A concerned friend in Israel told me: ‘We hold the election today and count the votes, without any conclusive result. So the real election begins tomorrow when the multiple various parties jockey for position. More often than you might think, some fringe fanatical party that won only three seats is able to dictate which of the major parties will take over, and then the entire nation is held at the mercy of those three votes. For God’s sake, Mr. Michener, never allow proportional representation to gain a foothold in your country. That way lies disaster.’
From watching many such elections in Europe, I have grown to deplore proportional representation and the nurturing of marginal parties. They lead to indecision, make clear-cut programs practically impossible, and prevent society from initiating a bold change in direction under a clear winner who has been given a mandate to govern. The volatile nature of third-party movements like the Ross Perot phenomenon of 1992 makes us susceptible to the worst abuses of pluralism and proportionalism.
I appreciate the system in New Zealand, where liberals and conservatives alternate with surprising frequency. At the start of any campaign in which one party is likely to oust the other, this is one of the first pledges made and honored: ‘We will preserve every good law our opponents have passed. What we’ll do is administer them more effectively.’ And power changes hands amicably, the hallmark of an effective political system.
I am aware that frequently in American history the brilliant philosophers of some third party have championed sensible improvements in government, improvements that the two major parties have been wise enough to appropriate. Opening the eyes and hearts of the major parties might be the acceptable role of the third party. I can live with such a system, provided that the third party is not awarded an assured portion of the electoral vote.
4. Does the nation provide its citizens, especially the young, with adequate health services?
The events in the United States in recent years have shown how volatile this issue is and how far we are from a reasonable solution (I shall discuss this essential factor more fully later). In the meantime we are the world’s only major nation without a health system that protects everyone. The recent flood of persuasive ads in which doctors and nurses state that ‘America has the best system of health care in the world’ prompts the cynic to ask: ‘For whom?’
And just as society should hold itself responsible for giving a child a healthy start in life, so also should it provide some easy and honorable way to ease the ending of a person’s life. I do not mean the support only of nursing homes or retirement areas with nursing facilities; I mean the structuring of an entire society so that medical services and continued and loving care are kept available. I do not advocate any form of euthanasia, but I firmly believe that states should pass legislation making the thoughtful use of living wills available and operative. No patient should be obligated to undergo prolonged heroic measures to save his or her life when that life has deteriorated to the point when it is no longer meaningful.
5. Does the nation provide effective schools, colleges, universities and schools for industrial training?
I shall also discuss this question of education more fully later; education is so important that every year I live I give it increased weight in my judging system. Put simply, a nation that allows its schools to become ineffective dooms itself to a secondary position when competing with the workforces of other nations, such as Japan and Germany, that have not only maintained educational standards but improved them. An effective school system is a preeminent obligation for any society; children have enormous potential that can never be brought into effective use without the most careful and persistent training. The son of a Neanderthal family had to learn to make arrowheads and trail wild animals. And for the child born in America today it is essential that he master the computer.
6. Does the nation provide free libraries?
Of vital importance is whether the nation provides free libraries at which adults can continue to educate themselves after graduation or to help them educate themselves if they have not finished school or college. I shudder whenever I hear that a community has closed its library. With the revolutionary changes occurring in our workforce, and with radically new demands being made by potential employers, the people young and old who do not continue educating themselves run the risk of becoming unemployed or unemployable. ‘Learn and earn’ could well become the mantra for the oncoming generations in all the nations of the world and especially in the United States.
7. Does the nation provide adequate employment opportunities for the young person as he or she approaches adulthood?
Obtaining a first job is a crucial step in the maturation of a teenager who has just left high school or a young man or woman who has been graduated from college. The leap into adult citizenry starts with a job. Young people must not be deprived of the vital opportunity of working for a living, of actually supporting themselves and perhaps a family and of becoming contributors to the nation’s wealth as well as consumers of it. The Ph.D. scholar who cannot find employment can become a social menace; any young person who is denied work and a living wage can become a walking time bomb.
It is the responsibility of a nation to provide employment for its young. The question of whether a nation enables its young to become producers and thus contributors to the nation’s wealth will be a major focus of this book.
8. Does the nation provide a financial/taxation system that helps keep the difference between the very rich and the very poor at an acceptable level, and does it encourage the development of a moderately well-to-do middle class of entrepreneurs?
I deem this to be one of the crucial responsibilities of a society and I am appalled at nations like Mexico that generate considerable wealth but refuse to distribute it up and down the economic ladder. The failure to develop a sturdy middle class is a sign of weakness, one that condemns a society to mediocrity at best and revolution at worst. I will elaborate later on my contention that the United States has grown sloppy in dealing with this problem of the distribution of wealth and must try to redress the imbalance.
