, as a group, their average share of the "net" for each future job, to be divided among them according to the number of hours each had on that particular job times his nominal hourly wage rate, which varied according to each worker's experience and training.  Seeing the logic behind it -- and the possibility of upping their paychecks at the end of the week -- they agreed to give it a try.



ix.

 

So what happened?  Well, starting the very next morning I witnessed a roughly 40% increase in worker productivity, a figure that remained more-or-less constant through the rest of the season and for the next 25 years. 

The only thing I had to do to make this new deal work was to sit down with my crew at the end of each job -- under a shade tree if possible -- with the customer's check in one hand and a fist full of receipts in the other.  We would then proceed to fill out the back of the job sheet together.  There were no secrets here and everybody knew it.  And if I made a mistake in arithmetic, as I sometimes did, nobody was shy about pointing it out.  As long as my workers knew they could trust me, and that I wasn't trying to put one over on them, they were fully on board.  And why shouldn't they be?   They were now taking home forty percent more than many of their friends who worked for my competitors.

In addition, there were some fringe benefits for me as a boss that I had not anticipated.  For one thing, it didn't seem to matter whether I was on the job site or not.  There was no longer any need to keep a close watch on my workers to make sure they were working, something I had always hated doing.  And when I eventually hired an additional employee (our little company was growing) and he started goofing off the first time I was away from the job, his co-workers quickly put him in his place.  They were all working for each other now, they realized, and made sure the newcomer understood as well. 

I also noticed that the wastage of materials dropped off significantly.  There were fewer damaged root-balls and broken limbs, fewer poorly planted shrubs and trees that would need to be re-planted, and more careful attention given to the finer points in the overall arrangements of the plants in accordance with the designs my wife had drawn up.   In short, less of anything and everything that could potentially reduce the size of their  paychecks at the end of the job.  I still had to monitor for quality -- no skimping on mulches or peat moss, for example -- but my wife and I were relieved of most of the burdens of managing a crew.

Naturally my wife and I also saw a 40% increase in our earnings per hour.  That pleased us both, even though my wife would occasionally complain that she could not see the logic of paying our workers so much more than our competitors, especially on really fat jobs when our margins were high.  I'd tell her not to worry, the more money they made the more money we made, and to be thankful our little company no longer suffered a lot of the headaches of our competitors -- chronic absenteeism and high rates of turnover especially  -- which had caused not a few of them to quit the industry altogether.  That seemed to satisfy her.



x.

 

In conclusion, based upon 25 years of personal experience as well as the documented examples of UPS, SteelCase, and Lincoln Electric,  I think we can reasonably expect to see an increase in productivity on the order of 30-to-40 percent, and perhaps even more, depending on the circumstances.  

But all this is subject to the one crucial proviso I have already mentioned: that the gains in productivity be shared equitably between labor and capital according to some mutually agreed upon formula that has been agreed to beforehand,  and that is advantageous to both sides. 

This is a complicated and inherently contentious issue, full of pitfalls and temptations, and is not to be taken lightly.  There are some situations, for example, that are relatively straightforward, such as adjusting the speed of an assembly line.   In other cases it will be a matter of using fewer workers to operate the same number of machines, whose speeds may or may not be adjustable in the short-run, even though it may be possible to redesign them in the long-run.   Not all production processes lend themselves equally to incentive-based work sprints, it needs to be realized, and we will have to deal with them one case at a time. 

Some form of collective bargaining will be essential in every case, however, I feel sure, and for this reason I am attaching as a technical appendix a note on wages and prices I wrote several decades ago.  Whether it will be of any practical value, or even makes sense, I have absolutely no idea anymore; and so leave it for others to judge.* [*I will say, though, that on the basis of it, Milton Friedman once wrote that I was "an excellent amateur economist."]

 

 xi.

 

Let me wind up this part of the discussion by returning to the question of the new standard of living.  At the end of the last chapter I listed a number of ways the new way of life I am proposing could save money for the families who choose to follow it.  But then I wondered whether these savings could possibly compensate for all the lost wages?  Skepticism was justified, as I was prepared to admit.

We are now in a position to take big chip out of that well-founded skepticism:  the actual loss in wages may not be nearly as large as we initially supposed.  It will certainly be less in percentage terms than the reduction in the total hours of employment, significantly less, and for a certain class of families (those with one full-time and one part-time wage-earner) might not result in any loss of income at all.

But let's keep to the case of a young family of four with two pre-school-age children and two full-time working adults who, between them, are employed 80 hours a week outside the home.   If the couple switches to two 18-hour-a-week jobs with a 40 percent increase in hourly wages, that would result in a 37 percent decrease in family income.  Or, more conservatively, if it switches to two 24-hour-a-week jobs with only a 20 percent increase in wages, that would result in a 28 percent reduction in income. 

This gives us a more realistic picture of the range of economies the couple would need to realize in order to maintain its standard of living -- once it stops paying for daycare,  starts cooking at home on a regular basis instead of eating out all the time, and no longer has to make monthly payments on, or buy gas and insurance for, two high-speed automobiles, etc..

At the end of the next chapter we shall take a closer look at the costs of homeownership in the new towns under a similar range of assumptions.

 







IV.  Our Real Estate


 

In this chapter I want to examine the other major challenge we are going to have to meet if we expect to turn our dreams turn into a living reality.  This is the challenge of acquiring large tracts of open land out in the countryside and building new towns upon those tracts which will remain faithful to the principles of a true Garden City

Let me begin with a simple observation: creating a new town from scratch, even in the best of circumstances, is no easy task.   Most emphatically it is no task for amateurs.  It is an immensely complex undertaking requiring extraordinary amounts of talent, drive, experience, organizational ability, and access to capital -- to say nothing of the shrewdness and savvy necessary to navigate a maze of legal and political obstacles, and to comply with countless governmental regulations. 

In short, if we are going to successfully build new towns in the country we are going to need lots of help: the kinds of help that only the largest and most accomplished real estate developers in America can supply.

 

ii.

