At the laissez-faire end of the spectrum, economists like the University of Chicago’s Milton Friedman think that in arguments over social issues “there is a strong tendency for people to substitute their own values for the values of others.” The current pollution concern is “an upper-income demand—the high-income people want to get the low-income people to pay for something that the high-income people value ... people move from the clear, clean countryside to the polluted cities—not the other way around—because the advantages of the city outweigh the disadvantages.” Left alone, “people are more likely to act in their own interests, to evaluate the costs and benefits of their own activities.”

  It is, of course, hard to legislate changes in consciousness. But most economists are unwilling to give up growth as a goal. World population is certain to grow for many years to come, an extra billion between 1960 and 1975, three more billion in the next quarter-century. Even if that rate of increase is slowed, you need growth just to keep pace. In a world of no growth but more people, you only accomplish one person’s well-being, or one nation’s, at the expense of another. That is the kind of redistribution of wealth we had before there was any surplus wealth to compound, when people in skins hit each other over the head with mastodon thighbones to accomplish the redistribution. Presumably we have only recently outgrown such activity, and the record of social maturity is not a record anybody would trust to the application of economic problems. So the doomsday equations have at least the virtue of getting people to think about the problems of a finite earth; it will take long enough to do something about it anyway.

  It is from the increments that poverty is alleviated and the goals of the society met. If there are social problems—such as pollution—that can’t be met by the market mechanism, they can be met by a pricing system: penalizing the polluter, let us say, or giving a tax incentive to achieve the desired end. This is not a net gain to growth in the traditional ways we have measured growth, because the stimulus from investments in pollution control is outweighed by the price rise in the end product, hence a damper on total demand. A study prepared for the Council on Environmental Quality, a government office, indicated this could be done for a small percentage of annual GNP, less than 1 percent, for air and water.

  What is the impact of all of this on the man in the green eyeshade considering how goes the world? In the short run—and the short run is all that is considered by many of the men in green eyeshades—he can continue to play the game of displacement: who makes the needles. (If the Meadows model were to be true, and we were to be closer to doomsday, and the pricing mechanism were left alone, the man in the green eyeshade could make incredible killings by buying up commodities on the eve of their disappearance.) But in the longer run, the demand for social purposes, whether in pollution control or health, education and welfare, is going to come out of the savings flow. (Institutional Investor magazine polled forty-one of the nation’s leading academic, governmental, and business economists, and two-thirds of them believed that (a) growth should continue, with a change in priorities, and (b) that additional “income-wealth redistribution is required.”) If the government borrows in the capital markets to deliver, it tips the balance we discussed in an earlier chapter. If it raises taxes to deliver, that comes at least partially out of profits. And if it, in effect, prints the money to deliver, then inflation also will cut into profits. As is often said in this sort of discussion, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.

  There are some items to be balanced against this. One is the value of the compound in a trillion-dollar economy. One is the growing role of services in the economy; by 1980 the Department of Labor says more will be employed in services than in manufacturing. Services are nonpollutive, but the productivity curve also begins to flatten because there are no economies of scale from doctors, teachers, barbers and string quartets.

  The man in the green eyeshade is a capitalist and a manager : “The capitalist and managerial classes may see,” writes Robert Heilbroner in Between Capitalism and Socialism, “the nature and nearness of the ecological crisis . . . and may come to accept a smaller share of the national surplus simply because they recognize that there is no alternative.”

  Some conclusions are inescapable. Even if the ecological crisis is overstated and far away, even if social problems can be solved with the existing mechanism—both of those points arguable—the consensus is moving away from the market as decision-maker and from the business society. As soon as you get all the articulation of “goals” and “priorities,” you are moving from decision-making by market to decision-making by political philosophy. (This is an idea developed by Daniel Bell both in The End of Ideology and in The Post-Industrial State, and by others.) “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country,” said Charley Wilson, one of Eisenhower’s businessmen Cabinet members. It would be interesting to see, year by year, what percentage of the people agree with that, and to watch the change.

  So the money manager in the metaphorical green eyeshade will no longer be operating in a world where the market determines totally what is produced (and induced), nor in a society run by business decisions. Capital is scarcer and profits are thinner. He is still looking for three stocks that will double, but the range of his options is less. He has always looked not just at profits, E, but at the rate of change in estimated profits, E + ΔE, and in the long run—the broad run, the macro scene, whatever—his expectations are diminished.

  Open-ended expectations are an integral part of the markets we have grown up to know. Without them, the calculators can calculate the rates of return, and everybody can be on their way home at 10:05 A.M. to work on their Leisure Time, or more likely, to attend some committee meeting that will be devised to take up the remaining hours. The expectations are what Keynes called “animal spirits”:A large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than on a mathematical expectation, whether moral or hedonistic or economic. Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as a result of animal spirits—of a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multipled by quantitative probabilities ... thus if the animal spirits are dimmed and the spontaneous optimism falters, leaving us to depend on nothing but a mathematical expectation, enterprise will fade and die—though fears of loss may have a basis no more reasonable than hopes of profit had before . . . individual initiative will only be adequate when reasonable calculation is supplemented and supported by animal spirits, so that the thought of ultimate loss which often overtakes pioneers, as experience undoubtedly tells us and them, is put aside as a healthy man puts aside the expectation of death.

