SPAN: December 1979

A LEITER FROM THE PUBLISHER

SPAN 2

With this month, the decade of the seventies draws to a close. The world has seen many changes in these 10 years.

Leaders have come and gone. Economic crises and social movements have emerged and subsided, to be succeeded by new crises, new movements. (The energy crisis and the human rights movement spring to mind on the contemporary global agenda.)

We at SPAN, monitoring events as we do to report and interpret them periodically for our Indian readers from the American perspective, try to be sensitive to the ebb and flow of fresh currents in international relations. As we select and prepare material for publication, we look for underlying patterns.

Several items in this issue of SPAN catch our eye. They seem to flag important trends in the consideration of world affairs by intelligent observers and participants. We anticipate that these trends will become more pronounced in the decade to come.

Two articles submit the economic policies of many developed and developing countries, including the United States and India, to close scrutiny. In one, the British economist, I.M.D. Little, questions governmental reliance on import controls.

He cites a lO-country analysis by J. Bhagwati and Anne Krueger that has stressed the viability of liberal trade regimes.

Elsewhere in this issue, the American Nobel Prize winner in economics for 1979, Theodore Schultz, argues against what he considers to be the political interference that often makes it impossible for global agricultural production to increaseand to stay abreast of the growth in demand.

Each of these articles runs counter to the prevalent practice and theory of the past 30 years. They take issue with much of the conventional economic wisdom in both developed and developing countries since the end of World War II. But these articles may well point to an emerging new economic policy.

Governments may in fact be starting to relax import and agricultural controls-responding not so much to the arguments of learned economists and theoreticians as to the reallife needs and pressures of farmers, traders and consumers.

An intense concern with arms control is a second preoccupation that is becoming paramount as the decade of the eighties looms over the horizon. As time passes and arms proliferate, arms control becomes literally a matter oflife and death. "The fact that conflict anywhere could result in destruction everywhere ... makes the pursuit of peace a necessity for all humanity." These words were spoken by George Seignious II, director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, at a recent meeting of the United Nations General Assembly to debate arms control measures. Mr. Seignious went on to review the progress of negotiations in major areas of the international arms control effort: the second strategic arms limitation treaty (SALT II), a comprehensive test ban, elimination of chemical apd radiological weapons, and nuclear nonproliferation. The U.S. Government is in the vanguard of the arms control movement and its efforts at curtailment of nuclear nonproliferation are part of an international effort.

An informative 1J0te and illustrative graph that accompanies Mr. Seignious' speech gives the facts on worldwide arms spending and shows the Soviet Union well in the lead.

-J.W.G.

How Politics Distorts the Agricultural Process

by Theodore

W. Schultz

When Employees Run the Company

5 12 15 18 20 .A Popular Art: Printmaking 26 30 34 The Varieties of Religious Experience 37 38 An interview by David W. Ewing and Pamela M. Banks

by Judith Goldman

A Reconsideration

by Sisirkumar

Ghose

44 46 49 Front cover: Solar cells packed in cones of reflective material are used to harness energy from the sun and turn it into reliable, low-cost electric power in one of the solar energy . systems being tested at Sandia Laboratories, New Mexico. See stories on pages 37-43.

Back cover: Towers of the Renaissance Center in Detroit reach skyward, apt symbols of the new heights that the city is trying to reach after years of decay. See also page 49.

Managing Editor: Chidananda Das Gupta. Assistant Managing Editor: Krishan Gabrani.

Editorial Staff: Aruna Dasgupta, Nirmal Sharma, Murari Saha, Rocque Fernandes.

Art Director: Nand Katyal. Art Staff: Gopi Gajwani, B. Roy Choudhury, Kanti Roy. Chief of Production: Awtar S. Marwaha. Photo Editor: Avinash Pasricha. Photographic Services: ICA Photo Lab. Published by the International Communication Agency, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhill0001, on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the United States Government. Printed by H.K. Mehta at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad, Haryana.

Photographs: Front cover-Dan McCoy. Inside front cover-NASA. 5- Tony Kelly; Bob Strode. 6-7-Bob Strode.

8-Carl Howard. 9, IO-Bob Strode. I I-Richard Howard. l2-13-Norm Sklarewitz. l4-Christopher Morrow.

21-Š Copyright 1976 Tyler Graphics Ltd. 22 left-courtesy Pace Editions Inc. (2); right-Universal Limited Art Editions: 23 top-Š Gemini G.E.L., left-Universal Limited Art Editions (2); right-courtesy Castelli Graphics. N.Y. (2). 24 top-~niver.sal Limited Art Editions. 25 top left-courtesy of American Associated Artists; rightcourtesy of the Museum of Modern Art; bottom-LeRoy Woodson Jr., courtesy Frederich Gallery, Washington D.C. 37-T.S. Nagarajan. 38-39-000 McCoy. 4O-Associated Press. 43-Avinash Pasricha. 49 center-Tim HursleyjKorab Ltd. (2); bottom right-Balthazar Korab. Back cover-Tim HursleyjKorab Ltd.

Use of SPAN articles in other publications is encouraged, except when copyrighted. For permission, write to the Editor. Price of magazine: one year's subscription (12 issues), 21 rupees; single copy. 2 rupees 75 paise. For change of address, send an old address from a recent SPAN envelope along with new address to A.K. Mitra, Circulation Manager, SPAN Magazine, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001.(See change of address form on page 48.)

BOW POLITICS DISTOBTS TI The 1979 Nobel Prize winner in economics has some strong words to say about political interference in agriculture and its effects. World food production can keep abreast of population growth, he thinks, but protests that "politics is making it impossible to realize this economic possibility."

"What will be the future, costs of agricultural products?" Much depends on the answer. Seeing the pure economic opportunities, the prospects for lower costs are good; but in view of what is being done politically, the prospects for lower costs are much less favorable.

Despite the vicissitudes of naturedroughts, poor monsoons, pests and insects, and outbreaks of plant and animal diseases-the basic economic potential of agriculture throughout the world is such that increases in production can be expected to stay abreast of the growth in population, including increase in demand as the income of consumers rises during the next couple of decades. Politics is making it impossible to realize this economic possibility. In a real sense, it is politics against economics.

Difficult as it may be, it is necessary to distinguish between the functions of politics and .those of economics. Prices imposed by governments tend to differ substantially from economic prices. It follows that there is a "political market"; it is a market that responds to the dominant political interests that control the government. The gap between this political market and the economic market is the analytical key to much of the failure of the world to realize its economic potential in agricultural production. There

I DON'T CARE ABOVT

AN'I COUNT'ISURVEl(OR!

'0

is also a marked difference in the long run welfare gains; in the case of agriculture many low-income countries are bent on cheap urban food prices and thereby forgo the welfare gains to be had from modernizing agriculture; modernization would, in the long run, give them farm food products at lower real costs for all consumers.

Although resources to produce food are scarce, there is no scarcity of arguments in support of what governments do to agriculture. There is much confusion about the maximizing economic role that producers and consumers of food perform. This confusion is at the heart of many of the cross-purposes that characterize public and private endeavors in this area. Inconsistencies abound, and much of what is being done is counterproductive.

Ideologies, theories, and proposals revealed in what is said at conferences and in what is written in the flood of reports on food and agriculture are akin to the confusion that interrupted the building of the TQwer of Babel.

There are voices that shout that agriculture is up against the Limits of the Earth, that chemical fertilizers harm the soil, impair the natural properties of plants and are too costly in energy, and that modern agricultural technology is inappropriate in developing a Good Society. It is also proclaimed that landlords perform no useful economic functions, and that equity demands that top priorities be given to small farmers.

Another equity objective, inconsistent with the other, requires the procurement of food grains from underpaid farmers to reduce the public costs of having "free food shops." Freer international trade is deemed by many to be the primary source of the instability in food and agricultural prices and' of the secular decline in the terms of trade of agricultural products. To counteract these and other "adverse effects" of international trade, the world production of food is hampered

THIS IS

M" GARDEN!

I PLANTED TIlESE iOMATOE5! I PLANTED TI1Ese BEAN5!

N0800l('S 60NNA

MOVE ME OFF

MY LAND!!

by tariffs, variable levies and quotas on imports and by export subsidies.

Politics tends to prevail despite the fact that the resulting economic losses are large as a consequence of the policies that are pursued. Governments are indeed slow in learning from their economic mistakes with regard to food and agriculture. It was so during the years before the shocking 1973 and 1974 sharp increases in food grain prices and the 1974 astronomical rise in sugar prices.

Two essential parts of the organization of any sovereign country are its political activities and its economic activities. These two parts are obviously interdependent.

Neither part is a substitute for the other.

There are necessary governmental functions that no economy can perform regardless of how well the economic activities of the country are organized. In a dynamic agricultural economy, there are entrepre~eurial functions that only farmers and housewives can perform efficiently. Although both politics and economics are essential parts, thinking about the optimum role of each and their interconnections is a tangled thicket beset with doctrines and convenience in assessing the facts.

The politics of food and agriculture is in one important sense a paradox. During recent decades there has developed a strong perverse relationship between the proportion of the population who are farm people and their political influence in shaping .food and agricultural policies.

In many low-income countries where rural (agricultural) people are a large majority of the population, food and agriculture policies tend to be strongly biased in favor of urban people. In'many .

Western countries and in Japan where the farm population has become a small minority, food and agricultural price policies are paradoxically strongly biased against urban people.

The strong political leverage of the agricultural interest groups in the United

AGRICULTURAL PBOtlBSS States, despite the fact that the farm population is less than 4 per cent of the total population, has been analyzed by many in the context of the political structure of the Federal Government.

There is compelling evidence that the political market of governments seriously distorts the economic market of food and agriculture throughout the world. It may be argued that high-income countries can afford the luxury of their political distortions in this area; but the supply of food in many low-income countries is all too close to subsistence for them to forgo the additional agricultural production that is not forthcoming because of the inhibiting effects of their political markets.

I shall consider in turn the adverse effects of politics on: (I) the agricultural research sector, (2) the modernization process and its disequilibria, (3) human capital (farm entrepreneurs), (4) financial and physical capital markets, and (5) the international market.

Agricultural research sector There has been real progress in scientific agricultural research oriented to the requirements of low-income countries.

But the utilization of the contributions of this research are being thwarted by the distortion of producer incentives. Although more agricultural research is clearly warranted, it is at present not the major limiting factor in the production possibilities in many low-income countries. The international agricultural research centers are an important innovation, the first of which was launched by the research entrepreneurship of private foundations. National agricultural research, however, continues to be the primary contributor.

There is little room for doubt regarding the success of agricultural research. Yet all too little attention is given to that scarce talent, Research Entrepreneurship.

There is a strong tendency toward large research organizations that are overorganized. In fact, a large organization that is tightly controlled is the death of creative research, regardless of whether it be one of the international agricultural research centers, a large private foundation, or a major research-oriented university. More important for the purpose at hand, however, are the adverse effects on agricultural research and on the utilization of its contributions that are a consequence of the distortions of agricultural incentives.

Two important inferences can be derived from the economic dynamics of agricultural modernization. First, economic disequilibria are inevitable. They cannot be prevented by law, by public policy, and surely not by rhetoric. Second, the function of farm entrepreneurs in perceiving, interpreting and responding to new and better opportunities cannot be performed efficiently by governments.

Human capital: farm entrepreneurs

Theodore W. Schultz, who shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in economics with Sir Arthur Lewis (a British citizen who teaches at Princeton University), is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago. Schultz is best known for his work on the importance of human resources for development, andfor his criticism of development strategies that emphasize industrial growth while neglecting the agricultural sector. He has written numerous books, the most famous of which is Transforming Traditional Agriculture.

Modernization entails disequilibria Agricultural modernization is not a plan, a policy, or a governmental mandate.

It is an open-ended process that is not routine, and therefore the routine farm management that is characteristic of the long-established economic equilibrium of traditional agriculture will not suffice. It is an economic process that is dynamic.

It entails resource allocation decisions to take advantage of new opportunities.

These opportunities must be perceived, interpreted and acted on. When the contributions of agricultural research reduce the physical and biological constraints on agriculture, new opportunities to increase production become possible.

When new forms of capital become available, they also increase the production potential of agriculture. Any new investment opportunity that is worthwhile pursuing implies that there is a disequilibrium that calls for a change in resource allocation. The value of the ability to deal with disequilibria is high in a dynamic economy.

Farmers the world over, in dealing with costs, returns and risks, are calculating economic agents. Within their small individual, allocative domain they are finetuning entrepreneurs, tuning so subtly that many experts fail to see how efficient they are. Farmers, although they differ for reasons of schooling, health, and experience in their ability to perceive, interpret, and respond to new events pertaining to their farm enterprises, provide an essential human resource which is entrepreneurship.

On most farms there is also a second enterprise, the household one; from the viewpoint of economic activities, housewives are also entrepreneurs in allocating their own time and in using farm products and purchased goods in household production. This entrepreneurial talent is supplied by millions of men and women on small-scale producing units; and on this score, agriculture is a highly decentralized sector of the economy. Where governments have taken over the entrepreneurial function in farming, they have been far from efficient in modernizing agriculture.