 

Unsurprisingly, such services do not come cheap.  The kinds of entrepreneurs who can supply them have historically been high-rollers: buccaneering types with thick skins and a high tolerance for risk, even failure, who expect to be rewarded in proportion to the gambles that they take and the myriads of obstacles they are forced to overcome.  What is worse, as a class private developers have an unsavory reputation, at least in the United States, being known for a certain unscrupulousness in their business dealings, for cutting corners, and for not always being guided by the highest ethical or legal standards.   Neither are they famous for their appreciation of the finer points of good architectural and landscape design -- the very qualities that will be needed in abundance if our new towns in the country are going to succeed in being the permanently attractive and livable places we intend them to be.

But as a famous American developer, James Rouse, used to say, "The answer to bad development is good development."  This is a maxim the truth of which Rouse himself demonstrated over the course of a long and successful career in the American real estate industry, including the design and construction of some of the earliest and most innovative shopping malls in America, the famous Fanuel Hall restoration project in downtown Boston, and most significantly of all for our purposes here, the building from scratch the new town of Columbia, Maryland, which he located in the open countryside midway between Washington D.C. and Baltimore, Maryland. 

 

iii.

 

Part of our task, therefore, both as future citizens of these new country towns and as the leaders of a new Garden City movement in America, will be to go out and engage the very best developers in America: those rare individuals of uncommon talent and integrity who, like Rouse, know what true excellence is, and who will be willing to work closely with us or our chosen representatives as their client in a long-term professional relationship: a relationship that will be based, not on trust, let us be clear, but rather upon mutual respect and a shared commitment to a common goal that we both understand.
 

And what, exactly, is that goal?  The goal is to plan and build new towns in the country in a way that will both reward the developer handsomely for the successful completion of a project and respect -- in all essentials and over the long-term -- the two guiding principles of the Garden City concept as originally specified by Howard (see II:iv-v above).  Nothing less, nothing more.

 

iv.

 
This last point requires elaboration.  Unless we are careful the cumulative costs of assembling a large tract of real estate, adapting it to the abstract plan of a Garden City, building out the basic infrastructure (roads, utilities, etc.), and then, in the final stages, constructing some of its more essential architectural amenities, can mount astronomically.  For a couple of reasons.  In the first place, because the upfront costs will be large and can easily become larger; and secondly, because the elapsed time between when the first purchases are made and the project is complete will be long. and can easily grow longer. 

In other words, time being money, the compound interest accruing on large loans extended over long periods of time can mushroom.  Unless we are vigilant, it will reach levels that are quite beyond the ability of the future townsfolk to cover out of  their own modest future earnings.  What this would imply, of course, is eventual bankruptcy for the township itself, followed inevitably by the selling off of the two municipal land trusts that had been specially set aside for the long-term benefit and protection of the future community.  In other words it would lead to the forced liquidation of the town's greenbelt and all the commercial real estate within its borders.  At that point we can say good-bye Garden City, hello urban sprawl.

 

v.

 

Without pretending to solve this dilemma in any definitive way I would like to make several observations.  The most important one by far concerns the character and location of the town's future site.  It is absolutely imperative in my judgment that any site chosen be far enough away from any existing urban development as to place it completely outside the orbit of urban real estate speculation.  In the case of some of our bigger cities this can mean 50 miles or more beyond the edge of exurban development.  In the case of some of our smaller cities and towns it may mean as few as ten or twelve miles. 

My point is that only in these thinly settled outlying areas -- of which we have an abundance in these United States, let us be thankful -- will we find the price of land to be a true reflection of its agricultural value.  Only there will it be possible to buy land at cheap enough prices that we can generate enough income by leasing it out for agriculture, to cover the interest on the money borrowed to make the purchase in the first place.  Which is but another way of saying that only in those areas will it be possible to acquire and carry large tracts of undeveloped real estate indefinitely into the future without running up debt.

 

 vi.

A second problem we are sure to encounter in the course of assembling a town site is the problem of holdouts.  No matter how far out we go, if there is a whiff in the air of a future town going in, we are going to encounter a few individuals who will refuse to sell.  For some it will be a matter of sentimental attachment to their farms, which is certainly understandable; and in those cases,  provided we are flexible and diplomatic in our approach, it might be possible to work out an accommodation that is mutually satisfactory via some form of long-term lease-back arrangement.  But in other cases it will be matter of greed.  The cussedness of human nature being what it is, there are sure to be a few local landowners who, the minute they smell what they think is an opportunity to make a killing, will decide to try to hold the whole project hostage to their own extortionate demands.

There are several ways we might get around this problem.  For instance, if there is only one landowner of an extraordinarily large tract of land, so that only a single purchase is necessary to acquire a town site, the problem would not arise, which argues in favor of our looking for large corporate farms to buy. 

Or we might conduct all our negotiations in such secrecy with each landowner that others in the neighborhood never find out.  But this is a very difficult thing to do.  A better strategy would be to make all purchase agreements  optional, contingent upon all the other landowners in the area being willing to sign similar agreements -- thereby bringing social pressure to bear on any potential hold-outs.  

A final strategy would be to invoke the principle of eminent domain.  This is a controversial legal procedure, provided for in the U.S. Constitution, that would force private landowners to the sell their land for public purposes at going market prices.  It requires the authority, to say nothing of the active cooperation, of government, at either the state or the federal level.  Though such a procedure is unlikely to prove necessary -- or feasible -- for the first few towns that we build, it would surely become central to the success of a mass Garden City movement in America. 

For this reason we need to begin thinking seriously now about the political nature of such a future mass movement, a subject that shall occupy us in the next chapter.  One of the objects of government, Lincoln observed, is to do those things for the people that the people cannot do for themselves, or do so well.

 

vii.



In addition to not paying too much for the land, it is also important not to build too much too soon.  For there are going to be temptations, and a certain unspoken conflict of interest, pushing in precisely that direction.  Let me explain.

It is human nature to bet big on a sure thing.  In the case at hand, in order to attract the large amounts of capital required to build a new town from scratch, it will be necessary to issue guarantees to the outside investors who furnish this capital (including the developers with whom we are working) of an attractive rate of return on all the time and money that they sink into the project.   Such guarantees are only possible using collateral; and the only collateral of any value the new town is going to possess will be its future down-town commercial real estate: the very prize that private developers have traditionally used to lure investors into such schemes. 

