August is a good time to reflect on the way things are, and the ways they could be. The rest of the year is too busy for much critical thinking-beyond that which must be done to keep things from falling apart.
For those lucky enough (if lucky is the word) to be employed by big bureaucratic organizations, ”Lifetime Employment” has a special charm. Floyd Kempske`s novel depicts a corporation in which bureaucrats routinely bump off their superiors to get ahead. It is expected of them.
Nobody knows what the company does. They know only which way is down (the non-exempts) and which way is up (finance and human resources) and how to get ahead. ”With lifetime employment, change gets a little messy,” says a beautiful and competent murderess. ”But if you can`t deal with an occasional mess, you shouldn`t be a manager.”
Kempske, a writer and editor of trade publications, has written a funny book, reminiscent of Aldous Huxley, about what we loosely describe as the craft of ”management” in an angry and fearful age. On the way to a showdown, the hero stops by a convenience store to buy some cat food and finds himself staring at a rack of pistols next to the dairy case. There is a shooting gallery in the basement. ”He walked over to the counter, where there were two displays of impulse items: air fresheners shaped like pine trees and .22 caliber rounds in eight bright colors. `Enameled coating,` said the sign.
`Won`t nick or scratch. Make an ammunition statement.` ”
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Anybody who goes to scientific meetings knows about macho science, a kind of gunslinger ritual by which kids sort themselves out through short, brutal verbal confrontations. There seems to be some sort of hierarchy involved:
There are few woman physicists, chemists or economists, but plenty of female molecular biologists.
In ”World Without Women: The Christian Clerical Culture of Western Science,” David Noble, a historian of technology, takes a crack at explaining why women have been excluded from science. He had started out to explain the male mystique of engineering, he writes; he found he had to return to the Dark Ages of the first thousand years after Christ-”when priests were married, an androgynous Christian ideal was taken seriously, aristocratic women gained significant control over property and, not incidentally, Aristotle`s writings were all but lost to the West.”
Now it isn`t easy to know how much to trust a scholar who views the advent of digital technology mainly as a semiconscious conspiracy by bosses to ”de-skill” the workers, as Noble did in an earlier work, ”The Forces of Production,” but this observation illustrates his knack for seeing deep into the consequences of our acts.
Noble has a larger agenda in tracing the high manners of science to their roots in Christian monasteries: By equating modern science with old-time religion, he hopes to deprive the priestly builders of today`s cathedrals-the superconducting supercollider, for instance, or the space station-of some of their authority. Noble is among the most gifted of our critics, a latter-day Lewis Mumford, helping us to reimagine ourselves.
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If you`re disappointed to learn that the seminal empirical work on the relationship between pay and performance in baseball was the two-equation model Gerald Scully published in the American Economic Review in 1974, you might want to pick up ”Baseball and Billions: A Probing Look Inside the Big Business of Our National Pastime.”
Andrew Zimbalist, a baseball buff and Smith College economics professor, has written a guide to the economics of baseball that anyone can read and understand without sacrificing an ounce of sophistication.
There is a sense of foreboding over baseball, Zimbalist says. True, the leagues are balanced, attendance is up, TV revenue is soaring, the licensing of paraphernalia is lush and the game is profitable as never before. But it`s not only I who finds baseball dry, technical and hugely overpriced. Zimbalist says baseball`s problems are fixable, with a certain amount of congressional regulation: Require big games to be broadcast, continue to expand the leagues, increase the chances for labor peace. Let`s hope he is right.
For now, though, the metaphor has shifted from the diamond and clubhouse to the lawyers` office and boardroom. The agents, TV packagers, owners and union representatives are far more interesting than the slack-jawed players. Zimbalist has written a terrific guide for those of us who find this so.
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A.J. Weberman will go down in journalistic history as the inventor of the sneakup study of celebrity garbage. In a 1971 Esquire article, he described his investigations of the trash of Bob Dylan, Neil Simon, Muhammad Ali and Abbie Hoffman. William Rathje is a professor of anthropology and director of the Garbage Project at the University of Arizona. He aims to do for civilizations what Weberman did for a handful of stars: make them self-conscious about what their garbage reveals.
With Atlantic Monthly editor Cullen Murphy, Rathje has written ”Rubbish: The Archaeology of Garbage,” a highly readable and unemotional survey of the economics (and ecology) of what we throw away.
They survey the daily tipping of garbage into a landfill (”an orchestrated mechanical pavane. . .”) and explain why so little of it degrades. They weigh the pros and cons of disposable diapers and conclude that throwaway nappies are not the environmental time bomb that is sometimes claimed.
In the end, they offer a list of recommendations that are sweet-tempered and wise. Be willing to pay for garbage disposal. Don`t bow before false panaceas. Use money as a behavioral incentive. Distrust symbolic targets. Focus on big-ticket items. Be reasonable about risk. Educate the next generation. Above all, they advise, don`t think of our garbage problems in terms of a crisis. ”Crisis thinking typically results in ill-conceived and counterproductive measures.” It is a good message for an August day. On baseball and rubbish.