Where governments have not nationalized agriculture, the entrepreneurial roles of farmers and of farm housewives are important, and the economic opportunities open to them really matter.

Politics is responsible in large measure for the fact that the economic potential of agriculture is not being realized in many low-income countries. The physical and biological constraints on agriculture are currently overshadowed by the malfunctioning of the economy because of political constraints. Agricultural research has made it possible to reduce substantially the physical and biological constraints. The increase in supply of capital for agricultural development is favorable, but much of it is being misallocated. Agriculture in most low-income countries, notwithstanding the political constraints, has broken out of the routine equilibrium of traditional agriculture. As agriculture

becomes more dynamic, the economic function of farm entrepreneurs becomes more important.

Within their small individual, allocative domain, farmers the world over are fine-tuning entrepreneurs, tuning so subtly that many experts fail to see how good they are.

Financial and physical capital markets New forms of capital are essential in modernizing agriculture-tube wells, irrigation canals, drainage and discharge ditches; new types of farm equipment and even some mechanical power for field work and electric motors to lift water; and also funds to buy new varieties of seeds, fertilizer, insecticides, fuel and electricity. When it is profitable for farmers The supply of external capital is also to undertake these investments, savings beset with doctrines on what is proper by farmers from the increase in their agricultural development. Large dams for net incomes can provide much of the electric power and for irrigation, when additional capital that is required, as was financed largely by external capital, are the case during the adoption of the dwarf prime examples of considerable capital Mexican wheat in Punjab. Some funds misallocation. The electric power compoalso became available from various nent comes off better than the irrigation sources in the community, as it became facilities. The irrigation from the imevident that loans to wheat farmers were pounded water is often subject to two a better investment than alternative invest- limitations. The construction of the irriment opportunities. gation facilities is too frequently inPolitical capital markets tend to be complete, because the canals that are 'out of tune with such successful modernrequired to bring the water onto the izing experiences. That profitability is the cropland of the farms are not at hand. The mainspring of agricultural modernization other limitation arises in part out of the including capital formation is contrary to management of the timing of the release the prevailing doctrine. According to this . of water into the canals. When the time doctrine profits are suspect on various of release is prescribed by the need to counts: When profits accrue to cultivators generate electricity, the timing is often they are incapable of saving and investing wrong for irrigation.

Irrigation and related investment to them; resident landowners use them to exploit landless labor; nonresident land- control and improve the utilization of ldrds are guilty of conspicuous consump- water are especially important in rice tion; and, local moneylenders are greedy production. Tube wells are investments economic parasites. But for lack of profit- that farmers can and do undertake when ability the economic potential of agri- the costs are warranted relative to the culture is not to be had. When profit- returns. But there are some irrigation ability exists, farmers turn sand into gold. facilities that are beyond the ability of

individual farmers even though they were to act collectively.

But in undertaking this and also other types of investments to increase the capacity of agriculture, the government and the farmers are at best responding to price signals that are badly distorted.

Underpriced rice is by all odds the wrong signal for allocating capital efficiently to and within agriculture.

External capital earmarked for agriculture is being tied increasingly to agricultural reform. The objective is couched in terms of equity to be attained by reducing the income inequality between large and small farms. The U.S. Congress has mandated that U.S. AID funds and technical assistance be used for this purpose. It ill behooves the Congress to require aid-receiving low-income countries to undertake agriculture programs that will equalIze rural incomes with a view of reducing rural poverty, in view of the failure of U.S. domestic Federal programs authorized for this purpose over the years since the New Deal.

The World Bank has also become strongly committed to this equity approach in providing funds for agricultural development.

This welfare approach to rural income inequality in low-income countries is doomed. It failed under much more favorable circumstances in the United States. The expectation that it can succeed in low-income countries is wishful thinking.

International trade aspects The contest between politics and economics on the functions of international trade has been a continuing struggle ever since classical economics challenged the mercantilism of governments. The worldwide score card on this cOntest shows that economics loses most of the rounds.

Protectionism is flourishing once again.

Although the comparative advantage of agriculture continues to be in large measure location-specific throughout the world, many countries forgo the economic benefits from trade. Politics tends to prevail: Virtually every sovereign state has its own political market for agricultural products. These political markets have one thing in common, namely, ¡they distort the economic markets. There are very few exceptions but the nonagricultural "city-states," Hong Kong and Singapore, do qualify. Trade restrictions hold the key to many economic distortions.

But these trade restrictions cannot be eliminated by national agricultural research programs, nor by the international agricultural research centers. Nor can they (Text continued on page 45)

EMP

WHEN

EESRUN

THE COMPANY

Leslie Russell is an engineer with the Chicago and Northwestern Transportation Company, an employee~run enterprise that has run at a profit while two of its chief competitors went bankrupt.

W

orker-owned companies, once dismissed as an unworkable business proposition, are making an impressive impact in the United States today. The growing trend toward such companies is the result of the gains they have led to-legally (in the shape of tax breaks for employee stock ownershipplans,for example), economically (some have been created to save jobs in areas of underemployment) and managerially. According to a study published by the U.S. Department of Labor, employee ownership leads to increased profitabilityHarvard Business Review, one of the leading Amenican publications in the field of busines~ management, recently published an in-depth interview with Leamon J. Bennett,

the worker-elected president and chairman of the board of trustees of Puget Sound Plywood, Inc., Tacoma, Washington. The first worker-owned company to be described in Harvard Business Review, Puget Sound Plywood was founded in 1941 and incorporated as a producer cooperative from its start with a net worth of more than $5 million. Sales now are nearly $30million annually; the company has about 400 employees on the payroll, the majority of whom are also owners; it sells its products throughout the United States, Europe, Japan and Asia, and operates supplier companies in Oregon and Washing'ton.

An abridged version of the interview with Bennett by the editors of Harvard Business Review appears on thefollowing pages.

QUESTION: The employees elected you president of this company, we know. Did they elect the other managers too?

LEAMON BENNETT: The vice president, the secretary, the treasurer and the board of trustees are all elected, but the general manager and a few other managers are appointed.

Can anyone working here vote in the elections?

No, to vote here, you have to be a member of the cooperative; you have to own a unit of stock -13 shares in all. But not everyone here owns stock. Some are what we call "hired employees." They are people taken on at set wages to fill certain jobs that the members do not choose to take. The majority of workers-about 240-are owners, and they share in the company's earnings equally.

The rest of them-about l30-are hired employees.

Why do you think people want to buy into the company and work here?

Our company manual has a good way of explaining that. No member has bought a job. He has joined an association in which people band together to manufacture a commodity that none of them could produce alone. The results of their efforts belong to all. Even though he can't look at the plant, the machinery and the inventory and say, "I see my lj240th interest," he does own such an interest and is in a sense in business for himself.

What qualities would you say the members of the company are looking for in the people they elect as chairman and president?

It depends. 1 think the first time one is elected they are perhaps looking for someone who is witty and has a good deal of charisma, which are probably not the best qualities to look for. But the second time around, they look at what the fellow has done, how he's carried the ball, if you will-whether they have confidence in him. Anyone can run for office here and be elected. Ownership is the only requirement for running. There are no academic requirements and no seniority requirements.

We're interested in hearing about the nine peoplewho serve on the board.

As a group, they're a little younger than the average owner, but they're not as young as you might suspect, because the average employee in the mill is middle-aged. Most of the board members are somewhere in between. They can appreciate to a great degree what either extreme thinks-a youngster or

one who is advanced in years. It's the younger people-and let me emphasize that by "younger" 1 mean people under about 50who are inclined to run for the board or for any of the company offices, because they're still interested in reaching out. They haven't stuck to their jobs in the mill so long that they've become restricted in their viewpoints. Our board is more representative of the members now, 1 think, than it has been in the six years that I've been here.

Does the board ever have to make unpopular decisions?

Yes, it does. There was one case where the question was whether to shut down a particular job in the company, and a woman had the job. We don't have many women owners yet, though there are more than there used to be, and our sales manager, Carol Wilson, is one of them. Anyway, the board was split on the question of whether to terminate the job. It was a tie vote. One of the nine board members wasn't present, and in case of tie votes of the board, 1 as chairman cast the deciding vote. The only time the chairman votes is when there's a tie vote. 1 voted for terminating the position. That was a very unpopular decision, and 1 heard a lot about it after it was made.

How much confidence would you say the owners have in the board?

It's high. It fluctuates from very high to outstanding. There are people who disagree with what you do, but they'll go along if you talk to them and make a logical case for your decision, and if you're candid with them.

The owners tend to elect individuals with those qualities of communication, and that's why there's a good deal of confidence.

Serving on the board seems to depend almost completely on communication, as you describe it.

You have to have the kind of mind that can approach company problems, but if you have that, then the primary thing is communication. 1 don't think you'd be on the board long if you communicated well but couldn't defend your decisions before the other owners. But no matter what your intellect, you wouldn't get re-elected if you didn't continually talk with them about what's going on.

But during the shift you're on, you're working. How do you, Mr. Leamon, have enough time to talk?

It can be very hectic if there are controversial matters in the air. But 1 like it. If something's coming up that's controver-

Above: Leamon Bennett confers with a couple of co-worker-owners. Right: During his shift in the factory, Bennett works with foreman Andy Pulido.

sial, there'll be almost a beaten path over to where 1 work! Talking it out is the only way to do it. Frankly, 1 wouldn't be willing simply to stand at my job and do it alone. That's the way 1 am, and everyone knows it. So 1 get involved. You have to be one who doesn't worry a lot. I'm not a worrier. 1 enjoy the listening and explaining to other members. 1 get the best information 1 can, analyze it, do what 1 think is most logical.

What goes on at board meetings?

We discuss any subject that seems pertinent. We talk about the information we get from members-some ofthem go everywhere, it seems, and see everything. We don't have a five-year plan or anything like that, but we try to stay on top of things and improve our operation, especially the machinery. Also, we interview and decide on applicants for new jobs, and we hear disciplinary cases. We decide on contracts with suppliers and customers after we hear the advice of the general manager. We ourselves make trips to other mills sometimes to see new equipment and compare notes with other managers.

Who looks down the road a bit and worries whether Puget Sound Plywood is going 'to be able to hold or improve its place in the industry?

The board gets into that quite a lot. The board and the managers are more concerned than are most¡ shareholders with outside influences that may affect productivity, production planning, markets and so on. The shareholder who stays in the' mill is concerned about the work environment, about the affairs of his work area.

As chairman of the board of trustees, do you assign people to these committees?

Yes, to most of them. We have committees on safety, audits, production, machinery, job description and policy. They do an important job because they monitor, they watch over, they come up with ideas for change. They're another part of the management system.

Getting the right people on these committees is very important to' me. My inclination has been to put some younger people on the committees because, frankly, I think they're more imaginative. When you get involved in a production occupation, you tend to become narrow in your thinking unless you do a good deal of reading or reaching out of some kind. So I try to get a good cross-section of owners on the committees, and this means some of the capable workers in their mid-20s.

Do the owners get their hand in on some of the committee appointments, too?

Yes, two committees are elected-the grievance committee and the equalization committee.

And that tells you something about what the shareholders want to control personally-their work and their compensation.

When you decided some years ago to sell in Europe and then in Japan, did the board alone make those decisions or did the owners vote on them?

The board decided-the membership did not vote. That's selling, and the membership is not concerned with selling, only with manufacturing.

The members have always gone along with the board on its selling decisions. Only if it came to, say, selling the mill would the members vote on the question.

Marketing and production strategy, then, are in the hands of the board and the managers?

Yes. For example, we are about to get a computerized linear programming model that will take information about production quantifies, supply costs, transportation costs, selling prices and so forth, and it will tell us what product mix to have. Should 20 per cent of our product be cedar, and if so, what percentage for hemlock, fir and spruce? Questions like that. Because information on current market conditions goes into the model, the numbers keep fluctuating.

That sort of thing the board and the managers are concerned with, but not the members of the co-op. The members do concern themselves with more than just their jobs, though. Some also serve on committees.

If you were asked to choose one or two characteristics to describe what the president of a company like this does in contrast to what the president of a traditional company does, what would they be?

Well, the president of our company is an arbitrator, I suppose you might say, and a spokesman for the members.

He makes recommendations and has little authority except at shareholder meetings.

If you compare the president of the company with the chairman, the president is an administrator in the tasks he does, and of course this is in addition to his normal work out in the mill. He's really an administrative representative.

The chairman is a jack-of-all-trades.

He presides over all the board of trustees meetings and is involved in just about everything of major importance that goes on in the company-the major decisions. As an example, the chairman of our board is also on the board of the Mt. Adams Veneer Company, which we own jointly with Publishers' Paper. He votes the shares of our company that we have in that. Also, we have a subsidiary-Eugene Studded Veneer in Eugene, Oregon-we own that completely.

So, the chairman gets quite involved there.

Many things don't require full board concurrence, and frankly I do not like that

much. The board is the primary decisionmaking body in this company, and it has the authority to make any decisions it wishes as long as they're legal. But this business of circumventing the board, I do not believe in. I don't do it. I would much rather have a meeting if there's any question.