None of this need be a problem for the future community so long as the investors are not placed in a position to foreclose on their loans; which is to say, as long the town is able to service its debts out of its ordinary revenues, derived  from taxes on the local populace together with the rents generated off its commercial real estate leases.

The point I am trying to make is that it will be no skin off the backs of the outside investors if they elect to exercise their rights to foreclose on the town.  They might, and probably would, come out ahead, at least in the long-run; down-town commercial real estate is, after all, the gift that keeps on giving.  They might decide  -- indeed, would be eager -- to expand the total taxpaying population in the town, which they  could do by developing the green-belt which will have simultaneously fallen into their hands.  And there would be little to stop them from establishing downtown commercial monopolies -- by allowing a Home Depot store but not a Lowes, to choose just one of many possible examples -- as a way to force up prices and rents.



viii.

 

None of this need happen, of course, provided the town doesn't get over-extended.  But if the town is not to get over-extended, the town's representatives need to be aware of the bias to do just that which will exist on the part of the developers and outside investors in the town with whom they are working so closely.  In particular, they must be prepared to resist the temptation to build something a little too grand in the beginning -- no matter how alluring the prospects are painted to be, and no matter how seductive the arts of salesmanship exercised upon them.


This is but another way of saying that it will be essential for the future inhabitants of our towns -- whoever they might eventually turn out to be -- to have their representatives in place and on site far ahead of time: persons of undoubted integrity (like Howard's board of overseers) who will act as their agents and be vested with all the necessary legal authority to protect their future interests.  Above all these agents must have the authority to approve or disapprove in detail each stage of construction as the project proceeds.  Austerity is going to have to be the watchword here, and must remain so if we expect to maximize our long-term chances of success.

 

ix.

 

Let me give some examples of what I mean by austerity, starting with the downtown commercial district.

 

You will recall that this central district was to combine the charms of an old-fashioned town-square with the comforts and amenities of a modern shopping mall, and that it would be surrounded by a large landscaped park with water features, etc.  This is indeed the goal.  But initially it is going to have to be something much more modest: closer to a frontier mining camp than a mall, with one church, some sort of saloon-qua -hotel, a large general store, a cement plant, and a lumber yard.   The town's first workers, and its first permanent inhabitants, will likely be in the construction trades, not manufacturing, and their numbers will be small, maybe a few hundreds.  At least this is the way I imagine it.

Only gradually, over a period of a decade or more, will this camp begin to look anything like the picturesque townscape we have mapped in our plans.  Our new Garden City, like any genuine community, must develop organically in time, gradually adding new people and the new primary sources of employment (what we are calling factories) along with new places to shop, go to school, etc., in a carefully planned and coordinated sequence of stages.  Only in this way will it be possible to prevent the town's superstructure -- including its various secondary and tertiary sources of employment (stores, schools, etc.) -- from outgrowing the population base it is intended to serve, and upon which it will depend for its solvency.

 

 x.

Or consider the new neighborhood villages.  In preparing for their construction it will probably be a good idea to install its infrastructure ahead of time, including the major road beds and main trunks of the various underground utilities: water, gas, phone, electricity, etc.  For that very reason it is essential that these installations be done, not only quickly, but as near in time as possible to the date when the future residents of the neighborhood are scheduled to move in and begin constructing their homes. 

By the same token, all non-essential improvements to the neighborhood should be deferred.  Gravel roads, for example, instead of concrete or asphalt paving, will suffice for the first few years. Sidewalks can wait, as can street lights, even if the wiring for street lights has already been stubbed in, as it probably should be.  (Or maybe just the conduit should be pre-installed, leaving the actual wire to be pulled later?)  As for the small neighborhood park across the street, it will exist from day one, but only in a very rudimentary state, with, at most, a few newly-planted shade trees.   Future improvements in the form of ball fields or swing-sets and shuffle-board courts, let alone anything as costly as a neighborhood pavillion, should be put off until such time as either all the families in the neighborhood or else the town as a whole (I do not wish to prejudge this issue) can afford to pay for them.

 

xi. 

 

These same principles apply when it comes to considering the ways families might go about building their houses.

For instance, let us assume that many families will require a certain amount of professional help in the initial phases of construction, which also happen to be the heaviest and most exacting.  I am thinking in particular of the initial layout of the building lines, the digging and pouring of the footings and any slabs, plus any block work or concrete form construction that needs to be done to bring the foundations up to grade for the ground floor.  Some families might also need help with the rough framing, others with even more.

In all these cases it is important that the professional builder be prepared to work closely with the amateurs in meeting their needs.  This involves not only the issue of timing -- not starting too soon -- but also of including the non-professionals in the construction process to the maximum degree feasible.  Amateurs can certainly be used laborers and helpers, and can learn on the job.  Above all, it is essential that the professional respect each family's right -- and understand its need -- to delay non-essentials, and to build its house in stages if that is what it chooses.  Some families will decide that their living quarters can initially be cramped, and that one or two rooms are enough for a start.   Others, childless couples, say, who are still young and hardy, might decide to begin by living in a tent.  Grandparents, on the other hand, especially if they are getting on in years, may go to the opposite extreme and elect to have their small retirement cottages constructed completely.  Hopefully, they will have money left over to help their children and grandchildren make a start on their living quarters at the other end of the garden.

 

xii.


Why is this so important.  Because, again, time is money.  There is an enormous amount of money to be made -- or, rather, saved -- by building one's house a room at a time.  It is all in the financing: the amount of interest that has to be paid on a series of small loans taken over short periods of time is only a  small fraction of the interest on a single large loan taken over one long period of time.  And since interest is typically three-quarters of the total cost of owning a house under a conventional 30 year mortgage, we are talking about a strategy that can potentially bring about truly radical reductions in the costs of homeownership.  In the limiting case, when a family elects to borrow no money at all, but rather to save up enough ahead of time to pay for each new stage of construction, it saves the full three-quarters.  Not bad when you consider that what we are talking about -- paying the rent or making the monthly mortgage payment -- is easily the single biggest item in the average family's budget, taking typically around 30 percent of its income.

Of course, there are trade-offs.  Families who build in stages will forego the luxury of moving into a brand new house that is completely finished, right down to the last piece of trim.  But do they really want to pay three or four times as much for what is, after all, the same thing in the end?  And how long does the thrill of the new last when compared to pleasures and satisfactions -- to say nothing of the memories -- of building one's own home?  If beauty is the promise of happiness, as someone once said, then which are the most beautiful houses of all?



xiii.

 

Let me wind up this chapter by returning once more to the issue of the of the new family budget.  When we left it at the end of the last chapter we forecast that many workers would see a 20-to-40 percent increase in wages (and productivity), depending upon the particular circumstances of their jobs.  We were talking about jobs in manufacturing, however, not work in general.  We live in what is sometimes described as a post-industrial economy, in which manufacturing employs less than 20 percent of the workforce.  Even if we add to this figure the number of people working in industries where similar types of incentives might be made to apply -- construction, agriculture, and so-called back office-work are some of the ones that come to mind -- we are still left with what looks to be two-thirds of the workforce who would be left out in the cold.  What about them?

There is a real problem here, and I will not deny it.  But it may not be quite as big a problem as appears at first sight.  We need to realize that the ratio of primary production workers to service workers in our new Garden Cities will be roughly the reverse of what it is at present.  This is because the new factories will be employing roughly twice as many people as they did before, albeit at roughly half as many hours per employee, and because there will be many fewer service workers in a society in which people do a lot more things for themselves at home: fewer fast food workers, nursing home workers, childcare workers, house cleaners, lawn maintenance workers, and so on.

Furthermore, there is no reason why office secretaries and janitors (and the like) who happen to work in factories cannot share in the profits the same way the front-line production workers do.  No reason, in fact, why they cannot themselves respond to the same incentives to work more efficiently.  This would be especially true if the factories use some form of group incentive plan along the lines I described in my little company above, which I called a system of "net shares."   For in those circumstances all the workers know they are, in effect, working for each other, and higher standards of discipline are more easily maintained.  Peer pressure is not always such a bad thing.

But even so, this still leaves jobs like bus driver, police officer, town clerk, and ordinary sales clerk.  In other words, people not directly tied to the primary processes of production.   What about their wages and productivity?  I shall return to that issue in the next chapter when I consider political remedies to the more general problem of falling wages in America, caused by the frankly dishonest as well as dangerously short-sighted trade and immigration policies that have been foisted upon the American public by America's cosmopolitan elites, in the mistaken belief that we (or, rather, they) ought to be more concerned about the welfare of working people in poor countries than in their own [*Mistaken, in the first place, because if you implement freer trade policies that favor the welfare of foreign workers at the expense of domestic ones, you are likely end up with protectionist trade policies which promote the welfare of neither group; and, secondly, because immigration from poor countries to rich countries, which our elites favor, invariably retards the development of the poor countries, which, of course, is bad for the overwhelming majorities of poor peoples who stay behind in those countries, and should therefore be opposed on moral grounds].   In the final analysis these are political problems, not economic ones.  It will be an important part of our task as ordinary citizens in a democracy to organize ourselves in such a way that we can restore the general wage level of the ordinary American worker, bringing it back to where it would, and should, already be by now, had the interests of America’s working-class majority been properly taken into account when our new trade and immigration policies were first being formulated.   It can be done, and it is our right to do it.  Let us be up and doing.





V.   Zionwards -- or, Let us be up and doing

I want to conclude with a chapter on the importance of organization, and on the nature of the organizational task before us.  I could equally say that I want to say something about our rights and responsibilities as American citizens.  For one of the unique things about our situation today -- when compared to the situation of other peoples in other times and places, who may also have hungered and thirsted after great changes in the shape of their everyday lives -- is that we are a free people.   Truly and actually free.  Both economically free and politically free.   In fact, we have at our disposal a whole list of freedoms spelled out for us in the most explicit possible terms: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of conscience and of religion, freedom of contract, freedom to associate and to assemble, the right to petition our government, the right to vote, the right to bear arms.  To top it all, there has recently been placed in our hands the most marvelous instruments of freedom, the likes of which the world has never seen.  I mean the world wide web, cell phones, and personal computers: all of which we can easily afford, and are at liberty to use in any way we please in the lawful exercise of our constitutional rights.

In short, there has never been a time in history when there was less excuse for a people not to peacefully assert themselves to claim what is rightfully theirs.  If we fail now, we shall have no one to blame but ourselves.

ii.

Before I go any further let me pause to say that I am not an expert in matters of organization.  On the contrary, I am the rankest of beginners.  I lack both ability and experience in this area.  So everything I am about to say should be taken, if not with a grain of salt, then with at least a certain measure of skepticism.  There will be people reading me with far better insight into the practical problems of organizing a democratic mass movement for change than I have.  Hopefully some of them will be among its leaders tomorrow.   But whoever may eventually end up leading, no matter how talented they are, let them remember that they are not prophets but fallible human beings, and conduct themselves accordingly.  Style is the deference which action pays to uncertainty, as a famous American physicist once observed.   It is a tricky road ahead, and we must be prepared to learn from our mistakes, both individually and collectively, if we expect to get very far.  I recommend the philosopher Karl Popper to be our guiding angel here.  Read him.


iii.


With that proviso, let me try to map the road ahead as best I can see it.    In many ways it resembles the road faced by European Jewry a hundred years ago, when it decided to try to establish a new home for itself in the promised land.  The main difference is that ours is a voluntary movement, undertaken, not out of necessity, but as a matter of free choice, and within the bounds of our own very large country.  This is a big difference, of course, and we must keep it in mind.  But organizationally the two tasks are essentially the same.   We can learn a lot from that first Zionist movement in my opinion -- so much, in fact, that I propose we take it as a model. 