  None of this will happen tomorrow, and it was also Keynes who said that “in the long run we are all dead” and that the conventions by which we operated were a succession of short terms—those looking at the long run did so at their own peril. We have a marketplace in which it is possible to float all the services as well as the manufactures, and so probably many happy hours of playing with the displacements await our men. But if we are to give up the “illimitable plains” of the “cowboy economy,” the new and smaller horizon is going to affect our ability to believe that we can compound and extrapolate with impunity, that the three hot ones we heard about at lunch today can go from 5 to 100. We have already lost our gunslingers, a phrase I once applied to some of our citizens, and if our Big Sky goes we will have to give up some of our fantasies. But they always were fantasies anyway, and maybe there are other energies to make our wheels spin.

  Having thus dispatched the spirit of capitalism, let us see what we can do with the Protestant Ethic. That phrase describes a devotion to thrift and industry, postponed pleasure and hard work, the hustle as approved by the Lord. It accompanied the Puritan temper, a rather forbidding and pleasure-shy view of life, and is aptly described in the confidential Ford memo together with the complaint that it is disappearing: “the traditional work ethic—the concept that hard work is a virtue and a duty—will undergo additional erosion.” (You have already seen the seeds of conflict, because if Prince Valiant at the Pink Elephant says, “I am not going to bust my ass for anybody, I don’t even bust my ass for myself,” it is safe to say he does not believe that “hard work is a virtue and a duty.”)

  We may keep using the phrase Protestant Ethic—everybody does—but for the record we should now split Protestant from Ethic. We call it that because Max Weber called it that in one of the classic works of political economics, and the sociologists and political economists are still sending students to the paperback stores for Max Weber, and not just for the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The textile families of northern France—Catholics all—sent letters to their sons, and to each other, that could have gone right into Die protestantische Ethik. Weber did not say, of course, that Protestantism was the sole cause of capitalism. In his commentary on Weber, Julien Freund says that the Protestant Ethic was at least in part a reaction against Marx’s solely economic motive. Embryo capitalism had existed in other societies—Babylonian, Indian, Chinese, and Roman—but the “spirit” of capitalism only developed with the mystery-less, magic-free character of Protestantism, with its rationality and rationalization. (This will come up again in a moment in the counter-culture’s objections.) The accompanying asceticism of Protestantism said that you worked hard in your calling to succeed—a sign of election by God—but did not spend the wealth created, because only sobriety pleased God. “Thus the Puritan came to accumulate capital without cease.” Even Keynes’s assumptions in Essays in Persuasion seem to be based on a kind of Protestant society, where wealth increases because the margin between production and consumption increases.

  Talk about industry, thrift and the way to salvation, the Protestant Ethic has found its happiest current home in a very non-Protestant country—at least in name—Japan. A while back, on a visit, I would ask people in Japan: How much vacation do you take a year? And the answers would come back: two days, one day, three days. Why so little? Well, if you work on your vacation you get paid more, and the beaches are too crowded anyway. And I remember sitting with the translator of my own book, himself a distinguished director of the Bank of Japan, everybody cross-legged, a sliver of raw fish poised between his chopsticks, a garden scene framed perfectly by the door.

  “In the 1960’s,” said the honorable director, “our total output passed Italy, France, Germany, and England; at this rate we will pass the U.S.S.R. in 1979. How? Our people save twenty percent of their wages. No other country saves so much. In the U.S. it is closer to six percent.”

  It is indeed, and when sour years come and the people clutch a little and the savings rate goes up to 8 percent, the President gathers his economic advisers to Camp David and wants to know what the hell is wrong with the Consumer, how do we get him to loosen up?

  “Of course,” said the director’s research assistant, “we will not pass the United States until ...” and everybody stopped talking because that was not courteous.

  “Sometime in the 1990’s,” said the director, “and many things could happen by then: we have social overhead building up.”

  “But we have done this without resources, without oil, without surplus food,” said the assistant, “with industry and thrift, industry and thrift.”

  (The voices in Osaka rise to haunt the finite-earth model builders, in the morning alma mater:“For the building of a new Japan

  Let’s put our strength and minds together

  Doing our best to promote production

  Sending our goods to the people of the world,

  Endlessly and continuously,

  Like water gushing from a fountain.

  Grow, industry, grow, grow, grow!

  Harmony and Sincerity!

  Matsushita Electric! Matsushita Electric!”)

  Industry and thrift, dedication and devotion; you could imagine the United States without them, but not without the mythology and ethic behind them. What is at stake is the happiness of Arthur Burns, whether we will always have a cost-push inflation, whether we stay Nation Number One like President Nixon wanted, and what happened to our dreams of becoming rich. Nothing unambitious about that, either.

  Once again, the Ford memo:

  For many, the traditional motivations of job security, money reward, and opportunity for personal advancement are proving insufficient.