What goes on at your shareholder meetings?

We begin them generally at 8 a.m. in a hall uptown. They're held on workdays, usually on Saturdays. We pay straight-time pay for attendance, which is time-and-a-half on Saturdays. The mill operates six days a week.

Presentations are made and inquiries from the floor responded to. Then there's a motion to accept a plan of action and a vote.

If there's a problem, we hold a special meeting. Special meetings are limited to the subjects that are mentioned in the letters sent out to shareholders. Occasionally, we'll have a meeting on an issue like whether to buy equipment. a piece of equipment-expensive We'll have that right here in the mill.

How do the general manager's functions differ from those of the elected managers here? Why is he not elected?

The general manager is not a shareholder.

It would be difficult to have him be a shareholder because he can command pay that is far in excess of what he could realize as a shareholder.

The general manager has been involved in management in other companies and is usually a very experienced individual.

The qualifications for being a general manager are not what one would normally gain from working in a plywood mill. So we usually employ the best person we can find in the industry. These people are well known throughout the industry. The general manager is subordinate to the board of trustees in decisionmaking.

Obviously we consult him. He attends our meetings on. invitation to give advice on any matter he has expertise in, and there are many. From time to time there may be some conflict, particularly when a new general manager comes in, because he's really not familiar with the co-op concept. We may not always agree with the manager, but this is our company. We hire the manager. .

We have bylaws that are very specific.

The manager is to act as an adviser to the board of trustees. What normally happens is that the general manager conducts the routine business-what type of plywood we're going to make this week, all those daily industrial functions. The board' does not get involved in that, except, from time to time, if there's some special problem

that is brought to our attention.

The board members have more sources of information from within the mill than the manager does, because the people talk to us more. We work out there, most of us. We try to match notes at the meetings-they're not confrontations. You can't have that. Occasionally we disagree, as all human beings will, but we have a working association.

The general manager has quite a responsible position because he's involved in daily production. As for company policy, it's decided in the boardroom.

new products to the company? Is that 'where you get your innovation?

Yes, that is another strength of a manager with a good business background-familiarity with various products in other businesses.

Primarily, though, he handles the production and the office force.

Does everyone here except the general manager get the same pay?

All members of the cooperative get the same pay, all the owner-employees. But the hired workers sometimes -get more than we do. That's because we pay them competitive rates, which may be higher.

You are the president and chairman, but you receive the same pay as a worker who has no management responsibilities? That doesn't seem quite fair.

We think this is the way to do it, though.

Equal pay is the key to the spirit of a cooperative like this. I've talked with many people who've worked here or who have worked here and retired, and equal pay was one reason they came here and liked it. The people who do the janitorial services get the same pay as the foremen and the superintendent and the directors. Not all other co-ops do this, but this company always has.

How is the pay level set?

We use a formula, a rather complicated one that the board of trustees decides on. The paychecks to the owners are actually advances on the expected annual earnings. The purpose of the formula is to keep the advance in line with earnings, not too much or too little, and to even the payments out as much as possible during the course of the year.

Under the law we must distribute all of our net earnings each year to the members. There are no profits in the conventional sense and no dividends.

And these advances are not always as high as pay rates in other industries?

No. Sometimes an owner-employee leaves and finds a higher paying job with comparable work in another company. Keep in mind that the earnings available for distribution fluctuate. This is a tough industry-the price rises and falls, and there are supply problems.

We have a chart showing how a member's earnings have fluctuated over the years. A member earned about $5,000 in 1967, but it was up to more than $15,000 in 1969. And then he earned less than $10,000 in 1970, but more than $15,000 again in 1972. My point is only that how we compare with other industries depends on what year you're asking about.

What about people who work here for a long time and then see new employees receiving the same pay? Do they wonder about that?

Well, that was the way it was when they started, and so they accept it. Here's.another point: Suppose we have a person who's worked faithfully for 35 or 40 years, and he or she gets to the stage where he loses zeal or becomes tired and wants a job with much less responsibility. We owe it to that indi~ vidual to continue paying him. We can put him in a position with less responsibility and let a better qualified person take the job he's. had. He suffers no pay loss. There's no problem in doing this with pay equalization.

An employee's pay doesn't depend on the number of shares he or she owns, then?

Each member owns the same number of shares, gets the same pay and has one vote on each issue. Over the years, in order to raise capital, the company has created more shares. Originally a shareholder owned one share, but now he has to own 13 shares. If you want to buy into the company now, it costs a lot more than it used to.

How do you get to be an owner?

Normally, you buy from someone who wants to retire or stop working for some other reason. First, you apply to work here for a period of about six weeks. You have to serve under three foremen in that period.

Then you go before the board of trustees.

If they think you'll be a good member, they give you permission to buy the shares of an outgoing member.

pay than the hired employees. For example, one of the key hired people on the midnight to 8 a.m. shift makes more money than I d,o.

As for the jobs, you can't tell the difference between owners and hired persons. Often they work side by side, and there is excellent rapport between them. Some of the hired people have been here for some time. They don't want to buy shares, because they get paid well without them, and they're not interested enough in our business to want owner status. Of course, if there's a downturn in the market, or if labor-saving machines are installed, then the hired employees are the ones who are laid off.

All owners have to be workers, then?

No, about 50 shareholders don't work.

They've left, but have held onto their shares.

Eventually they'll probably try to sell their shares to new owners coming in because there's no advantage to owning stock here unlessyou're a worker. There's no dividend for people who aren't contributing by working.

Isn't it hard for the average young person to buy into the company?

It would be if he or she had to pay all at once for a unit of 13 shares, which now runs only a somewhere around $ 27,000-but modest down payment is required~ You pay the balance over a long period in some cases, and the installments are made small enough to payout of your monthly advances.

When it comes time for an owner to retire, what retirement benefits does he or she have?

We have no pension plan-the company makes no payments to a retired owner. However, the owner can sell his shares, as I've already indicated, and so he has that money plus his savings plus social security. If this is not enough, the person may go on working here.A few years ago one of the owners who worked every day, was 81, and today we have one who is 72. At present the rule for any new employee is that he or she must retire at age 70, but I think that requirement will be abolished at an early meeting. And several members do have individual pension plans at banks.

Once you become an owner, do you have preferred standing in the mill?

You have more security if you're an owner, but, as I said, you ma)' be getting less

WORKING AT PUGET SOUND PLYWOOD QUESTION: How did you happen to come here?

ANDY PULIDO: I'd worked in plywood before in other states. I moved into the area, took a look at the mill and liked the idea of investment in it. It is a co-op, and you buy a share and hope you make a return on your investment.

Do you think you're likely to get a return on it?

Oh, you have good tim~ and bad times, but overall I think I made a pretty good investment.

I'm glad I did it.

Do you enjoy working under this kind of system?

You bet! You can use your own initiative, and you feel you're a part of the company, and you are-¡you are a co-owner.

So it's the owners who have control?

Not only do they control the board, as we discussed, but they also vote on expenditures in excess of $ 50,000. The members must approve them at the annual meeting or at special meetings. Also, changes in the bylaws and changes in the seniority rules must be approved by vote.

This must slow up decisionmaking quite a bit?

Probably not as much as you think. And if there's any doubt whether to submit a question to a vote of the members, we prefer voting to a decision by the board, despite

What about getting paid the same as everybody else does? Does that ever rankle you?

No. I think that is a very fair and equitable way to pay. Everybody is a co-owner in the company, so I think everybody should have a fair share of the profits, equally. I like that.

As a shift foreman, is your main job checking to see that people are. doing what they're supposed to?

Well, that is part of my responsibility, but this type of environment doesn't require a lot of strict supervision because everybody is a coowner. Basically my job duty isjust coordinating the different woods to make whatever type of panel we're selling at the time and to try to meet production goals.

How long have you been the shift foreman?

Let's see, about a year and a half now. Before that, for two and a half years, I was a head rustler. That's another sort of foreman.

And what were you before you became that?

Well, I started working in plywood elsewhere when I was 16, part time, and I've been at Puget Sound for 121 years in all, so I've worked just about eyery aspect of a mill, in all departments.

Were you elected to the position you have now?

No, we have a seniority system, and you bid by plant seniority-the length of time you've been here. The particular job that I bid on was a modified seniority job. I happened to have the requirements set down for it, so I was awarded the job.

Have you felt better working under this kind of system than you have elsewhere?

Yes, I like it because I have money invested in the company, and I can see my profits or my losses. And you do feel that you're a part of the company.

When you're working with other people, do you think that there's a different spirit here?

Yes, it's a good spirit. Everybody's bought in-we're shareholders. We do haYehir.edpeople who work in the mill, but basically I like our. idea of equal earnings, equal profits.

That's right. Actually, any shareholder may come in and talk to the board, if he or she' wishes, and some do. I encourage them to because I think no one can tell your story like you can, and if it happened to me, if I were in the position where I thought I had been wronged, I would certainly want to be sure that all the facts were known as correctly as I could present them.

Is there any feeling that, to be really democratic, everyone should have a chance at getting the preferred jobs?

Most of the jobs in the mill are determined on straight seniority. Now, there are some factors that influence that. As an example, when you sign for ajob, you must stay on that Grievances and discipline are very imjob for one year. This precludes one of the portant to employees everywhere, and we'd old-timers from searching out a good job like to hear about how these problems are every time one comes up and signing up for handled here.

Sometimes, then, the board will reverse the a new one every six weeks.

Well, I think we probably have the best foreman's or another boss' decision?

Intermeshed with this straight seniority For many kinds of disciplinary action, yes. is our system of modified seniority. Some system I've ever seen. It works like this. Say, the foreman sends someone home for using But there are different kinds of offenses-all of the people who hold supervisory jobs have tools he or she isn't authorized to use, or for this is spelled out in a booklet called Personnel modified seniority jobs that require a certain throwing something out of the window or for Rules that every member gets. There are some expertise, a certain experience, a certain some other offense of that kind. And, say, the offenses for which up to three warnings may education. For example, each of the foreperson doesn't feel that disciplinary action be given before discipline, and there are some men'sjobs is posted under "modified senioriis justified. He can then submit a grievance for which there are no warnings at all, and ty," and those who are desirous of having in writing, within 48 hours of the action, to the worker is discharged outright. It's all one of them must submit their qualifications the grievance committee which, as I said¡ spelled out. to the corporate secretary. At the next board meeting, not only are their qualifications before, is elected. Now the grievance committee meets and considers the case and It must take a great deal of the board checked into and discussed, but the indimakes a rC<.commendationto the board. The members' time. viduals themselves are interviewed by the board has the final say. It may hear the But that's what we're here for. We're here board. That's the way those jobs are assigned. worker in person. for the benefit of the members. Besides, suppose you have a key individual and beThen straight seniority doesn't count for These busy board members-having just cause of some silly misunderstanding with anything? one day a week to meet, and all the other the supervisor he or she leaves the company.

Seniority here has absolutely nothing to do matters they must attend to-they'll take time That happens in some of the large companies. with it, except in the event that we have two We don't want that happening here. to hear the employee in person? people who are comparable in their expertise

its taking more time. It's a good psychological step to take. One of the advantages of this co-op form is the cohesiveness we achieve. We get as many people involved as possible without creating chaos, and we're better off for it.

and education. Then, probably, the one who had been here the longer of the two would get the job. The reason I like this system so much is that it gives the younger person with intelligence, with imagination, with experience, the opportunity to get a job he would have no chance for whatever under normal seniority rules.

And no matter how much expertise these modified seniority jobs require, the people who get them will all earn the same amount?

That's right, if they all work the same number of hours. We're all hourly employees here.

How do you handle overtime?

In some co-ops you can work as many hours as you want, and you're assigned to your jobs by a foreman. But in our company we have equalization, whereby each person gets the same opportunity to work the same number of extra hours as everyone else. I think that has to be one of the central considerations of a co-op. If you eliminated that, you'd eliminate the co-op. Perhaps if you were the foreman and your friends wished to work, they would get all the overtime work, and someone you didn't care much for would never have the opportunity for any overtime. That hasn't happened here.

Romeo Myott is a quarry supervisor at Vermont Asbestos. Employees purchased this company and made it a profitable operation ajier its previous owner, unwilling to meet the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's order to install antipollution equipment, decided to close the mine.

That's a crucial point.

Yes, I think the key to a co-op is equalization, because the suspicion of unfairness can be there whether it actually occurs or not. I find that a prejudice or a suspicion is just as harmful as an actual undesirable act. I firmly believe that if you maintain equalization, you eliminate both of these problems.

Why is it that they would choose to work here where they would probably earn less than they would at some more traditional company?

Well, there are rewards other than money.

I think the psychological realization that they have something to say about what goes on in their company has a great deal to do with it as well as the fairness, the opportunity that's provided, which is much more than in any privately owned company. Of course, I'm sure that you would get various replies to that inquiry if you asked many individuals, but I think primarily it's the expectation that if there's a desirable job coming up, they'll have a shot at it, that here a person can rise very quickly.