Let us therefore contemplate the building of a national membership organization in the United States like the World Zionist Organization, dedicated to advancing the interests of all Americans who wish to live the new life in the new Garden City.  It will me a national membership organization with state and local chapters and must certainly be democratic in nature, open to all American citizens without regard to race, creed, color, or national origin. 

But this still leaves a lot to be decided.  What kind of parliamentary structure should it have?  What form of representation?  What system of voting? In this internet age there are many new possibilities here, and I think we should strive to take advantage of the best of them. 

Our aim should be to make the new organization as responsive as possible to the full range of interests and opinions of its members, without crippling its effectiveness as an executive agency acting on their collective behalf. 

One of the recurrent failures of democracy in America so far, particularly at the state and local levels, and in many labor and grass-roots organizations (and in many corporate ones, too, for that matter), has been a certain opaqueness in the background machinery of elections, which leads to a kind of walking-deadness in many of the people elected, even when there is not outright corruption.  This is something we must learn to overcome. 

Politics in a democracy should be the best live entertainment: a vital activity in which all who really care can be responsibly involved, both mentally and physically.  History shows that the American people have good political instincts by and large; they need to be able to exercise them more.


iv.


Among the possible tasks of the new organization I would suggest the following, in no particular order:


Recruitment.  People cannot join us if they do not first hear about our plans and ideas.  This pamphlet is one step in that direction, even though it is primarily intended to enlist the energies of small corps of dedicated activists, young men and women who can serve as the vanguards of our cause.  Their task will be to work out in detail the forms of parliamentary organization described in the paragraph above -- at both the state and the national levels -- after which a national campaign of advertising can begin.  In that campaign we should employ all the resources of modern telecommunications with a view to reaching as wide an audience as possible.  Special consideration should be given to the possibility of working closely with existing church, college, high school, and trade-union organizations, especially at the local level, since this is where the nuclei of many future neighborhood groups are most likely to be recruited.  Such nuclei will likely be the bedrock of the new organization, and its primary constituency.

Public outreach.  There will be many people in our society, some in highly influential positions, who may not choose this new lifestyle for themselves or their families, but who will nonetheless look upon it with favor for a variety of social and economic reasons, not all of them narrowly self-interested.  We need to reach out to these people in order to enlist their support, both political and financial, without which we would be operating at a distinct as well as quite unnecessary disadvantage.

I would make a special appeal to the American Jewish community:  "Come on, guys, give us a hand!   We are your fellow American citizens, not Polish serfs!  We could very much use your assistance in a dozen different ways.  What is more, whether you know it or not, Israel could use ours.  Why don't we learn to work together for our common good?"

Public Relations.  Inevitably we must be prepared to defend ourselves in public against a variety of polemical attacks that are sure to be leveled against us by various groups in society, some of whom may feel -- whether rightly or wrongly -- that their material interests or ideological preconceptions would be adversely affected by our success.  This isn't to say there won't be occasions when their criticisms are just, in which cases let us have the grace and courage to admit that we are wrong, and to compromise if necessary.  Yet history shows there is rarely much progress in society, especially material progress, without real and sometimes unavoidable conflicts of interest.  Let us strive to keep them civil.

Training and Support.   There is bound to be an interval of years between the time when families or small groups of families first join our organization and the time when they eventually make their move to the country.  They will have to make constructive use of this interval.  Couples must work assiduously to save up money -- this is absolutely essential -- if they expect to be able to make a down payments on their homesteads.  New skills will have to be learned in matters of construction, cooking, and home economics, as well as in various specialized techniques and areas of knowledge related to manufacturing, especially if they have an idea of the type of industry they might eventually end up working in.  Such technical and financial qualifications will be key if our new communities are going to be able to attract industry in the first place, and if we expect them to survive. 

It is imperative, therefore, that our new organization assist its members with ways and means to acquire these qualifications.  At the same time it must provide them with ways to keep their spirits up during the times they are waiting.   Organized political activities are one way of doing this, and should probably become a prominent feature of their lives during this interval, at the local and precinct levels especially.  The game of politics can be tremendous fun, and never more so than when you are winning.

Corporate Outreach.  The whole reason we expect our plans to succeed is that manufacturers who invest in the new type of factories will make more money in them than in the alternatives.*

[*Of course it has been a commonplace for years now to think they can make even more money investing overseas, where wages are dirt cheap.  But all that is about to change.   As the dollar falls and this nation's balance of payments begins to turn, as inevitably it must, we can expect to see a manufacturing renaissance in America, fueled by our country's need to start exporting goods and services equal in value to those that it imports.  The only question is which industries will expand most.]

Thus an essential part of our program will be to sell our ideas to the American manufacturing community.   This means we will have to develop a cadre of talented corporate consultants, some of whom no doubt will be graduates of our nation's leading business schools, who can go out into the business community and persuasively make our case.  With offices on Wall St. (at least I should think so) their presence must be felt in the daily business press, in boardrooms, at annual shareholder meetings, industry expos and conventions, even at Davos and the annual Renaissance Weekends: wherever and whenever the movers and shakers of the corporate world get together to think about the future.

Town Planning and Site Acquisition.  I have already talked about the need to go out and find the best developers in America.   That is indeed the way to begin I feel fairly sure.  But beyond that we must prepare for a time when the demand for good planners and developers will far outstrip the available supply.  The kinds of ideas we are promoting are tailor made to appeal to America's schools of architecture and town-planning, and to already-established departments of urban development and civil engineering in our major universities.  We would be foolish not to work closely with these existing institutions in hopes of attracting more and better students to them in the years ahead, thus upgrading the professions of town-planning and urban development in America, both in terms of numbers and in terms of quality.

We might also think about the possibility of organizing our own national bank, given that there are going to be large numbers of people in our organization who are engaged in the time-consuming process of saving up money to purchase future homesteads.  Such a banking institution might function like the Jewish National Fund, using its assets to purchase land for future town sites as well as meeting the regular banking needs of its member/depositors.   I have no idea if this is truly a good idea, or even a feasible one, but merely suggest it for our possible future consideration.   Let us leave no stone unturned.

