The reckoning. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, April, 1987 by James Fallows

the earlier saga, through the late seventies and early eighties. The longer he goes on the more loose ends turn up. The fortunes of the players change: Ford recovers, Nissan falls farther behind Toyota. (Last year Ford had a bigger profit than GM for the first time ever; Nissan had its first loss in years.) Some of the manufacturing jobs that went overseas in the sixties and seventies came back, as the Japanese built plants closer to their markets in the U.S. It became harder and harder to figure out what "Japanese" and "American" cars really meant, since there was so much subcontracting and international investment. The book loses energy as the thematic connections grow less distinct.

Halberstam can't be blamed for the complexityof modern manufacturing. But the blur at the end of The Reckoning leads us to the book's, and the author's, most important weakness. Halberstam is very good at writing about people, cultures, and institutions. He is not so good at writing about ideas. His instinct is to pick one exceptional man as a vehicle for a certain point of view; as he tells the man's story he presents his idea, trying it out against different evidence and seeing whether it holds up.

Through the first two-thirds of the book, theideas are in synch and Halberstam doesn't need to serve as analyst. Everything conspires to push Japan up and Detroit down. But in the last section the facts are confused, and so is the book's direction. The crucial illustration of this problem occurs in two chapters near the very end:

One chapter describes the work of HarleyShaiken, whom Halberstam introduces in typical bigger-than-life style. ("Shaiken, an expert on technology, had gained exceptional insight into the dramatic changes taking place in the American workplace, in part because of his formidable intellect and in part because of the years he spent, before finding his place in academia, as a worker on the GM line.") Shaiken has advanced the view that today's automation is fundamentally different than anything that's happened before. Whereas all previous waves of automation have created more jobs in new industries than they have destroyed in old industries, today's "superautomation" is, according to Shaiken, really going to destroy American jobs and send them irretrievably all around the world.

It's possible that Shaiken is right, but it's notobvious that he is. There is a vigorous argument about his contention, with evidence available to each side. Of this Halberstam tell us nothing at all. Instead, just ten pages later, he gives us another heroic profile of another big thinker who has a very different idea. This is of Naohiro Amaya, a truly impressive (to me) Japanese official who argues that the U.S. is culturally more fit than Japan for the next stage of economic struggle. That is, adaptability and creativity are about to become more important, and the U.S. is better on those counts than Japan, despite our well-known current troubles with manufacturing.