We've had an influx of many people wanting to work here, but we can't take too many people on a trial basis at one time because they'd be getting in each other's way. I think

they like to work here because they feel confident that they're part of what's going on and that they're going to be able to make their contribution. And they can look straight at anyone here and say, "We're in this together, whether we like it or not, and we usually like it."

After hearing and knowing what you do about other companies and management systems and then observing and working here, do you feel that some of the traditional management duties like disciplining workers and <policing the plant are easier here as a result of employee ownership?

Absolutely. You can tell that in the ratio of supervisors to employees. In each shift we really have only two supervisors. The workers realize that whatever they do is going to affect them personally, and this philosophy pretty much permeates the entire company.

And it doesn't wear off after you've been here five or ten years? The motivation continues?

No, it does not wear off. As a matter of fact, I think it gets stronger. The members become more and more aware of the overall operation and of how small actions can affect company performance.

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ROTESTERS LOOK TO Convinced that local issues are those that mean most to people, citizen groups in America are turning their attention from national problems to those within the community. Today, their targets are likely to be city halls, state legislatures and local business companies.

A new generation of political activists is turning away from natiomil issues in favor of working on the grass-roots problems of cities and states.

In every region of the United States, people are bypassing the White House and U.S. Congress, and instead are taking their protests straight to city council chambers, state legislatures and local business executives.

Where organized protesters used to spend their time and energies demonstrating on issues such as civil rights and the Vietnam war, new groups are zeroing in on clearing cluttered vacant lots, fixing chuckholes in the streets and fighting the telephone company.

The new battlegrounds may not provide the grand national stage offered by big public controversies in Washington, activist group members concede, but victories in the community are more productive and more meaningful to many citizens.

Bernadette Pedagno, a staff member of the activist Vermont Alliance, explains: "You can change all the laws in Washington you want, and it is really not going to have as much impact on the day-to-day life of an individual as the resolution of a local issue. " On the other side of the country, Suzanne Campi, Southern California field director for Common Cause, a voluntary, private citizen lobby, feels the same way, noting: "If we lobby in Los Angeles, the issue is right in front of us. Washington is 3,000 miles away, and we're faced with the President, two houses of Congress and a zillion committees."

Some analysts are suggesting that the trend toward conservatism by Jimmy Carter's White House, the Congress and politicians generally is a factor in turning the attention of activists from Washington to the field.

The new direction is viewed by others as the liberals' response to the recent resurgence of the "new right" conservatives.

Though some leaders of the new activists are veterans of past protest movements, others have no philosophical ties to those causes and, in fact, resent being cast as radicals.

Whatever their political bent, the new protesters are using different tactics: fewer boisterous demonstrations, more emphasis on practical politics and economic leverage.

Barbara Arnold, codirector of the statewide campaign staff of Massachusetts Fair Share, says of her group: "We're a mainstream organization working at the local level to effect change. Many of our members. would not call themselves 'progressive,' because to them the word has radical connotations."

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Members of Ihe Coalition for Economic Survival in Los Angeles hold a rally urging rent controls and more mass Iransil. The organizmion is conducting a vOler-registration campaign to win ils baltle.

THEIR OWN BACKYARDS

Today's community actlVlsts stress the swing away from looking to Washington for financial help. David Olsen, president of the New School for Democratic Management in San Francisco, observes: "It's no longer fashionable for the Federal Government to payout large sums for social welfare, and a local self-reliance ethic is re-emerging nationwide."

A few groups even run their own slates in local elections. Three members of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now serve on the Pulaski County Quorum Court in Little Rock, Arkansas. This organization, known as ACORN, boasts 23,000 dues-paying families in 16 states, and expects to hit 100,000 within five years. Its projects range from cleaning up vacant lots in Des Moines to seeking equal water rates in New Orleans.

Many of the groups are self-supporting, relying solely on dues-paying individuals or families for money. Most of the budgets are low.

What is the new order of activists up to? Here is a sampling: • The Vermont Alliance, founded four years ago, and with a current membership of about 800 families, was instrumental in requiring physicians to prescribe cheaper generic drugs rather than higher priced name brands. The group's chapter in Barre persuaded the town to make a cost study on a possible switch from privately run utilities to municipal operations.

• The Public Interest Research Group, Inc., in New York, comprised largely of students, joined in a lobbying effort in the legislature to permit citizens to sue public officials for illegal actions. It also helped spotlight discriminatory lending practices and aided in collecting $ 65,000 in judgments in smallclaims court.

• The Massachusetts Fair Share organization, with a growing membership of 24,000 families, has been active in getting a bridge repaired, battling a telephone company to drop a securitydeposit requirement for its customers, and demonstrating against property owners delinquent in tax payments.

• In Miami, the Concerned Seniors of Dade County has persuaded the local government to initiate a $1.25-million pilot program for door-to-door transportation for the elderly.

In a recent County Commission meeting, 700 members packed the room to plead their case.

• Carolina Action, a five-year-old group in North Carolina, Leaders of the Massachusetts Fair Share organization plan their strategy for a protest demonstration. The activist group has already won a number of victories-it has got a bridge repaired, and made a telephone company drop a security-deposit requirement from its customers.

concentrates its fire on corporations rather than government.

One of the group's proudest achievements was winning changes in auto-insurance rates. Jay Hessey, staff director, says: "We did very little with the insurance commissioner, so we went directly after the corporations. They hold the power and are the ones we should be dealing with."

• The Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS) in San Antonio influenced the spending in the last five years of about $150 million in capital improvements and repair funds for drainage systems, housing rehabilitation, parks and libraries .

• The Ohio Public Interest Campaign, a statewide coalition, is fighting Governor James Rhodes' program of tax breaks to attract new industry. The organization is also pushing for legislation to make it difficult for employers to abandon Ohio factories for favored tax treatment elsewhere.

• The Coalition for Economic Survival in Los Angeles is waging a fight for rent controls and more mass transit. The organization is currently conducting a voter-registration campaign. Larry Gross, an official of the group, explains: "Protest has impact, but we know we have to organize votes to have any political clout."

• Campaign Against Utility Service Exploitation (CAUSE), also in Los Angeles, has led successful fights against the release of unlisted telephone numbers to police and against telephonecompany charges for information requests. Burt Wilson, a CAUSE coordinator, says: "People will call this office before they call their Congressman. They have no sense of being taken care of in Washington."

• The New School for Democratic Management in San Francisco was launched by a self-styled radical organization, the Foundation for National Progress, which also publishes the counterculture magazine Mother Jones. In 1978, the school offered entrepreneurship training for 700 members of communityactivist groups.

The strategy of the new activists seldom ends in illegal or violent action, a departure from tactics of some antiwar and related movements of the past. But protests in some cases have included picketing and parading-even tense confrontation.

Members of Massachusetts Fair Share have blocked traffic or surrounded a person's car to demonstrate for a cause .

The Citizens Action League of California brought sleeping bags to Governor Jerry Brown's office after they charged he refused to see them on property-tax relief. The sit-in broke up when Brown agreed to a meeting.

Demonstrations can get violent, too. In Philadelphia on February 8, 1979, police arrested 13 protesters after a fight broke out in City Council chambers over complaints by housing activists about plans for spending community-development funds.

Other protests can go to extremes. In the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C., a member of the Community for Creative Nonviolence recently went on a hunger strike.

He threatened to starve himself to death unless a Catholic parish canceled its plans to spend money for building renovation and gave it to the poor instead. The church refused to relenf, and Mitch Snyder finally ended his fast.

Some groups have formed regional or national connectionsa seeming contradiction of the determination to battle at the . local level. An organizer notes: "You can't completely divorce yourself from Washington, because that's where the money is."

But the consensus among activists is that the trend to local. and state action by citizen groups will accelerate in years ahead.

The reason: More and more people are convinced that they can play bigger roles where basic decisions are made-close to

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0

WHO BENEFITS FROM OPENT E? Excessive use of trade controls by the developing nations is an important reason for their poor export performance and inefficient production for domestic markets, says a British economist.

mports,and to a lesser extent exports, have been controlled by almost all developing countries since World War II. Yet the evidence indicates what theory suggests, that the more open the economy the higher is the income and the better the growth rate. But reliance on controls persists. Why? For some countries in Latin America, controls were introduced in the depression of the 1930s or during World War II, because of worsening terms of trade.

But almost invariably the controls instituted by developing countries since World War II have been the result of a balance of payments (BOP) crisis brought on by increased spending for development. Of course, World War II also left most Western industrialized countries with an almost complete array of import and exchange controls. But within a decade the import controls and most exchange controls in the developed countries had been dismantled. Why did the developing world intensify import controls long after the extreme dislocations caused by the war had vanished?

My impression is that this reliance arose mainly from the conviction among leaders of opinion and policymakers in the Third World that a poor country could not develop and manage its foreign trade and payments without controls.

I

Of course, all controls protect, and sometimes protect absolutely. But there are several reasons (among them the timing of the controls, and the fact that the countries instituting these controls had few industries to protect anyway) that lead us to believe the primary motive to have been BOP management-not protection.

Furthermore, an intellectual heritage has probably played an important role in maintaining the control system, as the new intelligentsia, taught by the developing economists of the 1940s and 1950s, rose in support of the system. In many semi-industrialized countries this has resulted in a strange meeting of the minds of intellectuals, businessmen and bureaucrats.

The rationale for poor countries to control imports was developed in the 1950s, mainly by Hans Singer and Raul Prebisch. Briefly, Singer's thesis was that developing countries had not got much out of international investment and trade-above all, not much industrialization. There were dark hints that these countries might have got less than nothing out of it, as foreign trade diverted activities away from industrialization, which would have played a catalytic role in development. Singer also promoted the thesis of a secular worsening in the terms

of trade of the developing countries, basing his argument on a United Nations document, "Relating Prices of Exports and Imports of Underdeveloped Countries," published in 1949.

Prebisch, and the Economic Commission for Latin America headed by him, emphasized the same worsening in the terms of trade of developing countries from 1949 onward. This thesis became enshrined in the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCT AD), and in repeated pronouncements by many development economists.

The peaks in commodity prices during the Korean war, the subsequent decreases in prices followed by recovery after the early 1960s, the historically high levels of today, and the fact that all the scholarly work I know of denies any long-run trend, have probably still not fully exorcised the myth created by the 1949U.N.study.

To the argument of declining terms of trade was added the view that the demand for exports from developing countries would inevitably be sluggish compared with their own demand for importsespecially, of course, if domestic demand were to be steered toward investment goods for development. To this was added the acceptable argument that the price elasticity for exports was very low (at least for developing countries taken

Trade among developing countries is inhibited by their import substitution policies; markets together). Thus, exports of developing countries were determined by external forces not under their control, and this was also true of aggregate capital imports.

Therefore, the level of imports was also determined. The conclusion was that their own import controls and other restrictions did not restrict trade but served only to control the pattern of imports in the interest of development. Also, with the declining terms of trade, BOP trouble would be endemic, and frequent devaluation and inflation would result. Moreover, devaluation would further worsen the terms of trade in the face of an inelastic foreign demand.

However, even if we accept the elasticity assumptions, it still does not add up to a case. Export taxes could be used to prevent devaluation from reducing export proceeds. Luxury taxes could prevent low priority imports. If industrialization needed a special push, this could be achieved by tariffs or, better still, by subsidies which would not discriminate against exports. Finally, it is probably an illusion that the reduction of consumption associated with price rises that result from controls is less inflationary than price rises resulting from other policies. he argument could thus be fully convincing only to those who had acquired faith in planning-and by "planning" I mean trying to manipulate quantities with some end in view, with prices as a by-product rather than vice versa. To express a disbelief in planning, at least for developing countries, in the 1950s, was a confession of confusion or worse.

By the 1960s the great majority of developing countries were married to control systems and high protection (as indeed they still are, although to a lesser extent). Thus, it is to the challenge to the controlled-trade establishment that we must now turn. On a theoretical plane the seeds were sown by 1963 by Jagdish Bhagwati and V.K. Ramaswami, among others. At the more influential applied level it did not .acquire real force until 1970, when the extraordinary average heights and variability of effective protection were exposed in a book by Ian Little, Tibor Scitovsky, and Maurice Scott, and in another by Bela Balassa. The former work also discussed the inhibiting effects of general control regimes (which had spread from simple import controls). Both books laid some stress ori promoting rather than protecting industry so as to achieve,

T

as far as possible, neutrality between the domestic market and exports. The LittleScitovsky-Scott volume also discussed how a transition to more liberal trade, which would be more favorable to exports, might be made, and suggested that it would be very difficult to justify effective subsidization of industry, whether directly or by tariffs, of more than 20 per cent.

More recently there has been a massive 10-country study of trade regimes guided

by Jagdish Bhagwati and Anne Krueger.

Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Egypt, Ghana, India, Israel, the Philippines, the Republic of Korea, and Turkey were the countries covered between 1950 and 1972. The study found that the open or relatively open countries grew faster-faster than when they were less open and faster than those that were chronically "closed."

Brazil, Israel and South Korea performed best of the group. The main reasons given for superior performance were as follows: Exports proved to be highly responsive to the reduction or elimination of the bias against them. The partly consequential increase in imports reduced the chaos in the pattern of import substitution incentives and ensured a freer flow of imports, with production benefits resulting from greater capacity utilization and a reduction in required stocks. The greater value of exports also made it easier to borrow.