News and Information.  Naturally our organization must provide its members with the means to freely communicate with each other, and to stay accurately informed concerning all major developments affecting the organization and its mission.  The first of these objectives can easily be met using the new social networking capabilities of the internet.   The second is more challenging.  Official websites and publications will obviously be an important part of the mix.  But attention must also be given to the publication of a truly independent newspaper which is not under control of the organization's executive: a publication that can be relied upon to give all sides to every controversial issue, and not just the ones favored by the small group of individuals who may momentarily be in control of the executive machinery of the organization.  

I do not pretend to know the best way to accomplish this goal.  I can only suggest that we look at the history of the Christian Science Monitor and the Wall St. Journal as two possible models, and that we pay particular attention to the problem of editorial succession.  The New York Times and the British journal Nature are cautionary tales on ways not to go.  This might conceivably be a problem with no permanent solution, which every generation has to solve anew.  But let us at least get it right for the first generation.

An Independent Judiciary.  Consideration should be given to establishing an independent judiciary within the new organization itself to protect the rights of all its members without prejudice, and to enforce the constitution, laws, by-laws, and policies of the organization which the membership adopts through its elected representatives.  The organization will also need to be able to pursue its own legal and constitutional rights and interests within the courts of the United States, and should think about developing the staff and legal resources to do so effectively.
 

v.


Last but not least, I want to dwell on what is probably our most crucial task: the need to develop a solid base of political support for our plans and ideas, and not just as a matter of public opinion, but in every state legislature in America and in both houses of Congress.  To see why this is so important it helps to know a story. 

It is the story of an earlier homesteading venture in America remarkably like the one we are contemplating now, complete with part-time jobs in the country, rural factories, and people building their own houses.   But what concerns me are not the similarities so much as way it originated, and the manner of its attempted implementation. 

For it began as little more than a bee in the bonnet of President Franklyn Delanore Roosevelt, put there by a young agricultural economist in his administration named Milburn Wilson in the depths of the Great Depression.  It was in fact but one of a myriad of unorthodox new ideas which were hatched in the earliest  days of the Roosevelt's new administration, whose aim was to bring desperately needed economic relief to America's vast army of the unemployed: in this case to hosts of poor farm families in virtually every state in the union who were stranded in the countryside with no markets for their produce.

Roosevelt spoke of his new "rural-industrial groups" as a third type of development between the "urban-industrial" and "rural-agricultural" types of the past.  To bring them into existence he proposed a vast machinery of national planning and regional development which would be administered by the federal government, in this case working through a Division of Subsistence Homesteads which had been set up inside the new Resettlement Administration.   Caught up in the enthusiasm of the times -- and because this was one of the new President's very own pet ideas -- Congress quickly appropriated enough funds to break ground on several hundred of pilot projects across the nation.

What happened next is an object lesson in how not to proceed.   To begin with, the future inhabitants of these new rural-industrial villages were not true volunteers so much as poor farmers on relief: they were being paid by the federal government to build houses they would eventually own because this was some of the only work available.  Many of them may have been sold on Roosevelt's beautiful dream -- in fact most of them were -- but nevertheless they were given no real say in how it would be implemented.  As it turned out, they had to work under the direct supervision of men sent from Washington, in places on the map chosen from Washington, according to designs and specifications that had been drawn up in Washington.  In fact every house had the very same floor plan. Not surprisingly this to a certain amount of dissension in the field, as it should have.

A second problem with Roosevelt's idea was that the promised factories never materialized, and showed no signs of materializing.   This is not surprising either when you consider the depressed state of the American economy during the Great Depression, and how long the Great Depression lasted.  But even had economic recovery gotten underway much sooner, it seems unlikely that Roosevelt's dream could have come to fruition.  Most of the advanced transport and communications technologies that are necessary for industrial decentralization had not been invented yet, much less installed.  This was a time before freeways, let alone cell phones and the internet, and even rural electrification was just barely underway.  Roosevelt's dream was decades ahead of its time.

As these realities began to sink in and news of dissension in the ranks of the homesteaders filtered back to Washington,  the program came under attack in the halls of Congress, led by numerous business interests and ideological groups who were adamantly opposed to government planning in general, and this project in particular.  Roosevelt, meanwhile, had moved on.  He was now preoccupied by other, more pressing concerns in the first tumultuous years of his administration.   And since he and the young Milburn Wilson were the only two men in his administration who had caught the vision of the new "rural-industrial type", the idea was left without a single effective spokesman in Washington. 

From that point on it was an idea without a constituency.   Or, rather, I should say, it was an idea whose sole constituency consisted of a few thousand impoverished farm families scattered across America who were unorganized, unrecognized, and with no leaders of their own -- and who, therefore, were completely without influence.   Funding was unceremoniously discontinued, and the seeds of their little homestead communities withered on the vine.  I sometimes think of them when driving by the small hamlet of Homestead, Tennessee, near where I live.  Off to the side of the road, in a deserted field, is a small group of hand-crafted cottages made of the local crab orchard stone.  Beautifully constructed, on what appear to be solid foundations, they stand as mute reminders of Roosevelt's dream. 


vi.

The lesson here is plain enough.  In a democracy it pays to be organized.  It isn't enough that the President of the United States is on your side.  For when it comes to the interests of ordinary working people in America, unless you have the numbers and the organization -- the numbers plus the organization -- there is simply no chance that your voice will be heard.  Organized constituencies are the only ones that count.

vii.

I bring this up because of the many political battles that lie ahead.  What are some of these battles?  I have already mentioned the matter of immanent domain.  This is an extraordinarily contentious issue at the present time, among certain libertarian elements especially, whose influence in politics is not be underestimated.* [*Libertarians are like poker players who want to set the stakes after they've had a peek at their hands.] To it we can add an indefinite number of state and county zoning ordinances, environmental regulations, rules of incorporation, and no doubt other legislative enactments that will stand in the way of our new developments.  Already there are numerous vested interests deeply entrenched in state capitals across America, some of  whom will prefer to see these obstacle remain in our way, and whose paid lobbyists and representatives will be working behind the scenes to insure that they do.  This is but one of the political realities we will have face.

 

viii.

