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PARTISAN REVIEW
the area of environmental legislation, the difference between our–
selves and our foreign competitors is not the air quality standards.
The Japanese have higher air quality standards for steel mills than
we do. But we get bogged down in an eight-year legal hassle over
what the standards are, and we can't make quick decisions. Both the
Japanese and the Germans, under higher envitonmental standards,
have found ways to make quick, certain decisions. Business can live
with any air quality standard as long as it knows precisely what the
standard is and that nobody is going to change the rule while the
factory is half-built.
DANIEL BELL: These legal complexities have not emerged because the
government
wants
to drag business into the courts.
LESTER THUROW: But the laws are such that is is easy to drag people
into court. That's one area about which the Reagan administration
is absolutely wrong. They think that they can change the environ–
mental structure. They may put in an administrator who doesn 't
enforce the law, but all that means is that a judge will ruin every
project because the Sierra Club will bring every project to court.
There are a million ways to drag p eople into court if you want to
stop progress.
WILLIAM PHILLIPS: You've drawn a pretty bl eak picture.
LESTER THUROW: You haven 't h eard the worst yet. Compare us with
the British , because
I
think we are on the same road as they. About
1900, the American per capita GNP passed that of Great Britain. By
1980 their per capita income was less than half that in the United
States, and last year the per capita GNP of
East
Germany surpassed
that of Great Britain. The Germans can make communism work
better than the British can make capitalism work. The problem
obviously was that while the British did all kinds of great things
year-by-year to stave off the decline, they never had to face one crisis
that would overcome all the vested interes ts.
I
think that's a problem
that's before us too: how to confront economic problems in an
environment where there's no crisis .
EUGENE GOODHEART: You make it sound as though it's impossible to
get a handle on the difficulty because it's so pervasive.
LESTER THUROW: There is no magic button that you can punch that's
going to solve the problem .
I
firmly believe that.