Krueger, in her summary volume, deals primarily with the conditions under which liberalization attempts have been made.

Twenty-two liberalization efforts are reported for the 10 countries between 1950 and 1972. All involved packages. Devaluation was combined with import liberalization, deflation, reduction of tariffs, and export subsidies, in varying degrees. Most efforts wer~made in periods of economic crisis, usually in a situation in which the government had committed itself to an overvalued exchange rate, and in which there was a loss of reserves or debt rescheduling. Many efforts included attempts at stabilization.

Of course, if a simple devaluation is to be effective, inflation has to be stopped.

It was the consequent deflationary measures, and the foreign (International Monetary Fund or WorId Bank) involvement, which often made these attempts unpopular, and resulted in a reversal.

It must be remembered that the Fund norm was then a fixed exchange rate.

But a floating rate, or a sliding peg, was used in several countries on and off.

The reasons for failure to liberalize are divergent. Either the effective devaluation was inadequate, or the bias against exports was not removed or was not much reduced (as in India and the Philippines), so that exports did not respond sufficiently. Inflation and a fixed rate continued or was reimposed (Chile under Allende).

There was insufficient political and intellectual commitment (India, Chile), or an actual reversal for political reasons (Ghana), or bad monsoon luck (India again). Needless to say, manufacturers require some expectation of continuing profitability for exports if they are to invest for export production, make products designed for export, and spend money on a marketing organization. Only in a few countries was the government commitment to the change of policy sufficient for this expectation. But although failure was frequent, there was progress.

The Bhagwati-Krueger phase analysis suggests an increasing degree of liberalization after the mid-1960s and comes down in favor of an export promotion strategy.

Further relevant evidence is added by Balassa in a preliminary report on his WorId Bank studies of exports in developing countries, where he discusses Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, India, Israel, South Korea, Mexico, Singapore, Taiwan and Yugoslavia. Of these countries, only South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan have created virtually free trade regimes for exports. Exporters can buy not only imports but also domestic inputs at world prices. Singapore and Taiwan are now as free trading as most developed countries. South Korea and Taiwan also have free labor markets, barely affected by trade unions or labor legislation. These three countries sustained gross national product growth rates of about 10 per cent for as much as a decade prior to 1973-a performance shared only by Hong Kong, Israel and Japan.

A.

thOUghIsrael is fully liberalized, tariffs still result in a significant bias against exports. None of the other countries mentioned are fully liberalized, and none have created the free trade regimes for exports of South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan (and, of course, Hong Kong). All, however, have made some effort at export promotion. The staggering export performance of HongKong, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan is well known. However, the

in developed countries are vaster, but in the developing ones, they are growing more rapidly. manufactured exports of Argentina, Brazil and Colombia have also grown very fast, at about 30 per cent per annum in 1967-73, but from very low levels. As a consequence, the proportion of manufactured output exported remains very low: in 1973 the ratios were 3.6 per cent, 4.4 per cent and 7.5 per cent, respectively, compared with 49.9 per cent for Taiwan and 40.5 per cent for South Korea.

The highly open economies of Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan all weathered the world recession of 1974-75 very well, despite their extreme dependence on imported energy. South Korea's growth rate never dipped below 8.3 per cent. Hong Kong's and Taiwan's were brought below 3 per cent, but they recovered to rates of 16.2 per cent and 11.9 per cent in 1976. Despite continued sluggish world demand, the U.S. dollar value of the exports of the three rose by 39.4 per cent, 56.2 per cent and 52.2 per cent in 1976.

Of course, liberalization and reduced protection cannot achieve all the miracles it has produced for the four Asian countries discussed. It is obvious that the speed of the consequential changes in industrialized countries has some limit.

But the fact that there is this limit to the degree of market penetration that will be permitted at anyone time by the industrialized countries (and a limit to the size even of their markets) should not be regarded as a reason to continue with a policy bias in favor of import substitution. There are still gains to be made by all countries, even if only a few more miracles can be expected.

The developed countries still produce a very high proportion of the laborintensive manufactures they consume.

Clothing imports from the developing countries account for little more than 5per cent of consumption in the developed world. The range of labor-intensive goods for which there has been any significant market penetration is still quite limited.

Yet for 15 years manufactured exports from developing countries have increased at the rate of 15 per cent per annum. With reasonable goodwill on the part of the developed countries, and appropriate policies on the part of the developing countries, this rate of growth could be maintained for a very long time. The growth of exports from Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan is certain to slow down greatly because at present they export such a high propor-

tion of their output; hence, the growth rate of exports must soon approach these countries' overall growth rate, which is unlikely to exceed 10 per cent. In this situation there should be room for sales of comparable goods by other developing countries. It must be remembered that these countries now play a role that is far from small in markets for manufactured exports (the growth of exports from them in 1976 was worth about $7,000 million). urthermore, developing countries trade little with each other. Such trade is greatly inhibited by their own import substitution policies. This has been of secondary importance because the market in developing countries is so much smaller than the market in the developed world, but its importance is increasing as markets in developing countries for tradable items are growing faster than those in developed countries. Preferential regional trading arrangements are very much a second-best option, and they are also very difficult to negotiate. Policies of general liberalization and reduced protection can be of far greater benefit and cost much less in terms of scarce administrative talent. Yet organized and controlled regional trading remains the conventional wisdom of leaders of the developing world when trade among themselves is under discussion.

I have discussed mainly manufactured goods, but it seems also likely that considerable gains could result from more intratrade in agricultural products and even minerals, although this seems to have been studied relatively little. Furthermore, there is little doubt that liberal trade regimes would help even if exports did not increase greatly. All the benefits arising from greater use of the price mechanism-the reduction in administration, in delays, in stocks, in corruption, and the increase in competition-occur anyway.

In the 1970s there have been renewed attacks on trade and foreign investment, much of it stemming from England. The focus is now more on the evils of inappropriate technology and its inappropriate products, on multinationals, and, indeed, on the transfer of capital in any formincluding aid. It is related to the increased emphasis on income distribution and poverty. But it is also claimed that trade has harmed the poor in developing countries. If there were no trade, none of

F

the other alleged evils could result.

How is it, then, that the developing countries have grown so fast as a group, that is by 5.6 per cent in 1960-65 and by 6.0 per cent in 1965-73? Within these averages, half a dozen countries have grown without special benefit from ample mineral resources, at rates which would have been deemed inconceivable 20 years ago. The industrialized countries do not grow as fast, nor the centrally planned economies either. None but Japan has ever achieved even half the growth rates of the half dozen developing countries with the best performance. Even Japan's high growth wa~ for nearly a hundred years based primarily on foreign technology, designed for countries with higher wage levels than Japan.

I suggest that the basic reason is plain.

Such rapid growth can only be the result of catching up by importing relatively inappropriate technology. The result is technical change. Yet economist Keith Griffin has recently advanced the theory that growth in developing countries has come predominantly from increases in the amount of labor and capital and not from technical change. Not only are his supporting figures and analysis inadequate, but the conclusion flies in the face of common sense. No one can be against making technology more appropriatethat is, more labor-intensive-but this should not blind one to the fact that I.M.D. Little, a noted British economist, has published widely on economic matters, especially on the problems of developing nations. He has held senior positions at Oxford University, the United Nations and the World Bank.

foreign technology can and has produced miracles. These benefits are found not only in the agricultural and industrial spheres but also in advances in public health and life expectancy. We can all agree that the poor in developing countries have not benefited from growth as much as desirable. But the claim that the mass of the poor have not benefited at all is rhetoric.

Even in Brazil, where inequality has increased with fast growth, it is clear that the poorest 40 per cent of the population has benefited. Most observers will also agree that they would have benefited more if development had been more labor-intensive. However, I am convinced that with appropriate and open policies on the part of the developing countries, more labor-intensive development would have resulted.

In the open and fast growing Asian economies, the standard of living of the relatively poor has been revolutionized in a period of 15 years. If one wants to look for millions who have scarcely benefited, or even lost out in the postwar period, there can be little doubt that one would find them most easily in the slow-growing, low-trading countries, principally in South Asia and the Sahel.

To attribute this primarily to foreign technology is the greatest absurdity. The attack, mainly Western-inspired, on the transfer of technology, and on one of its modes of transfer-the multinational firm-has gone much too far, and threatens the poor.

However, I do not think that these recent arguments for import and technology controls have much effect on leaders in the developing world, as they violate common sense. Even the hatred and fear of the multinationals, and the feeling of being "dominated," seem to be dying down, as developing countries come to realize their strength. Many countries in Latin America are trying to struggle out of the trap of having established an excessively inward-looking industrial structure. The problem is that change takes many years if it is to be relativelypainless for all. At the same time, potential exporters need confidence that exports will remain profitable, and this, in turn, means confidence that a government committed to change will remain in power. The tragedy is that elsewhere many countries seem to be falling into the old trap of anything goes, provided it is capital-intensive import substitution. 0

With the existing pattern of development it will take lowincome countries a century of very rapid growth to reach the level of Western Europe. More effective means must be found to meet basic human needs. he central issues in North-South relations at this time are twofold.

First, to what extent is the North now dependent on the South for its prosperity?In 19600r even 1970 most informed observers would have said that the North can prosper regardless of the progress of the South. Today, I think most would say it probably cannot.

The second major issue is the feasibility of overcoming the worst aspects of absolute poverty by the end of this century.

Again, this is a question which, if raised in 1960 or 1970, would clearly have drawn the answer that it could not be done. Today, people are more inclined to say, it probably can be done, given the political will. Seven principal conclusions emerge from the Overseas Development Council's analysis of the present situation.

• The international economic system is no longer working well for either the North or the South. In our judgment, unless there are major structural changes, the industrial democracies face the prospect through the 1980s and 1990s of persistent high inflation and slower growth.

• There is a consensus emerging that a return to satisfactory economic progress with lower inflation in the industrial democracies depends on far greater cooperation with-and involvement of-the developing countries of the South.

• The most basic human needs of some 800 million people are not being met at this time. It is worth remembering that this number is actually considerably larger than the number of people in absolute poverty 20 years ago. It is a smaller

T

percentage of the total, but the total number is larger. The consequences of this, I think, are brought out most dramatically when one looks at children's deaths around the world. In 1975, 15.5 million children of four years or less died in the world. Of those 15.5 million, 15million died in developing countries. And of that 15 million approximately half died from causes associated with hunger and malnutrition.

• If the worst aspects of absolute poverty could be overcome worldwide by the year 2000, this would mean 10 million fewer people dying each year and some 15 million to 20 million fewer people born each year.

• The industrialized countries belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) can generally be put into the category of not yet having made up their minds on exactly what to do on North-South and development cooperation issues. There is increasing vision in the rhetoric of leadership, but the action continues to lag.

• In our judgment it is very unlikely that there will be sustained progress on either the economic set of issues or the basic human needs set of issues unless the two go together. Unless the moral humanitarian impulse is expressed in a mutually reinforcing way, we think it unlikely that there will be forward economic movement.

• There is need for a new "statecraft" in the last decades of this century analogous to that which emerged in the late 1940s and early 1950s when the OECD countries were suddenly confronted with a new set of major political and economic realities. This new foreign policy must accommodate the new forces on the world scene.

What is the economic stake? One of t4e striking developments of the past five or six years is the very substantial increase in the importance of trade with the developing countries and especially of manufactured goods. In 1976 the OECD countries exported $123,000 million of manufactures to the developing countries and' imported about $ 30,000 million, for a

IW(Q)ill COOPERATIONbYJAMESGRANT net balance of more than $90,000 million. dramatized this recently by pointing out A second major economic impact that that in the United States the wholesale is only now beginning to be recognized price index over the past five years has is the tremendous potential for relations gone up 66 per cent. In textiles where, with the South affecting not only the gross despite non tariff barriers, there is a connational product and employment but siderable import pattern, they only went up 26 per cent. In household electronicsalso the rate of inflation in the North.

At the time of the food and oil crisis radios, television sets-where there are many fewer restrictions, prices in the last everyone was aware that rising commodity prices contributed substantially to infla- five years have actually dropped. tion worldwide. What is not well known The North has been very apprehensive is that, as we look ahead to the 1980s, about commodity agreements in dealing it appears that rising demand in the devel- with the South; the Overseas Development oping countries will re-create some very Council ran a major computer study to find out what would have happened if major pressures on the price front-on the food price, for example. As we look there had been commodity agreements down toward the end of the next decade, from 1963 to 1972. We discovered that continuation of present trends means over this period the developing countries that grain exports from North America would have gained about $5,000 million will need to increase from about 100 mil- by having such agreements, but the United lion tons per year to about 200 million States would have gained $15,000 million.

This makes it very clear that with the tons. North America does not have the right kind of cooperation with developcapacity to grow this amount of additional grain without a very substantial rise in ing countries there is a great potential the cost of production. for the South becoming an engine of At the same time, throughout the de- growth for the future as well as for veloped world there is no longer much helping to cope with inflation. idle land or, if there is idle land, it is lower yielding, water is scarcer and all the James Grant is president of the Overseas Develinputs bring diminishing returns. On the opment Council, a Washington-based private, other hand, the unutilized agricultural non profit organization devoted to economic potential is in the developing countries. development research.