 
At the federal level, assuming we seek federal support, which we shall, the stakes are even higher, which means the issues are likely to be even more hotly contested.  

Consider, for instance, the fact that our program, if implemented on a sufficiently large scale, could significantly decrease America's dependence on foreign oil and gas supplies.  That means we would be less vulnerable to sudden overseas cut offs, with all that implies for our national security and strategic position in the world.   But it also means a contraction in the revenues of one of the largest and most powerful industries in the world, unless it takes steps to redirect its capital into other channels, which is always a painful thing to have to do, no matter who you are.

Or consider the fact that our new communities would be less dependent on high-speed automobiles.  This could greatly reduce the amounts of green house gases and other air pollutants that we pump into the atmosphere.  But it also implies a contraction in the overall size of the automobile industry, even though American manufacturers, if they are smart, might seize the opportunity to start building the new high-tech, low-speed model-T's which we advocate.  Who knows, they might discover markets overseas?

Finally, consider the impact on our cities and suburbs.   Of course we can make the case that our program, if implemented on a sufficiently large scale, will reduce urban traffic congestion, which would be to everyone's benefit.   And we can argue that it will reduce urban land values, thereby making housing more affordable for those families and individuals (and there will be countless millions of them) who elect to stay behind in the cities.   But by the same token it will damage the local real estate and housing industries.  Indeed, it will hurt local businesses across the board, and not only downtown, but throughout the metropolitan area; to say nothing of its negative impact on local tax revenues and on the many public services which those revenues pay for: public schools, hospitals, fire and police protection, the maintenance of roads, sewers, parks and recreation facilities, etc..

One can already see our opponents lining up.  There are two things about them of which we can be sure.  There will be a lot of them.  And a lot of them will be rich. These will not be bad people, let me clarify at the outset.   In fact they will be good people, most of them, just like we are.   But they will also be people whose material interests are being threatened, and who will respond just as we would if we were standing in their shoes.  Which brings me back to the hard realities of our situation.  Politics is a contest of numbers, organization, and money.  The money is organized in our society.  Indeed, the money is always organized in every society.  So pity our chances if we don't get organized as well.



ix.
  

But our situation is even direr than this.   Somehow or other, via a combination of ignorance, naivete, and greed, our governing elites have gotten themselves into a place where they no longer glimpse, let alone understand, the hopes and dreams of ordinary Americans.  In the space of forty years we have gone from a country of the Common Man, where middle-class meant being like everybody else, and the American Dream meant a house in the suburbs, to an America of the uncommon minority, where middle-class, if not a euphemism entirely, means belonging to the top quarter of society.

You may have noticed our political leaders have stopped speaking the language of the general welfare.  They seldom refer to the American people as a whole anymore.  Instead they talk about an America in which everyone has an opportunity to go to college, in which anyone can aspire to enter the professions, and in which success means climbing to the top of whatever corporate pyramid one has chosen to climb.  There, and only there, at the very pentacle of the pyramid, does true happiness lie, they genuinely seem to believe, so truly do they worship at the altar of the bitch goddess Success, as William James so aptly described it.

Meanwhile, whatever happened to the bottom three-quarters of society?  What about those of us who don't have advanced degrees, who didn't go to college, or even finish high school?  We exist after all.  We shall always exist.  What is more, we are now, and we always shall be, the overwhelming majority of citizens in this, our American democracy.  So how is it our leaders have forgotten about us? 

There are two answers to this question.  The short one is that labor in America is no longer organized.  The American labor movement -- to which my father dedicated his life, let me mention -- has become completely unraveled in the new global marketplace of free trade and third world immigration.

The second answer is more complex, and must be approached with caution.  It has to do with a transformation of America's elite institutions in the aftermath of World War II, and with the emergence of a new meritocratic elite that  is now largely in charge of those institutions: a meritocratic elite based on real talent and brains, to be sure, but also, owing to a unfortunate concatenation of historical circumstances, with thin roots in America's democratic traditions, little knowledge or appreciation of the long history of Western liberal institutions, and, most important of all, no real contact with the lives and concerns of ordinary Americans.

The result is an America which can no longer have an honest conversation with itself.  It is an America which mindlessly celebrates multiculturalism and racial diversity, but then turns around and designs trade and immigration policies that show no consideration for the welfare of the oldest and most vulnerable racial minority in our midst.   An America that celebrates science but cannot rationally discuss global warming, let alone the genetical basis of human biodiversity.  That preaches the principle of free trade, but feigns ignorance of the process of factor-price equalization.  That pretends we can mandate labor and environmental standards overseas, but refuses to entertain the possibility that we can subsidize wages here at home with a graduated consumption tax.

Let me be frank. Unless America’s laboring classes can somehow manage to get themselves organized on some permanent basis, then no immediate success on our part, no matter how spectacular, can save us from long-term poverty and ruin.  To choose just one example, unless we are united as a class, we will not be able to defend ourselves against the predatory moves of unscrupulous employers, should they, at some point in the future, decide to take advantage of our new situation in the countryside, where we no longer enjoy access to a virtually unlimited supply of alternate employers competing for our services, as we certainly do in the big cities today.  Our only choice in that event would be to knuckle under to their arbitrary wage demands, or else quit our communities altogether and move back to the cities.

But we have other, more pressing concerns.  It is imperative that we join together with all ordinary working- and middle-class men and women in this country, no matter where they may eventually decide to live, to, first, secure a system of national health insurance that covers us all; and, second, to turn our federal tax system into an efficient engine of economic redistribution, so that we can begin to repair the damage that has been done to American wages and working conditions over the past forty years.  

In general, let us work together to force ourselves upon the conscience and the consciousness of those elites of great wealth who reign on Wall Street and in the other capitals of finance.  For they will always be with us. The only thing we can hope to change is their attitude towards us, and their understanding of the nature of this new American civilization we all share -- or rather, I should say, the nature of this new world civilization towards which America is leading.  We can make them see that it is in their own long-term interest, as well as ours, to establish it on the basis of a new equilibrium -- on a concordance of classes, within a framework of equality and of mutual respect -- in place of the old one based upon domination and submission, which it is time we marked paid.

x.

