The Silent War: Inside the Global Business Battles Shaping America's Future. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, April, 1989 by Tom Peters

Finally, Magaziner and Patinkin appear to be nonplussed by any economic success beyond the U.S. border. According to them, Korea's growth is a cause for concern, not rejoicing. Likewise, Japan's high per capita income alarms them. So too does the slightest drop in America's market share in the world aircraft industry.

Magaziner and Patinkin call for shifting some defense spending to commercial spheres, programs to support the upgrading of worker skills, "surgical" trade responses (hitting the other guy precisely where it counts when an essential market appears closed to us), export financing support, sliding capital gains tax scales to encourage long-term investment, and an economic coordinating group "like the National Security Council." With the exception of the NSC for economics and the surgical trade strikes (a nice idea on paper, but the basis for perpetual protectionist escalation in practice), I have little problem with such a list.

My concern is with the implicit message: government as savior. This can't be the moral. If we took Magaziner and Patinkin at their word on this, then the American success stories they cover-each involving crucial management decisions-could teach us nothing.

The hobo jungle

Jim Fallows just wants us to be-or get back to being-our disorderly selves. 'America will be in serious trouble if it becomes an ordinary country, with people stuck in customary, class-bound roles in life," he writes. "Other countries have tools-traditional, ethnic solidarity-to help them get by in those circumstances. We do not."

Fallows's concern, following a two-year stint in Japan and Malaysia, is unabashedly cultural: "In the long run, a society's strength depends on the way that ordinary people voluntarily behave. Ordinary people matter because there are so many of them. Voluntary behavior matters because it's too hard to supervise everyone all the time."

In two brilliant chapters, Fallows contrasts "the Japanese talent for order" with "the American talent for disorder." He could not be further from Magaziner and Patinkin: 'America is not like Japan and can never be. . . . America's culture is America's greatest potential strength. Something about American values has enabled ordinary people, assembled haphazardly from around the world, to build the largest, richest, and freest economy in history. And to do so mainly through voluntary actions rather then state direction . . . .Japan is strong because each person knows his place. America is strong when people do not know their proper place and are free to invent new roles for themselves. . . .For better and for worse, this has always been a changeable, self-defining, let's-startover culture in which people with talent, energy, or luck believe they can invent their own lives."

This is even reflected in our choice of heroes, Fallows asserts: "Most of our national myths are about people who won't listen to others and end up doing what supposedly can't be done. Benjamin Franklin moves to Philadelphia and succeeds; Abraham Lincoln is elected after countless defeats; the American colonies throw off the British. Chuck Yeager bends the Army's admission rules to get his chance to fly."