India, for example, has the same cultivated acreage as the United States; its basic potential for growing food, hectare for hectare, is higher than the United States. But today India gets only 120 million tons of grain out of the same land from which the United States gets 250 million tons. If India could overcome its financial and institutional problems, it could be producing 300 million tons of grain a year at current price levels. Over the next 10 to 20 years, the world ought to be increasing grain production in places like India and Argentina, if we want to keep prices down. A very similar situation exists in energy.

A third area that we are just beginning to recognize is how important the import of manufactured goods is in keeping prices down in the United States. Robert McNamara, president of the World Bank,

It is quite clear that existing patterns of development are ineffective in addressing basic human needs, and that it would take the low-income countries a century of very rapid growth to reach the present level of Western Europe. Some more effective means needs to be found to address the problems of the very poor.

Even in the middle-income countries, which are growing faster than Europe or North America ever did, large groups of people are being left behind, to a greater extent than when Europe was industrialized in the 18th and 19th centuries.

It is striking, however, that some countries with very low incomes have made spectacular progress in meeting basic needs. In addition to China, there is a series of countries that have done quite well in this regard-South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and some other Asian countries that have combined a set of market economy approaches with income redistribution in a way that has brought dramatic improvements in well-being.

Income disparity in Taiwan is one-half that of the United States. And even though Taiwan's per capita income is very low, its life expectancy and infant mortality show a better record than that of Washington, D.C. Another country that has done extremely well in meeting basic needs is Sri Lanka. With a per capita income of $200, it now has life expectancy, infant mortality and literacy rates that the United States did not attain until about 1940.

In each of these cases the common feature is an extraordinary amount of political will to address the needs of the very poor.

The real question is how to re-create the same kind of political will in other countries-not only those of the South but also those of the North.

We are at a time of decision. The question is: What are we going to do on NorthSouth issues? So far the feeling that one gets is that there is, among the leadership both in the North and the South, a vision of the potential of mutually beneficial cooperation. The key issue is how to translate this vision into action.

e

rID For years, American printmaking was a quiet activity, confined to artists' studios and small, specialized galleries. But in the 1960s, prints began to appear in banks, department stores, airports and other public places. Artists who had never made prints became masters of the medium, and gallery owners who wouldn't have dreamed of handling prints began to sell them in large numbers.

The prints of the 1960s were big, bright, technologically dazzling and made of man y materials. Pop artist Claes Olden burg used polyurethane for his print Chrysler Airflow, for example; painter Larry Rivers printed on paper made from blue jeans; and artist Robert Rauschenberg printed his book, Shadows, on sheets of plastic. Printmaking boundaries expanded in a hundred directions. The presses ran nonstop, and journalists described the activity as a print revival. Seen in retrospect, it was more of a revolution; not since the 1890s in France had so many major artists focused their attention on printmaking.

One factor in this revolution was a growing interest in art by large numbers of Americans who also had enough money to begin buying it. As a result, the market in contemporary paintings boomed and prices soared. Limited-edition prints remained relatively inexpensive in contrast to paintings, and began attracting large numbers of buyers. Today, for example, a painting by an artist like Roy Lichtenstein may sell for as much as $100,000,while his prints sell for $400 to $1,800. But the reasons for the popularity of prints were more than economic. The abstract expressionists of the 1950s had not been attracted to the graphic arts. A fragmented, painstakingly detailed process, printmaking did not interest abstract painters whose works captured the subjective gestures of their hands and brushes.

The artists of the sixties, by comparison, experimented with an enormous range of images and materials. Jasper Johns painted pictures of flags and targets-linear designs adaptable to printmaking. Andy Warhol used a silk-screen printing process to enlarge and transfer photographs of such pop-culture figure as Marilyn Monroe onto canvas. Much of the art of the sixties came straight from the printing press: Robert Rauschenberg used newspapers in his work, and Roy Lichtenstein based his paintings on comic book images. For artists such as these, the discovery of printmaking was natural and logical.

The person chiefly responsible for the growth of graphic workshops in America is June Wayne, a painter, tapestry artist and lithographer. For years, Wayne had to go to Paris when she wanted to make lithographs. In 1959 she met W. McNeil Lowry, director of the Program in the Arts and Humanities of the Ford Foundation. Wayne outlined the difficulties of being .an American lithographer. Only one master printer worked in the United States, and the number of French printers was dwindling. The lithographic art, she said, was dying.

Wayne sent Lowry a proposal for reviving the art of lithography in America. In 1960, she received a four-part, $ 2 million grant from the Ford Foundation and opened the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, California.

Tamarind set out to create a pool of master printers and to expose American artists to the collaborative process of printmaking. Its success was astounding. Tamarind's staff

trained printers, attracted a host of visual artists, and studied how prints should be made, stored, framed, exhibited and sold.

The initial grant for Tamarind ended in 1970. With the help of a smaller Ford grant, the workshop continues under the name of the Tamarind institute in a new location-Albuquerque, New Mexico, where it is an affiliate of the University of New Mexico. The institute's main¡ focus is the master printer program. Each year, Tamarind chooses approximately 10 students for the program; after a year, the institute selects a smaller group to complete the two-year master-printer course.

Although these numbers are relatively small, Tamarind remains the foundation of American lithography. In all, about 400 artists have worked at Tamarind; another 100 artisans have been through the printing program. Today, virtually every sizable American city has a printmaking workshop, and many of them have Tamarind connections.

But Tamarind isn't solely responsible for the revival of American print making. In 1957, Tatyana Grosman founded Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE), America's oldest print making and publishing workshop.

Twenty-two years ago, when Grosman first carried a portfolio of prints to curators and dealers, few were interested. Today, eager customers line up to buy ULAE prints. The prints set the standard for quality in printed art, and even the right to buy one of them is considered a privilege.

Each printmaking workshop reflects the sensibility of its publisher or master printer. ULAE is European and oldfashioned; Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles, on the other hand, was the first contemporary all-American workshop. For a short while, Gemini was the biggest and most glamorous of the printmaking studios, and the artists who worked there in the late 1960soften were treated like Hollywood stars.

The prints Gemini made reflected the extravagant lifestyles and technological daring of the times. Rauschenberg's six-foot-tall print called Booster and Jasper Johns' molded lead relief images, for example, were dramatic pieces of work that displayed the sensibility of the artists as well as the technical prowess of master printer Kenneth Tyler.

In 1970, Kenneth Tyler, the technical wizard at Gemini, moved to the East Coast to found Tyler Graphics in Bedford, New York. Many of the artists who work at Gemini and ULAE also work in Tyler's studio-among them, Robert Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler, Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella.

Recently, Tyler installed a large papermaking machine in his studio, and he has been coaxing artists to experiment with making images out of paper. Frank Stella, for example, has made molded relief images out of a special drie~ paper pulp that has a texture as rough as matted wheat. Stella handpaints each image differently, thereby subverting a basic tenet of printmaking that every print in an edition must be identical.

The objective of American printmaking and related techniques is no longer to make identical, multiple images, but to create art.

About the Author: Judith Goldman, her self a former printmaker, is adviser to the print department of New York's Whitney Museum. A regular contributor to Vogue, she is working on a book about painter James Rosenquist ..

Robert Rauschenberg, "Kitty Hawk," lithograph

A Pop Perspective The refinement and development of graphic and printmakingtechniques are currently on display in India 'in an unusual art exhibit entitled, "The 70s: A Pop Perspective." Touring Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta and Madras, the exhibit presents 36 works of four notable pop artists: Andy Warhol (rightFlower Print, silk-screen line dI;awing, hand-colored by the artist and his 'collaborators), Roy Lichtenstein (above-Still Life With Pitcher and Flowers, lithograph and silk screen), Claes Oldenburg and James Rosenquist. The show illustrates the artists' personal development and their expansion of the print medium.

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American Printmaker in India American artist-print maker Carol Summers is currently in India conducting printmaking workshops in Delhi, Chandigarh, Baroda, Calcutta and Trivandrum. Summers, whose woodcut, Nightfall,is shown above, held similar workshops in India in 1974.

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James Rosenquist,

"Off the

Continental Divide," lithograph.

Jim Dine, "Spray-Painted Robe" (above), hand-colored combination of an etching and lithograph. " Die Maker" (left), hand-colored etching.

A new photographic exhibit, now touring the·United States, reveals the camera as a means of conveying a·personal vision rather than the pnblic information usually expected of i~.

GAR¥ BEYDLER, "20 Minutes in April," 1976; type C print; Museum of Modern Art, New York; acquired with matching funds from David H. McAlpin and the National Endowmentfor the Arts.

LUCAS SAMARAS, "Photo Transformation 6469," 1976; Polaroid SX-70 print; Museum of Modern Art, New York; gift of the American Art Foundation.

"Mirrors and Windows: American Photography Since 1960" is no ordinary survey of photography. The exhibit is the creation of John Szarkowski who, as director of the New York Museum of Modern Art's (MOMA) department of photography, is considered by many to be the doyen of the concept of photography as art. Moreover, most of the 200 prints that comprise it are taken from the department's permanent collection which, founded in 1940, is the. oldest and most prestigious of its kind in America.

The exhibition, which opened in New York last year, is now traveling to seven other locations around the country. It features 100 protagonists whose work combines to illustrate the radical change that has overtaken the medium during the past two decades. Photography is no longer primarily a conveyance for public information, social documentation and entertainment, but a' channel for personal visions that often border on the hermetic. In a catalogue illustrated by 127 pictures from the show, Szarkowski presents an essay in which the shift from public to. private concerns is analyzed, and the work divided into the categories named in the title. "Mirrors" are pictures concerned with self-expression, often in a romantic or surrealistic mode; "Windows" are attempts at objective exploration of reality.

A surprising aspect of the show is that although it is a confirmation of photography's status as high art, it seems also to be returning the medium to the people by glorifying the snapshot and the banal object.

As one informed amateur speculating on the show remarked: "All those people like me who take snapshots and stick them in albums are about to discover that what they've been doing all these years is art." Szarkowski in his monograph puts the photography of the last 20 years in perspective by touching on its early history and by describing the good old days of the picture magazines.

As late as the 1950s, there existed, in hi.s view, the feeling that there was "possibly,

and Windows' of America a coincidence between the creative photographer and the mass publisher." By 1960, this illusion had begun to fade and, with the demise of Life and Look, it disappeared altogether.

In Szarkowski's opinion, the photojournalists of the 1960s forgot the cardinal rule that "most issues of importance cannot be photographed." The coverage of Vietnam was, he says, "opaque and superficial" and came nowhere near explaining the war or revealing the sense of "moral frailty and failure" that it aroused in most Americans.

Of course, photojournalists were not the only casualties of the period. Professionals were gradually being ousted from what Szarkowski calls the "vernacular function"portraits, wedding pictures, architectural views and the like. If done at all, duties like these were being performed by amateurs, for cameras had become so easy to use that anyone could take a serviceable photograph.

Ironically enough, it was just as the selfsustaining professional was on the way out that the medium began to acquire intellectual and aesthetic clout. Before World War II, photographers had learned their trade through some form of apprenticeship or by personal trial and error. Afterward, photography became a subject to take in college and to receive degrees in, for the poom in cultural education had started. It became a feature in the newly formed arts departments of American universities, and practitioners were being turned out by the thousands, along with their future appreciators. A 'by~ product of this situation was the crosspollination between photography and printmaking, an exchange that conferred on one the cachet of art, and on the other a certain modernist chic.

So it was that the photographer gradually became estranged from the society of which he had once been so useful a member.

Meanwhile, the professionals themselves were widening the gap by switching their attention from "craft to content," and, furthermore, to content of an increasingly mysterious kind. Still more influential were what Szarkowski calls "perhaps the three most important events in American photography of the fifties." These were: the founding by Minor¡ White of Aperture magazine in 1952; "The Family of Man" show organized by Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955; and the publication in 1959 of The Americans, an ironic documentary by the Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank.

Of the three, notes the author, only "The Family of Man" was a popular success.

The show was an outstanding example of "the group journalism concept of photography-in which the personal intentions of the photographer are subservient to a larger. overriding concept." Even so, the event served only to mark the end of the old

era, leaving Aperture and The Americans to inaugurate the new. Different as the magazine and book'were, together they represented the beginning of the triumph of personal vision in photography. "The values that White and Frank held in common," writes Szarkowski, "defined the perimeters of thought and feeling that were available to the photographers of their time. The differences between them very nearly defined the range of options that were available within those boundaries."

This, the crux of Szarkowski's essay, suffers the most from paraphrase. The curator divides pictures into four typesdocumentary, pictorial, informational and "the equivalent" -of which the last is the most important. Alfred Stieglitz had devised the term "equivalent" to define pictures that stood for "a feeling he had about something other than the subject of the photograph."

White and Chappell took it further by saying that "one of the safer identifying marks of the equivalent is a feeling that for unstatable reasons some picture is decidedly significant to you."

