A
NEW KIND
OF
WAR
551
period, Russian waste mayor may not equal American waste-but it
is
of a different kind. For example, Khrushchev himself has complained
(it is apparently a very big problem) that parts of a new enterprise
will be completed before other elements-a plant may be built, and
the machinery not delivered, or vice versa-so that considerable capital
investment may stand idle for a long period. These Russian difficulties
are just not, however, the same thing as American under-utilization
in steel capacity, year after year after year. In the Soviet-American
confrontation, therefore, these elements of Russian waste are only a
temporary
advantage to the Americans.
There is a substantial amount of featherbedding in American
in–
dustry-sponsored by both management and the unions,
in
the front
office and
in
the plant. The so-called profit motive here too often
leads us to produce at much less than capacity, or to produce nonsense,
or not to produce at all. As J.
K.
Galbraith has stated it:
Our peacetime concern for production . . . is selective and tra–
ditional. As a result ... our total output and its rate of increase
are only a small part of what it might be, perhaps indeed only
a minor fraction.
The competition with the Soviets cannot be carried on in terms
of the money value of production-it is not a statistical game played
with Gross National Product figures. GNP includes the billions we
spend on cosmetics, on refrigerators that don't frost up and do make
ice-cubes automatically, and tens of thousands of other such
things.
In the new kind of war it may be significant that we are a nation on
wheels and the Russians are not; but our industrial effort toward
planned obsolescence of our automobiles is hardly a sign of
OUI
superiority. It is built-in waste, like the waste resulting from bureaucracy
which we assume about Russia. And waste equals waste. We cannot
depend upon
their
waste to lend
us
superiority. We know that our own
waste results from Madison Avenue's forced feeding of the nation along
with our huge unused productive capacity-from an excessive emphasis
on profitable consumer goods and a paucity of "unprofitable" state
services like education, research, urban renewal, and so on.
Soviet economic competition has been the subject of an investiga–
tion of the Joint Economic Committee; hearings were held and papers
submitted late
in
1959. Walt W. Rostow, an economic historian from
MIT who has become an important White House advisor, submitted
a really exceptional paper in which he summed up the contributions of
all the panelists by saying:
