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PARTISAN REVIEW
These changes have presented democracy with more exciting opportu–
nities and more terrible dangers than ordinary citizens have ever had to face
before. On the positive side, one can see a true Jeffersonian republic taking
shape, in which cyberspace presents a forever opening frontier, and nobody
has to become a machine for somebody else. The outlines of this new repub–
lic are already visible in Silicon Valley, Tech Square in Cambridge, Austin,
Texas, or in Haifa, Israel. Imagine an end to degrading work, imagine how
the basic skills of business reinforce the basic skills of democratic citizenship,
skills like the capacity to navigate and analyze complex streams of informa–
tion, the wit to make a succinct presentation, the acuity to read critically,
write persuasively, organize materials, and communicate one's views.
And yet, whom are we kidding? People who haven't the equivalent of
college level skills cannot hope even to get through the doors of compa–
nies like Motorola, General Motors, Fidelity, or any of the start-ups of the
new economy. But I think we can safely assume from basic literacy figures
that at least 25 percent of the current U.S. workforce is not sufficiently
educated to be qualified for work that would pay enough to sustain the
middle-class life of, say, Archie Bunker. If you think about who votes or
reads newspapers, we might be talking about 40 percent.
All of this means that twenty or thirty million people-people with
children, people hobbled by dullness and self-doubt, people who played by
the rules which evaporated from the time they were fifteen to the time
they were thirty-five-are hard pressed to see a future . Or make sense of
the past. Mter all, the school system we conceived, the union movements
we adjusted to, the "leading" economic indicators we tracked, the govern–
ment programs we put in place-did not assume that virtually every
member of society would need the equivalent of college just to get a job.
Something dramatic will have to be done, and market forces alone can–
not be trusted. Markets are fair by definition, but markets are not life.
People cannot be expected to think that they deserve their fate simply
because they were born into changing competitive rules. This is the only
life they will live.
What is business's responsibility in this crisis, its problem? Social disloca–
tion certainly makes problems for business. But that is not what most people
mean when they try to enlist business in solutions. They mean that the crisis
is caused by the actions of business, and it is up to business to make
things
better. They see businesses laying off workers or refusing to hire the under–
educated. They see growing profits, the rising salaries of entrepreneurial
executives, the growth of foreign operations. They imagine what a force for
social good individual companies could be
if
only they acted "responsibly:'
This kind of argument confuses cause with effect. But it is especially
strong in cities where very strong global corporations have a long history