9. Does the nation provide churches for the moral guidance of its people and especially its leaders?
I believe that a society requires moral values and a conviction to abide by them. History is replete with examples of strong-minded citizens who have acquired a solid moral foundation without the assistance of organized religion—churches or priests or rabbis—but it is risky for the nation as a whole to rely on the chance that its citizens will individually apply themselves to building a stable moral base without benefit of organized religion. It is better to enlist the churches in providing moral instruction, even indoctrination, for the vast majority of its young people. I have found that a man without strong moral principles is like a ship without a rudder; he cannot be depended upon to remain upright in a storm. I would never want to live in a community that did not have influential churches.
10. Does the society provide recreational opportunities?
In my studies of world cultures, I have been constantly impressed to see that each seminal culture sponsored athletic contests for the amusement of the public and for competition between states. It can be no accident that Greece and Rome had centers for competition, and that Saint Paul would refer several times to the athletic games of his new Christians. Historians repeatedly mention hippodromes for racing, arenas for boxing and other diversions, and fields for horsemanship. Vigorous athletic participation is as old as civilization and must therefore be fulfilling a basic need.
However, the nation cannot allow legitimate athletic competition to degenerate into brutal violence that glorifies the often destructive macho aspects of human nature. Unfortunately, in the United States the growing violence in sports has become part and parcel of a growing acceptance of violence as a normal factor in the life of our society. I shall discuss at length how this glorification of macho behavior in our society is damaging the traditions upon which we founded and built
our nation.
11. Does the society provide access to museums, opera houses, symphony halls, theaters, parks and zoos?
At the same time that the ancients were promoting athletic competitions, they seem to have spent just as much of their resources on theaters for the presentation of plays, stages for mime and dance, and on structures adorned with majestic sculptures and fine paintings. I admire good athletic competition, but I love music, the theater, dance, sculpture and painting; they form the benchmark by which cultures are judged. Sports and the arts must be kept in balance.
While I grant that perhaps even a majority of citizens would express little interest in ‘cultural’ functions and would be loath to support them, I believe they are essential to a good public life—they are not only for the pleasure of the upper classes or the cultural elite. Mankind’s more esoteric achievements should also be made available to underprivileged children, a random few of whom will develop an interest in art or in opera. As I did—that was my history; the availability of good libraries, art museums and great symphony halls meant that I could educate myself, regardless of whether or not I had instructors. This kind of self-education should be made possible for all young people, and if they ignore the opportunities it will be to their loss. The boy or girl who discovers the world’s intellectual treasures becomes open to endless adventures and self-improvement.
Cultural institutions should be supported with tax money, if possible. I am personally willing to help support my country’s cultural organizations through taxation because I have little regard for any society that refuses to assist such institutions financially. I told one group of city leaders who were debating whether they could afford a new stadium: ‘Any city is a collection of citizens who behave like a city. That means they are obligated to provide a stadium for sports, a theater for drama and dance and opera, an art museum, and a very strong chain of free libraries.’ That’s what cities are all about, and nations, too.
12. Is the nation able to balance the different cultural and ethnic and racial groups within its society, and does it treat all such groups equitably?
I believe that in the United States the deterioration of racial relations has become so intense that there is a risk of interracial strife unless the situation is drastically improved. No nation can allow its social, political or economic systems to discriminate against any one segment of its society. Neither can it allow minorities to become so frustrated that they feel it is futile to try to educate themselves or to raise their standards of living.
13. Does the nation provide an orderly system whereby the interests of the aged are protected from the ravages that overtake them?
I place a high priority on this social obligation primarily, I suppose, because I am myself subject to the demands and realize how delinquent we are as a society in caring for our older people. Compared with nations that have a superior social concern about the welfare of the aged—China, Japan, Denmark, Sweden, Korea and the smaller East Asian countries—we are far behind and ought to make a serious effort to catch up.
In my travels I have constantly applied these criteria to other countries as well as to my own, and found that differences between societies are glaring; not surprisingly, I have concluded that certain societies are more admirable than others. To deny this is to blind oneself to reality. At the end of six decades of persistent evaluation of nations I am prepared to present some conclusions as to how the United States compares with other nations.
Evaluations
CHARACTERISTIC HISTORICAL U.S. CONDITION TODAY
Stable society Superb, up to now But imperiled by racial conflict in decades ahead.
Reliable money system Superior, up to now But within the near future heavy debt poses a fearful danger.
Orderly political change Impeccable so far But the threat of third parties is real and ominous.
Adequate health services Low average among leading nations Far behind Canada, Great Britain, Germany, Scandinavia in making care available and affordable.
