Amerlioration; P. Bowers

The visitor's impromptu speech impressed my father indelibly. The short span between pre diction and contradiction provided him with a lesson he carried the rest of his life: never say never. Dad grew up and lived in an age in which he expected, as a matter of fact, change for the better. I call this expectation amelioration. He watched the automobile replace the horse drawn milk wagon, he heard the radio bring opera into people's homes on Saturday after noons. He saw air mail become a mode of quick delivery, talking movies displace vaude ville. As a boatsman, he benefited from mass production which delivered affordable boats to the man in the street. He saw the outboard motor change from a finicky, noisy, "han dyman special" to a quiet, dependable, and easily obtainable means of recreation. He watched racing boats improve their top speeds Mr. Bowers is President of Benchmark Projects, New York, N.Y., and a contracting project manager and planner in the computer systems field.

from 30 some miles per hour to well over 200 miles per hour. On an experimental basis, he built the first steel-framed houses east of the Mississippi in the late 1930s. At the same time, he built the first garden apartments in New Jersey - a daring venture. A Shared Experience That was about the time I arrived on the scene. As 1 grew, I learned to share Dad's sense of amelioration. Together, we watched the airplane displace the steamship as the pri mary mode of travel across the seas. We wit nessed the disappearance of polio and smallpox. Together, we realized our dream of actually seeing the man, as he spoke, on the radio. We saw racial discrimination, particu larly on the small town, day-to-day level, di minish significantly. We watched plastics be come the "wave of the future" in the 1950s and 1960s. And in the summer of 1969, to gether we participated in Neil Armstrong's "one small step" upon the moon. In 1971, Dad passed on.

Dad's legacy was wonderment-the ability to look at the world with kid-like awe, excite ment, and caring. He saw the world as basi cally good, and the people in it, as benevolent. He viewed the Hitlers, Stalins, Mussolinis, and Tojos as mere aberrations-temporary depar tures from the norm. He kept his focus on the world's long-term improving conditions. He maintained a benign, loving, custodial watch upon his world, of which he took proud emo tional ownership. Dad had handed me the torch of ameliora tion. Now, the only noticeable difference in a progressively better world is its accelerating rate of change. In the computer industry for 20 years, I've not only seen enormous change, but I've actively participated in it. At IBM in the late 1960s, I continually encountered change often on a daily basis. The Personal Computer, although predictable, still amazes me. Consider that in 1967 I sold a "small" business com puter that was 1600 times less powerful and about 20 times larger than the PC for well over $300,000.

I wish Dad were around to see, for example, automatic teller machines. Imagine getting cash from an unattended machine on a Sunday eve ning! Or the skyline of New York City. We're putting up 50-story apartment buildings like they were row houses. I live in a building whose population is half the size of the town where I was born. We truly live in remarkable times. Part of Dad's legacy of amelioration was his sense of participation in the" American experi ment." I was seven when World War II ended. Dad returned from a devastated Europe. Then America stood alone among the nations of the world as a tower of strength, a far more desir able country in which to live than any place else on earth. Dad transmitted to me his sense of gratitude for having been born here. His descriptions of what it would have been like to grow up in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, or even France, instead of the U.S., stuck with me. I remember late-night air raid practices in which my entire home town turned out all lights. The sirens and visits from our block's Civil Defense warden scared me. And I knew that my four-and five year old counterparts in Germany, Russia, and France were dying from real bombs. Scared as I was, my heart went out to those children who were suffering so terribly.

At an early age, I knew we held something precious. I wasn't sure what it was, but I re solved to find out. Whereas Dad marked prog ress with enthusiasm, I also wondered from whence it came. Along the way, I concluded that it had something to do with the ideas 249 people carried, how people treated each other, and how they organized. I realized, too, that it had something to do with enthusiasm. I noticed that my own enthusiasm could move moun tains. Further on, I concluded that the organization of one's government, particularly with regard to economics, was a key. As a young adult, I began to see the deleterious effects of dictators upon South American, Eastern European, and, later, African countries. I began to see that in centive, a textbook· term for enthusiasm, was critically important. No experiment could have created better comparisons of the effects of contrasting orga nizations than the real-world differences be tween East Berlin and West Berlin, East Ger many and West Germany, mainland China and Taiwan or Hong Kong, between North Korea and South Korea, between Japan and Cuba, be tween Switzerland and Albania, between the free and the unfree. There was definitely some thing to be learned here.