Let me finish with a few words for those who, like me, long for the life. 
Only we can take ourselves to the promised land.  Nobody can do it for us.  Only if we work together in a spirit of cooperation, discipline, and good cheer can we expect to enter that sacred wood over which is written:

 Here is the true economy; the ground of culture; the field of enlightenment.

Learn Abraham's God.  And never forget the generations of our ancestors before us, drawn from the four quarters of the world.  It was their sacrifice alone, both willing and unwilling, that makes it all possible.  Forever and ever, let us never forget them.








Appendix I:  Letter to Goody

(I have included this letter only because it is a convenient format for the scholarly presentation of an argument which I have no other way of placing before the public, and for the unexpected light it can shed on the historical process and our present place in it.)

7 January 2007

Professor Sir John Goody
Emeritus William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology
Department of Social Anthropology
CB2 1TP Cambridge
United Kingdom

re: the Adam & Eve myth in its Mesopotamian context

Dear Prof. Goody:

I am an amateur scholar who has recently retired from my profession, and consequently find myself with time on my hands and in need of some expert advice from a professional anthropologist.  It concerns a conjecture I first made when I was right out of college, while researching the historical origins of the Adam and Eve myth.   My quandary is how to go about presenting that conjecture today, in a manner that would make it suitable for consideration by an academic audience?

Broadly, my conjecture was this: that the Adam and Eve story is best understood as a conquest myth of Mesopotamian origin; that it should be read as an allegory (using that word in its original sense*) of the invention of agriculture, which made servitude a practicable political and economic institution, thereby opening society to relationships of domination and submission, along with the idea that obedience to authority is an absolute moral imperative which must under no circumstances be questioned. 

More narrowly, and less plausibly, I conjectured that the story is an artifact of the period in Mesopotamian history in which the first conquest events actually occurred: events which, as you know, V. Gordon Childe once hypothesized (on the basis of what, to me, still seems like an inspired reading of the stratigraphic evidence) occurred somewhere in northern Mesopotamia in the late 5th or early 4th millennium B.C. at the interface of the Ubaid and Halaf material cultures.

Now, of course, strong claims require strong evidence.  Limiting myself to the second, narrower form of the conjecture, therefore, let me begin by pointing to a couple of clues in the text, both of which no doubt you are already familiar with, but which because they are internal to the body of the text as we have it, support an early provenance.  The first is an apparent reference to matrilocal residence ("Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh.") which, taken literally, describes a custom that was quite common in early horticultural societies throughout the world, but which almost completely disappeared at the end of the Neolithic period (this sentence needs up-to-date documentation which I lack).

The second anachronism in the text (if that is the right word for it) concerns a symbolic association that once existed between serpents and the horticultural practices of northern Mesopotamia in the early 4th millennium.  Based on the plates in E. A. Speiser's Excavations at Tepe Gawra, Vol. 1, we learn not only that serpents were a common fertility symbol associated with horticultural fecundity during this period -- a period also distinguished, if I am not mistaken, by goddess worship and a relatively high status for females -- but that this may have been the only period in Mesopotamian history or prehistory in which such an association existed.  For later, during the 3rd and 2nd millennia, serpents became associated with the idea of immortality and eternal life (cf. Gilgamesh) and later still, during the 1st millennium, with the idea of physical health, from which our modern caduceus symbolizing the medical profession is derived.  (See Serpent Symbolism in the Old Testament by Karen Randolph Joines)

Thus if one accepts the broadly Mesopotamian origins of the Adam and Eve myth (which to my knowledge is not controversial) along with the decidedly unoriginal hypothesis that the story is at least in part, and in some sense, "about" the invention of agriculture by the female half of our species (as distinct from its being a conquest myth, or having anything to do with the origins of agricultural servitude, class and sexual inequalities, or the rise of authoritarian political states) then the fact that it was a serpent and not some other creature that tempted Eve to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil (which she did, and found that it was "good for food") is significant.  For then we would have two completely separate and independent pieces of evidence, neither of which by itself is enough to establish the plausibility of an early provenance, perhaps; but which, taken together, form a striking coincidence that is difficult to explain on any other hypothesis.

Of course it is not easy to credit the idea that a myth, any myth, could survive intact thirty centuries of oral transmission before being written down, let alone preserve arcane details of a long-ago culture.  I would not credit the possibility myself were there not a remarkably similar case on record in connection with the ancient vedic traditions of Indian civilization, as was documented by one of your former Cambridge colleagues, Prof. Glyn Daniel, in his book, The First Civilizations (see the Apollo paperback edition, p 96).

Might I ask whether you would consider it improper of me to question, if only provisionally and for the purposes of this discussion, a standard textbook assumption about the way the Urban Revolution first got underway in southern Mesopotamia, namely, that it was an essentially voluntary development?  Now granted, a number of cuneiform references to urban "assemblies" (ukin) suggest the existence consultative bodies of some sort at an early date.  But even so, when one takes into account the larger sequence of events in Mesopotamia as a whole, it is possible to view the rise of the Sumerian city-states as an involuntary response, the product of defensive alliances entered into by neighboring groups of villages as part of what they (rightly) understood to be a necessary reaction to events in the north.

To see this one need only contemplate the nature of conquest as a human institution, and then imagine the effect the first conquest events would have had on the thinking of the various horticultural societies that were scattered across Mesopotamia, many at relatively short distances from each other, once they had a chance to absorb what was happening and to reflect on its likely consequences for them.  The discovery that it was possible for ruthless bands of men to extend the concept of animal domestication to other human beings; that as an alternative to killing ones enemies and plundering their food stocks, it was possible to reduce them to a state of bondage by first seizing those food stocks, and then forcing their submission through a combination of restricted access to food, physical beatings, and unremitting toil – this discovery, or cultural innovation, or whatever one chooses to call it, was without question a turning point in human affairs, destabilizing and ultimately destroying the Neolithic world and replacing it with a new one based on warring states in a relentless competition for power, whose reverberations are still felt. 

The point I am trying to make is that the initial conquests in Mesopotamia, wherever and whenever they occurred, and despite t