Educational system Grades 1 to 6 fine; high school deplorable; college low average; graduate studies superior Behind France, Germany, Japan, Scandinavia in providing mastery of fundamentals.
Free libraries Has been world’s best, still good But grievously endangered by budget cuts and closing of branches.
Employment opportunities Has been superior Bad slippage recently. Lags behind Japan, Germany, China.
Distribution of wealth Superior in making a well-to-do middle class possible Distance between very wealthy and very poor is deplorable. Also, middle class suffers.
Churches Exceptional But reactionary drift threatens future political stability.
Recreation opportunities Superior, as of now But raw commercialism endangers sports system.
Higher cultures Excellent so far But entire structure endangered by budget cuts and attacks.
Racial equality Poor in the past Becoming worse.
Care for the aged Historically delinquent, and even now lagging behind most countries Social systems of China, Japan, Scandinavia far ahead.
A quick scan of the middle column above will explain why I feel justified in describing my homeland as a great society, especially during the decades of my growing up. Except for the racial discrimination that has been our national disgrace throughout our history, we excelled in so many important categories and reached respectable levels even in those where other nations surpassed us that I had a right to be proud.
As I now review the column I begin to wonder if my favorable evaluation of America was skewed by the intense indoctrination I received from my first day in Sunday school and, more important, my first morning in public school. For the first six or seven years of my education I lapped up patriotism until I acquired a faith in my country that has never since diminished. It continues to dictate my behavior at unexpected times and provides me with an almost automatic set of responses when public values are being challenged. I am not wise enough to determine whether that early and incessant indoctrination made me too uncritical.
But a study of the third column proves that today I am able to see American society with a more critical eye. I stand by every evaluation in that column and might make some of the judgments even harsher.
What the plethora of negative evaluations in the summary suggests is that our society is in danger, and, in some cases like the failure of large parts of our educational system, even in peril. The magnitude of these fracture points and what can be done to anticipate and escape them will be the focus of the remaining chapters in this essay.
I have been privileged to know American families at almost every level of income, from the Texas oil billionaires, about whom I have written, to the numerous garden-variety rich families with not much over a million. A large proportion of the families with which I have worked fall into the huge middle class with salaries around $75,000, and because I work with students I know scores who live on less than $10,000 a year. In the years prior to World War II the highest salary I ever had was $4,800 a year, so that a salary of $75,000 was far beyond the limits of my imagination, but of course $4,800 in the thirties was worth many times more than it is worth today. I have also been keenly interested in the street people so common in our cities who have minimal income and often no place to call home. They are outcasts, and I have never understood how they could have reached that appalling level. I cannot comprehend how a healthy man in his forties can have wasted his life and ended in the gutter, but even more incomprehensible is how a mother with two children could land beside him.
From a study of people with various levels of income I have come to realize just how important a living wage is. Fundamental to every problem I discuss in this book is not only our nation’s wealth but how it is distributed among the citizens.
So that we can have figures to refer to in our discussion, I present two different charts: the first listing outstanding family accumulations of wealth sometimes dating back to the last century; the second showing yearly
incomes of a random selection of people living today.
For Forbes magazine in 1994, $350 million marked the cutoff point between the very wealthy on the one hand and the merely elite who are categorized as ‘the comfortable millionaires.’ The ‘moderately wealthy’ trail behind in their $100 million ghettos.
In April 1995 The New York Times reported that Federal Reserve figures from 1989, which the paper said were the most recent numbers available, revealed that ‘the wealthiest 1% of American households—with net worth of at least $2.3 million each—[owned] nearly 40% of the nation’s wealth.… Farther down the scale, the top 20% of Americans—households worth $180,000 or more—[possess] more than 80% of the country’s wealth.’ A year later, in April 1996, The Wall Street Journal reported that an analysis by the New York compensation consultants Pearl Meyer & Partners Inc. done for the newspaper showed that ‘the heads of about 30 major companies received compensation that was 212 times higher than the pay of the average American employee.’
Here is a list of some of the country’s wealthiest families:
Family Fortunes Accumulated in the Past but Still Intact (a sampling)
The implications of the concentration of wealth into few hands are enormous. Kevin Phillips, a conservative Republican columnist, whose 1990 book, The Politics of Rich and Poor, is a bible on this theme, aptly sums up the effect upon our nation of this growing accumulation of wealth at the top:
It is not enough to describe the United States as the world’s richest nation between 1945 and 1989. The distribution of its wealth conveys a more provocative message. By several measurements, the United States in the late twentieth century led all other major industrial countries in the gap dividing the upper fifth of the population from the lower—in the disparity between top and bottom.