Business: America the Inefficient

WHATEVER else it may stand for, the U.S. has long been the Land of Efficiency. Here, if nowhere else, things worked: the trains, the plumbing, the vending—well, no, not the vending machines. But surely the telephones and, until the 1965 Northeastern blackout, the lights. Here mass production was born, the assembly line for good or ill became the modern cornucopia, and Henry Ford once reigned as the leading culture hero. Around the world American efficiency became a byword; at home it came close to being a religion, and wasted time was considered a sin. Only in America could it have occurred to that most idealistic of Presidents, Woodrow Wilson, to praise "clear, disinterested thinking and fearless action" by describing them as "spiritual efficiency."

Lately a horrid suspicion has been growing. Tales of the difficulty, expense and frustration of getting repairs for the car, the dryer, the TV set or just about anything were first whispered and then shouted through the land. The advent of the computer brought a quantum jump in dunning letters for bills already paid. Travelers swiftly spanned the oceans only to spend hours circling airports back home—and then find that their baggage had flown on to some destination of its own. At length the telephone—lifeline of American society and quintessential product of American efficiency—brought not the voices of faraway friends but strange clicks or buzzes, interminable rings, or deep, total silence. Now there is a strong feeling abroad that things just do not work right any more. America the Efficient seems to have become a land governed by Murphy's Law: If anything can go wrong, it will—and at the worst possible time. *

That, of course, is blasphemy—but blasphemy backed by a great deal of Kafkaesque evidence. The Federal Government, for one, sets a particularly disastrous example: it has given the nation, among other questionable monuments to efficiency, the farm-subsidy program, the F-111 swing-wing jet, and urban renewal (sometimes referred to as "Negro removal"). A congressional committee recently heard that between 1951 and 1964 the federal-highway building program in the Baltimore area, for instance, destroyed 21% of housing available to low-income blacks, jamming them into ever more crowded slums.

Of all the bureaucracies that have a knack for creating headaches, few can match the Internal Revenue Service. In the name of efficiency, it changed the income tax forms this year, making them so complicated that millions of Americans for the first time will have to give up and hire tax specialists. Sample instruction: "If line 15a is under $5,000 and consisted only of wages subject to withholding and not more than $200 of dividends, interest and non-withheld wages, and you are not claiming any adjustments on line 15b, you can have IRS figure your tax by omitting lines 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25 and 26 (but complete line 19)." The Post Office may not be able to match that, quite, but it regularly exceeds its own heroic standards of inefficiency. One letter took 16 days to move from Massachusetts to New Jersey. Neither bureaucracy nor political interference nor rigid seniority rules help the postman complete his appointed rounds.

Remember the Titanic

Local governments are trying hard to emulate Big