My Amelioration: Freedom And so it is, now: I see that freedom is all. I see the world constantly striving for it. I see freedom as arising from a fundamental yearning within me and my fellow humans. It is the expression of a desire to create a world in which mutual consent operates maximally and force is kept to a minimum. It is the institution alized manifestation of the very human desire to express good will and benevolence. For me, my amelioration, the ability to per ceive the world as moving in a direction of being a better place to live, is freedom. As cus todian of my amelioration I raise my voice in support as I see the peoples of the world getting more and more freedom. With great delight, I see a vast, unheralded, underlying, and funda mental movement toward more freedom. As I see it, despite the last few decades' atrocious genocides, the arms buildup, and the heavy-handed tactics of dictators around the world, the man in the street in Jakarta, Shanghai, Havana, and even Leningrad will laugh dictators off the podium. It has already happened recently in Jamaica and the Philip pines. For my money, the communist/socialist/ 250 THE FREEMAN. JULY 1987 totalitarian/authoritarian/dictatorial ideal has been a philosophical dead letter for decades. As a planet, we are in the process of mopping up the after-the-party debris which may take an other couple of decades. The trend reminds me of the wholesale deposition of kings which oc curred between the late 1700s and the early 1900s.

Economic Miracles The prospects are exciting. "Economic mir acles" are popping up all over the place. We are inured to their commonplace. West Ger many and Japan were among the first. Now there are places in South America, India, and even Africa where similar' 'miracles" have oc curred. In the last thirty years in South America, those who live under elected govern ments have increased from 20 per cent to well over 90 per cent-unimaginable in the 1950s and 1960s. Every day brings another example of eco nomic freedom and improving conditions somewhere in the world. France, a socialist country, is "privatizing" industry and re moving price and credit controls after their di sastrous experiment. Australia, another quasi socialist country, is loosening up its economy in the direction of economic freedom. In the past year or so, Ecuador has eliminated most price controls, reduced many tariffs, and cut the public sector payroll significantly.

Turkey is liberalizing its economy more than it has done since the Ottomans. Ireland has re cently deregulated its airlines with salubrious effects. Austrian socialists are dropping mar ginal tax rates, just like the U. S. India is a sleeping giant preparing its own bed of liberal ization. We have already heard of the un dreamed of liberalization attempts in China. Eastern European countries and even Soviet Russia are seeking market or quasi-market solutions to their horrendous economic problems. We have all noticed that the world is "get ting smaller." Technology has provided us with instant communications and rapid travel. It is very difficult to reverse (some postulate that technology is irreversible-i.e., you cannot put the genie back into the bottle). This ,'smallness" of the world allows members of country X to look easily over their shoulders and see what's going on in country Y. It allows people to view "real-world" examples of the effects of contrasting policies.

Not only is it (and will be) more difficult for centralized, authoritarian governments to hide the successes of more liberal governments from their own people, but also it is (and will be) easier to answer' 'what if" questions with more certainty. If someone were to postulate an ex traordinary idea such as privatizing and deregu lating, say, the post office, one can (and will) more easily look around and find a country which has already shown it can be done. This phenomenon is known as the Demon stration Effect and has (and will) put govern ments in positions of de facto competition with each other in serving their citizens' interests. It provides a powerful tool for promulgating the policies which work best at the expense of those which work least. From my point of view, those which will prove to have worked best will invariably be policies which move away from authoritarianism toward the ideal of freedom.

Passing the Torch This, then, is the dream and the promise. It carries with it Dad's axiomatic view that each generation of humans across the globe has it in its power to ameliorate its conditions and to leave behind a better world for its having been there. With great care, I pass this treasure on to you. D 251 Productive Advances: Who Benefits Most? by Joseph S. Fulda T he free enterprise system allows in ventors and investors to reap the re wards of creativity and risk. But in a market economy, those who gain most from the productive advances thought of by inventors and funded by investors are the poor. Let us examine several productive advances and see to whom the benefits accrue. Consider first the printing press. The very rich had scribes and private secretaries do their clerical work, but the very poor are now literate in numbers once deemed impossible. Or to move up the centuries, consider the television. The rich had hours of leisure and the funds for pri vate entertainment to fill them. The poor, how ever, now have an entertainment cornucopia undreamt of in earlier ages. As a third example, consider air travel. The rich were able to afford weeks of travel by land or sea, while their prop erties continued to generate income. Those less well off, on the other hand, would never see distant lands or relations without air travel. Or consider antibiotics, one of the twentieth cen tury's miracles. The rich who live in sanitary, spacious quarters have had less need of these wonder drugs than those who occupy crowded, unsanitary, slum areas. Finally, consider that mundane appliance, the vacuum cleaner. The rich often have others do their housekeeping.