  Insufficient! Security, money, and personal advancement? Do you know what we have to throw off to get to this point?

  I give you the honorable Cotton Mather:There are Two Callings to be minded by All Christians. Every Christian hath a GENERAL CALLING which is to Serve the Lord Jesus Christ and Save his own Soul . . . and every Christian hath also a PERSONAL CALLING or a certain Particular Employment by which his Usefulness in his Neighborhood is Distinguished . . . a Christian at his Two Callings is a man in a Boat, Rowing for Heaven; if he mind but one of his Callings, be it which it will, he pulls the Oar but on one side of the Boat, and will make but a poor dispatch to the Shoar of Eternal Blessedness . . . every Christian should have some Special Business . . . so he may Glorify God, by doing Good for others, and getting of Good for himself... to be without a Calling, as tis against the Fourth Commandment, so tis against the Eighth, which bids men seek for themselves a comfortable Subsistence . . . [if he follow no calling] . . . a man is Impious toward God, Unrighteous toward his family, toward his Neighborhood, toward the Commonwealth . . . it is not enough that a Christian have an Occupation; but he must mind it, and give a Good Account, with Diligence . . .

  and so on to Poor Richard’s Almanac: A sleeping fox catches no poultry; one day is worth two tomorrows; diligence is the mother of good luck; early to bed and early to rise provides a man with job security, money reward and opportunity for personal advancement.

  The extension of this ethic into industrial America was a real triumph. The Ford vice-president has a distinct problem: it is very hard to think of working on the line as a Calling. Cotton Mather’s listeners did not take this lightly, nor did he: “Man and his Posterity will Gain but little, by a Calling whereto God hath not Called him”; a Calling was to be Agreeable as well as Allowable. It does make work seem softer and more important to have been prayed for:It is a wonderful Inconvenience for a man to have a Calling that won’t Agree with him. See to it, O Parents, that when you chuse Callings for your Children, you wisely consult their Capacities and their Inclinations; lest you Ruine them. And, Oh! cry mightily to God, by Prayer, yea with Fasting and Prayer, for His Direction when you are to resolve upon a matter of such considerable consequence. But, O Children, you should also be Thoughtful and Prayerful, when you are going to fix upon your Callings; and above all propose deliberately Right Ends unto your selves in what you do.

  It is a bit hard to imagine, then: “Ma, I have fasted and prayed and sought the wisdom of God. I know my Calling, and I am going to work on the line at Ford, $4.57 an hour, as an assembler.”

  It seems almost simplistic to suggest, but you are more likely to bust your ass when everybody has been fasting and praying for you and what you are doing and your oar of the boat on the way to the Shoar of Eternal Blessedness than if none of those things are true, and if you are Ford, you have an extra problem if that spirit has departed.

  Not that it has departed everywhere. It is still in the literature. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” and “Wealth” are in a direct line from Cotton Mather and Poor Richard; be not only industrious, be clever, absorb and invest. Bishop Lawrence, doyen of the Episcopal Church at the turn of the century, really did say, “In the long run, it is only to the man of morality that wealth comes. Godliness is in league with riches.” Some of our major corporations have institutional advertising even today that could have been written by the Social Darwinists, and Dale Carnegie courses run on principles that were devised by Benjamin Franklin. The Man Who Gets Ahead in Business Reads The Wall Street Journal Every Business Day. (Did you ever see the television commercial about The Man Who Gets Ahead in Business? Business is a field event, pole-vaulting, and the bar is set at about a hundred feet, and the poor bastard is there in his business suit and his Knox hat and his briefcase, and he looks up nervously at this bar a hundred feet high and fingers the pole uncertainly. After knocking the bar off the first time, he makes it the second, presumably because he has read The Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal may be one of the best papers in the country, but I suggest that anyone who sees his job as a hundred-foot pole vault with no track shoes is in the wrong Calling and should pray for guidance.)

  While the literature of the Protestant Ethic has been exhorting everybody for three hundred years in this country to be industrious and thrifty, sober and wise—to “postpone gratification,” in the words of the scholars—another literature has sprung up. It is literature really only in the McLuhanesque sense, but it is with us every day, and that is advertising. The purpose of the advertising is not to get you to produce and save but to spend, to buy the goods, and this has been the case since at least fifty years ago, when mass marketing and mass advertising really got going. Now we have commercials in living color, and the populace spends far more time with them than the old populace did with Cotton Mather. What do we see? First of all, we never see anybody working except when they are candidates for medication: aspirin, pain relievers, tranquilizers, cold remedies. At least not office or factory work; the White Tornado and the Man From Glad will come and help with the house-work. The rest of the time, people are at play: is it possible to sell soft drinks without running into the surf? You only go around once in life, says the beer commercial, so you have to grab everything you can; that character is hanging precariously onto the rigging of his boat because one hand is clutching a beer can. And the airlines—well, there is the bell tolling the end of the Protestant Ethic: Fly now, pay later, Pan Am will take you to an island in the sun where you can be a beachcomber (not a Calling approved by Cotton Mather) and Eastern wants to fly you and Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice all to your own little love-nest in Jamaica.