Szarkowski characterizes such notions of the ineffable as "fundamentally romantic, anti-intellectual and profoundly self-centered," but he is careful not to use them against White. Classifying his art as the archetypal "Mirror," he nominates the "fey, Edwardian surrealism" of Jerry N. Uelsmann as its chief derivative.

Noteworthy among "Mirrors" is a color print by Lucas Samaras, who until recently was best known as a maker of far-out assemblages. At first the picture seems to be an animal's face with one heavily lashed eye.

But the eye is actually a peacock's feather, and the flesh-colored background turns out to be a warmly lit space with a figure (probably the artist's own) capering in it. Another surrealistwork is Jerry N. Uelsmann' s woman lying in a field that has metamorphosed into water in the foreground, while her pose is repeated by an uprooted tree on the horizon.

Painting in one way or another influences many of the "Mirrors," as in the Morris Louis-likeveil of color, made by the awning's reflection in "Corner of 38th Street," by Ernst Haas.

Because of the way photographic color tends to be sentimental, Helen Levitt's slum street scene with children could be mistaken for a "Mirror" when it is in fact a "Window."

Similarly, only those who have visited Charleston, South Carolina, would know that Stephen Shore's view of its pink and yellowbuildings is stark realism.

In the end, it is the show's overall impressionthat proves most powerful. Expressive or exploratory, most of the prints are cool to the point of disdainfulness, and many are so

ambiguous as to suggest impotence. More often than not, "equivalent" turns out to mean the kind of banality that comes from straining after the "something else" that the photographers have been either unable or unwilling to define even to themselves.

Szarkowski himself supplies the exhibition's most pertinent criticism by observing that photographic concerns can be "unfamiliar, eccentric, esoteric, artistically arcane, stubbornly subtle, or refined to the point of aridity. " Naturally, not everyone agrees that "Mirrors and Windows" provides the best framework on which to hang recent photography.

Anticipating this, the director qualifies his

thesis by saying that it is less a matter of dividing photography into two parts than seeing it as "a continuum, a single axis with two poles." He admits, also, that many of the pictures "live close to the axis" and invites spectators to rearrange them as they please-and as he himself may do after further reflection.

Szarkowski states early on that his aim is clarity. His critics may carp at his interpretation of modern photography, but they'll have to admit that it is as clear as the sharpest¡ print in his show.

0 About the Author: Vivien Raynor is an art critic. with The New York Times.

THE

KUGEL EPISODE

SS

A short story by Woody Allen Kugelmass, a professor of humanities at City College, was unhappily married for the second time. Daphne Kugelmass was an oaf. He also had two dull sons by his first wife, Flo, and was up to his neck in alimony and child support.

"Did I know it would turn out so badly?" Kugelmass whined to his analyst one day. "Daphne had promise. Who suspected she'd let herself go and swell up like a beach ball? Plus she had a few bucks, which is not in itself a healthy reason to marry a person, but it doesn't hurt, with the kind of operating nut I have. You see my point?"

Kugelmass was bald and as hairy as a bear, but he had soul.

"I need to meet a new woman," he went on. "I need to have an affair. I may not look the part, but I'm a man who needs romance.

I need softness, I need flirtation. I'm not getting younger, so before it's too late I want to make love in Venice, trade quips at '21,' and exchange coy glances over red wine and candlelight.

You see what I'm saying?"

Dr. Mandel shifted in his chair and said, "An affair will solve nothing. You're so unrealistic. Your problems run much deeper."

"And also this affair must be discreet," Kugelmass continued.

"I can't afford a second divorce. Daphne would really sock it to me."

"Mr. Kugelmass-" "But it can't be anyone at City College, because Daphne also works there. Not that anyone on the faculty at C.C.N. Y.! is any great shakes, but some of those coeds .... " "Mr. Kugelmass-" "Help me. I had a dream last night. I was skipping through a meadow holding a picnic basket and the basket was marked 'Options.' And then I saw there was a hole in the basket."

"Mr. Kugelmass, the worst thing you could do is act out.

You must simply express your feelings here, and together we'll analyze them. You have been in treatment long enough to know there is no overnight cure. After all, I'm an analyst, not a magician."

"Then perhaps what I need is a magician," Kugelmass said, rising from his chair. And with that he terminated his therapy.

A couple of weeks later, while Kugelmass and Daphne were moping around in their apartment one night like two pieces of old furniture, the phone rang.

"I'll get it," Kugelmass said. "Hello."

"Kugelmass?" a voice said. "Kugelmass, this is Persky."

"Who?" "Persky. Or should I say The Great Persky?"

"Pardon me?"

"I hear you're looking all over town for a magician to bring a little exotica into your life? Yes or no?"

"Sh-h-h," Kugelmass whispered. "Don't hang up. Where are you calling from, Persky?"

Early the following afternoon, Kugelmass climbed three flights of stairs in a broken-down apartment house in the Bush-

wick section of Brooklyn. Peering through the darkness of the hall, he found the door he was looking for and pressed the bell. rm going to regret this, he thought to himself.

Seconds later, he was greeted by a short, thin, waxy-looking man.

"You're Persky the Great?" Kugelmass said.

"The Great Persky. You want a tea2?"

"No, I want romance. I want music. I want love and beauty."

"But not tea, eh? Amazing. O.K., sit down."

Persky went to the back room, and Kugelmass heard the sounds of boxes and furniture being moved around .. Persky reappeared, pushing before him a large object on squeaky rollerskate wheels. He removed some old silk handkerchiefs that were lying on its top and blew away a bit of dust. It was a cheaplooking Chinese cabinet, badly lacquered.

"Persky," Kugelmass said, "what's your scam3?"

"Pay attention," Persky said. "This is some beautiful effect.

I developed it for a Knights of Pythias date last year, but the booking fell through. Get into the cabinet."

"Why, so you can stick it full of swords or something?"

"Y ou see any swords?"

Kugelmass made a face and, grunting, climbed into the cabinet. He couldn't help noticing a couple of ugly rhinestones glued onto the raw plywood just in front of his face. "If this is a joke," he said.

"Some joke. Now, here's the point. If! throw any novel into this cabinet with you, shut the doors, and tap it three times, you

"You got it, Kugelmass. Give me a holler when you've had enough." Persky tossed in a paperback copy of Flaubert's novel.

"Y ou sure this is safe?" Kugelmass asked as Persky began shutting the cabinet doors.

"Safe. Is anything safe in this crazy world?" Persky rapped three times on the cabinet and then flung open the doors.

Kugelmass was gone. At the same moment, he appeared in the bedroom of Charles and Emma Bovary's house at Yonville.

Before him was a beautiful woman, standing alone with her back turned to him as she folded some linen. I can't believe this, thought Kugelmass, staring at the doctor's ravishing wife. This is uncanny. I'm here. It's her.

Emma turned in surprise. "Goodness, you startled me," she said. "Who are you?" She spoke in the same fine English translation as the paperback.

It's simply devastating, he thought. Then, realizing that it was he whom she had addressed, he said, "Excuse me. I'm Sidney Kugelmass. I'm from City College. A professor of humanities. C.C.N.Y.? Uptown. I-oh, boy!"

Emma Bovary smiled flirtatiously and said, "Would you like a drink? A glass of wine, perhaps?"

She is beautiful, Kugelmass thought. What a contrast with the troglodyte who shared his bed! He felt a sudden impulse to take this vision into his arms and tell her she was the kind of woman he had dreamed of all his life.

"Yes, some wine," he said hoarsely. "White. No, red. No, white. Make it white."

"Charles is out for the day," Emma said, her voice full of playful implication.

After the wine, they went for a stroll in the lovely French countryside. "I've always dreamed that some mysterious stranger would appear and rescue me from the monotony of this crass rural existence," Emma said, clasping his hand. They passed a small church. "I love what you have on," she murmured.

"I've never seen anything like it around here. It's so ... so modern."

"It's called a leisure suit," he said romantically. "It was marked down." Suddenly he kissed her. For the next hour they reclined under a tree and whispered together and told each other deeply meaningful things with their eyes. Then Kugelmass sat will find yourself projected into that book." up. He had just remembered he had to meet Daphne at BloomingKugelmass made a grimace of disbelief.

"It's the emess,4" Persky said. "My hand to God. Not just dale's. "I must go," he told her. "But don't worry, I'll be back."

"I hope so," Emma said. a novel, either. A short story, a play, a poem. You can meet any He embraced her passionately, and the two walked back to the of the women created by the world's best writers. Whoever you dreamed of. You could carry on all you like with a real winner. house. He held Emma's face cupped in his palms, kissed her Then when you've had enough you give a yell, and I'll see you're again, and yelled, "O.K., Persky! I got to be at Bloomingdale's by three- thirty. " back here in a split second."

There was an audible pop, and Kugelmass was back in "Persky, are you some kind of outpatient?"

Brooklyn.

"I'm telling you it's on the level," Persky said.

"So? Did I lie?" Persky asked triumphantly. .

Kugelmass remained skeptical. "What are you telling me"Look, Persky, I'm right now late to meet the ball and chain that this cheesy homemade box can take me on a ride like you're at Lexington Avenue, but when can I go again? Tomorrow?" describing?"

"My pleasure. Just bring a twenty. And don't mention this to "For a double sawbuck."

Kugelmass reached for his wallet. "I'll believe this when I see anybody."

"Yeah. I'm going to call Rupert Murdoch. 5" it," he said.

Kugelmass hailed a cab and sped off to the city. His heart Persky tucked the bills in his pants pocket and turned toward his bookcase. "So who do you want to meet? Sister Carrie? danced on point. I am in love, he thought, I am the possessor of a Hester Prynne? Ophelia? Maybe someone by Saul Bellow? wonderful secret. What he didn't realize was that at this very Hey, what about Temple Drake? Although for a man your age moment students in various classrooms across the country were saying to their teachers, "Who is this character on page 100? she'd be a workout."

A bald Jew is kissing Madame Bovary?" A teacher in Sioux "French. I want to have an affair with a French lover."

Falls, South Dakota, sighed and thought, Jesus, these kids, with "Nana?" their pot and acid. What goes through their minds!

"I don't want to have to pay for it."

"What about Natasha in War and Peace?"

"I said French. I know! What about Emma Bovary? That IThe College of Ihe CilY of New York. 2Marijuana cigarette.

3Une, racket. 4Truth. 5Publisher of the New York Post. sounds to me perfect."

THE KUGELMASS EPISODE continued

Daphne Kugelmass was in the bathroom-accessories department at Bloomingdale's when Kugelmass arri.ved breathlessly.

"Where've you been?" she snapped. "It's four-thirty."

"I got held up in traffic," Kugelmass said.

Kugelmass visited Persky the next day, and in a few minutes was again passed magically to Yonville. Emma couldn't hide her excitement at seeing him. The two spent hours together, laughing and talking about their different backgrounds. Before Kugelmass left, they made love. "My God, I'm doing it with Madame Bovary!" Kugelmass whispered to himself. "Me, who failed freshman English."

As the months passed, Kugelmass saw Persky many times and developed a close and passionate relationship with Emma Bovary. "Make sure and always get me into the book before page 120," Kugelmass said to the magician one day. "I always have to meet her before she hooks up with this Rodolphe character."

"Why?" Persky asked. "You can't beat his time?"

"Beat his time. He's landed gentry. Those guys have nothing better to do than flirt and ride horses. To me, he's one of those faces you see in the pages of Women's Wear Daily. With the Helmut Berger hairdo. But to her he's hot stuff."

"And her husband suspects nothing?"

"He's out of his depth. He's a lacklustre little paramedic who's thrown in his lot with a jitterbug. He's ready to go to sleep by ten, and she's putting on her dancing shoes. Oh, ,well.... See, you later."

And once again Kugelmass entered the cabinet and passed instantly to the Bovary estate at Yonville. "How you doing, cupcake?" he said to Emma.

"Oh, Kugelmass," Emma sighed. "What I have to put up with. Last night at dinner, Mr. Personality dropped off to sleep in the middle of the dessert course. I'm pouring my heart out about Maxim's and the ballet, and out of the blue I hear snoring."

"It's O.K., darling. I'm here now," Kugelmass said, embracing her. I've earned this, he thought, smelling Emma's French perfume and burying his nose in her hair. I've suffered enough. I've paid enough analysts. I've searched till I'm weary.

She's young and nubile, and I'm here a few pages after Leon and just before Rodolphe. By showing up during the correct chapters, I've got the situation knocked.

Emma, to be sure, was just as happy as Kugelmass. She had been starved for excitement, and his tales of Broadway night life, of fast cars and Hollywood and TV stars, enthralled the young French beauty.

"Tell me again about O.J. Simpson,6" she implored that evening, as she and Kugelmass strolled past Abbe Bournisien's church.

"What can I say? The man is great. He sets all kinds of rushing records. Such moves. They can't touch him."

"And the Academy Awards?" Emma said wistfully. "I'd give anything to win one."

"First you've got to be nominated."

"I know. You explained it. But I'm convinced I can act. Of course, I'd want to take a class or two. With Strasberg maybe.

Then, if! had the right agent-" "We'll see, we'll see. I'll speak to Persky."

That night, safely returned to Persky's flat, Kugelmass brought up the idea of having Emma visit him in the big city.

"Let me think about it," Persky said. "Maybe I could work it.

Stranger things have happened." Of course, neither of them could think of one.

"Wherelhe hell do you go all the time?" Daphne Kugelmass barked at her husband as he returned home late that evening.

"You got a chippie stashed somewhere?"

"Yeah, sure, I'm just the type," Kugelmass said wearily.

"I was with Leonard Popkin. We were discussing Socialist agriculture in Poland. You know Popkin. He's a freak on the subject."

"Well, you've been very odd lately," Daphne said. "Distant.

Just don't forget about my father's birthday. On Saturday?"

"Oh, sure, sure," Kugelmass said, heading for the bathroom.

"My whole family will be there. We can see the twins. And Cousin Hamish. You should be more polite to Cousin Hamishhe likes you."

"Right, the twins," Kugelmass said, closing the bathroom door and shutting out the sound of his wife's voice. He leaned against it and took a deep breath. In a few hours, he told himself, he would be back in Yonville again, back with his beloved. And this time, if all went well, he would bring Emma back with him.

At three-fifteen the following afternoon, Persky worked his wizardry again. Kugelmass appeared before Emma, smiling and eager. The two spent a few hours at Yonville with Binet and then remounted the Bovary carriage. Following Persky's instructions, they held each other tightly, closed their eyes, and counted to ten.

When they opened them, the carriage was just drawing up at the side door of the Plaza Hotel, where Kugelmass had optimistically reserved a suite earlier in the day.

"I love it! It's everything I dreamed it would be," Emma said as she swirled joyously around the bedroom, surveying the city from their window. "There's F.A.O. Schwarz? And there's Central Park, and the Sherry is which one? Oh, there-I see.

It's too divine."

On the bed there were boxes from Halston and Saint Laurent.

Emma unwrapped a package and held up a pair of black velvet pants against her perfect body.

"The slacks suit is by Ralph Lauren," Kugelmass said.

"You'll look like a million bucks in it. Come on, sugar, give us a kiss."

"I've never been so happy!" Emma squealed as she stood before the mirror. "Let's go out on the town. I want to see 'Chorus Line' and the Guggenheim and this Jack Nicholson character you always talk about. Are any of his flicks showing?"

"I cannot get my mind around this," a Stanford professor said. "First a strange character named Kugelmass, and now she's gone from the book. Well, I guess the mark of a classic is that you can reread it a thousand times and always find something new." he lovers passed a blissful weekend. Kugelmass had told Daphne he would be away at a symposium in Boston and would return Monday. Savoring each moment, he and Emma went to the movies, had dinner in Chinatown, passed two hours at a discotheque, and went to bed with a TV movie. They slept till noon on Sunday, visited SoHo, and ogled celebrities at Elaine's. They had caviar and champagne in their suite on Sunday night and talked until dawn. That morning, in the cab taking them to Persky's apartment, Kugelmass thought, It was hectic, but worth it. I can't bring her here too often, but now and then it will be a charming contrast with Yonville.

At Persky's, Emma climbed into the cabinet, arranged her new boxes of clothes neatly around her, and kissed Kugelmass fondly. "My place next time," she said with a wink. Persky rapped three times on the cabinet. Nothing happened.

"Hmm," Persky said, scratching his head. He rapped again, but still no magic. "Something must be wrong," he mumbled.

"Persky, you're joking!" Kugelmass cried. "How can it not work?"

"Relax, relax. Are you still in the box, Emma?"

"Yes." Persky rapped again-harder this time.

"I'm still here, Persky."

"I know, darling. Sit tight."

T

"Persky, we have to get her back," Kugelmass whispered. ''I'm a married man, and I have a class in three hours. I'm not prepared for anything more than a cautious affair at this point."

"I can't understand it," Persky muttered. "It's such a reliable little trick."

But he could do nothing. "It's going to take a little while," he said to Kugelmass. "I'm going to have to strip it down. I'll call you later."

Kugelmass bundled Emma into a cab and took her back to the Plaza. He barely made it to his class on time. He was'on the phone all day, to Persky and to his mistress. The magician told him it might be several days before he got to the bottom of the trouble.

"How was the symposium?" Daphne asked him that night.

"Fine, fine," he said, lighting the filter end of a cigarette.

"What's wrong? You're as tense as a cat."

"Me? Ha, that's a laugh. I'm as calm as a summer night.

I'm just going to take a walk." He eased out the door, hailed a cab, and flew to the Plaza.

"This is no good," Emma said. "Charles will miss me."

"Bear with me, sugar," Kugelmass said. He was pale and sweaty. He kissed her again, raced to the elevators, yelled at Persky over a pay phone in the Plaza lobby, and just made it home before midnight.

"According to Popkin, barley prices in Krakow have not been this stable since 1971," he said to Daphne, and smiled wanly as he climbed into bed. he whole week went by like that. On Friday night, Kugelmass told Daphne there was another symposium he had to catch, this one in Syracuse. He hurried back to the Plaza, but the second weekend there was nothing like the first. "Get me back into the novel or marry me," Emma told Kugelmass. "Meanwhile, I want to get a job or go to class, because watching TV all day is the pits."

"Fine. We can use the money," Kugelmass said. "You consume twice your weight in room service."

"I met an Off Broadway producer in Central Park yesterday, and he said I might be right for a project he's doing," Emma said.

"Who is this clown?" Kugelmass asked.

"He's not a clown. He's sensitive and kind and cute. His name's Jeff Something-or-Other, and he's up for a Tony."

Later that afternoon, Kugelmass showed up at Persky's drunk.

"Relax," Persky told him. "You'll get a coronary."

"Relax. The man says relax. I've got a fictional character stashed in a hotel room, and I think my wife is haVing me tailed by a private shamus."

"O.K., O.K. We know there's a problem." Persky crawled under the cabinet and started banging on something with a large wrench. ''I'm like a wild animal," Kugelmass went on. "I'm sneaking around town, and Emma and I have had it up to here with each other. Not to mention a hotel tab that reads like the defense budget."

"So what should I do? This is the world of magic," Persky said. "It's all nuance."

"Nuance, my foot. I'm pouring Dom Perignon and black eggs into this little mouse, plus her wardrobe, plus she's enrolled at the Neighborhood Playhouse and suddenly needs professional photos. Also, Persky, Professor Fivish Kopkind, who teaches Camp Lit and who has always been jealous of me, has identified meas the sporadically appearing character in the Flaubert book, He's threatened to go to Daphne. I see ruin and alimony jail.

For adultery with Madame Bovary, my wife will reduce me to beggary."

"What do you want me to say? I'm working on it night and

T

day. As far as your personal anxiety goes, that I can't help you with. I'm a magician, not an analyst."

By Sunday,afternoon, Emma had locked herself in the bathroom and refused to respond to Kugelmass'g entreaties.

Kugelmass stared out the window at the Wollman Rink and contemplated suicide. Too bad this is a low floor, he thought, or I'd do it right now. Maybe if I ran away to Europe and started life over .... Maybe I could sell the International Herald Tribune, like those young girls used to.

The phone rang. Kugelmass lifted it to his ear mechanically.

"Bring her over," Persky said. "I think I got the bugs out of it."

Kugelmass's heart leaped. "You're serious?" he said. "You got it licked ?"

"It was something in the transmission. Go figure."

"Persky, you're a genius. We'll be there in a minute. Less than a minute."

Again the lovers hurried to the magician's apartment, and again Emma Bovary climbed into the cabinet with her boxes.

This time there was no kiss. Persky shut the doors, took a deep breath, and tapped the box three times. There was the reassuring popping noise, and when Persky peered inside, the box was empty. Madame Bovary was back in her novel. Kugelmass heaved a great sigh of relief and pumped the magician's hand.

"It's over," he said. "I learned my lesson. I'll never cheat again, I swear it." He pumped Persky's hand again and made a mental note to send him a necktie.

Three weeks later, at the end of a beautiful spring afternoon, Persky answered his doorbell. It was Kugelmass, with a sheepish expression on his face.

"O.K., Kugelmass," the magician said. "Where to this time?"

"It's just this once," Kugelmass said. "The weather is so lovely, and I'm not getting any younger. Listen, you've read Portnoy's Complaint? Remember The Monkey?"

"The price is now twenty-five dollars, because the cost of living is up, but I'll start you off with one freebie, due to all the trouble I caused you."

"You're good people," Kugelmass said, combing his few remaining hairs as he climbed into the cabinet again. "This'll work all right?"

"I hope. But I haven't tried it much since all that unpleasantness."

"Sex and romance," Kugelmass said from inside the box.

"What we go through for a pretty face."

Persky tossed in a copy of Portnoy's Complaint and rapped three times on the box. This time, instead of a popping noise there was a dull explosion, followed by a series of crackling noises and a shower of sparks. Persky leaped back, was seized by a heart attack, and dropped dead. The cabinet burst into flames, and eventually the entire house burned down.

Kugelmass, unaware of this catastrophe, had his own problems. He had not been thrust into Portnoy's Complaint, or into any other novel, for that matter. He had been projected into an old textbook, Remedial Spanish, and was running for his life over a barren, rocky terrain as the word" tener" ("to have")-a large and hairy irregular verb-raced after him on its spindly legs.

0 Better known as an actor, filmmaker and Hollywood's "comic genius," Woody Allen also writes humorous articles for The New Yorker.

'His writings have been collected in two volumes, Progressing from gag writing and stage shows to movies, Allen began making his own films in /969, After some hilariqus parodies, he began to be taken seriously when he made a tender comedy, Annie Hall, in 1977 which won four Academy Awards. His latest film is Manhattan.

e 9'arieties of In this close and revealing scrutiny of William James' ground-breaking study of the religious personality, the father of American pragmatism emerges as an insightful psychologist of the spiritual condition in both East and West.

lV;

illiam James' Gifford Lectures, The Varieties of Religious Experience, delivered in 1901and published the next year, marked, in the matter of religious'inquiry, a sort of American coming of age. Not that there had been no religious tracts or compilations before. But, generally speaking, till then America had been at the receiving end. It is remarkable how the book, an immediate success, has maintained its eminence, readability, lost little of its freshness.

Neither an anthropologist, a theologian, nor a historian of religions, but essentially a psychologist, William James takes us through a conducted tour of what he calls the "religious propensities" of mankind. Dealing solely with individual cases, he avoids, as far as possible, the theological or institutional aspects of the subject. The reason for doing so, for choosing mostly "abnormal psychological visitations," is that these come from men "for whom religion exists not as a dull habit but as an acute fever rather." George Fox, with whom the citations open, was "a psychopath or detraque of the deepest dye." All the same, James is anything but a crass determinist and sharply rejects "the bugaboo of morbid origin." Origin, real or supposed, does not explain value.

An unashamed pluralist, he looks upon religion as "a collective name." Religious experience is tailored to the recipient.

Quot homines, tot sententiae. Big or small, every religious soul reveals "the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude, insofar as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider to be divine."

Aware that the last word ("divine") may cause trouble, James at once narrows it down to mean solemn reality. Today's favorite phrase would be "the sacred" or "the idea of the holy." To believe him, "no other emotion than the religious can bring man to this pass," that is, so close

to the threshold, a crisis situation.

Here James draws attention to two types of religious emotion, which he calls, respectively, the religion of the healthyminded and the religion of the sick soul.

It is interesting that while he recommends the first, his preference may be for the second. The sick soul takes the evil aspects, the minus points of life, as its very essence. The completest religions, says James, are those in which the pessimistic elements are best developed-for instance, Buddhism and Christianity, both religions of deliverance based on metanoia or conversIOn. To the "twice-born," a phrase with obvious Indian echoes, life is lived on more than one level, with a strong tension between the mundane and the transcendental. Conversion implies a transvaluation of values: interests once central grow peripheral and vice versa. The why and how of the process are hard to account for. No one rubric will contain all the categories. St. Paul's conversion on the Damascus Road was sharp and quick.

But in religious history there is evidence of gradual change as well. Between the slow and the swift, the actual and potential fields, the margin fluctuates.

Refusing the ready refuge in a doctrine of grace, the pragmatist James insists on the "fruits of life" theory as the only valid proof of change. "If not, we ought to make short work with it, no matter what supernatural being may have infused it." However, since the highest thing attained by religious experience is saintliness, it is not surprising that he should devote no less than three chapters to it.

James singles out some of its striking features: the sense of a wider, an ideal, world, a spirit of self-surrender, elation and freedom. It is as if an energy of delight (ananda) has touched the earth.

Though he does not spell it out, religion is the only psychotherapy. Only here too the ascetics-sick souls?-have carved out a niche of their own. The opposition between have and be men has freely ranged from a healthy austerity to mortificatory excesses: the burlap shirt, the pebbles in the shoe, some of which the Roman Church has counted as merit and mark of superior virtue. With connoisseurs of conflict, masters of metaphysical poetry, like St. John of the Cross, it reaches a vertigo of Zen-like paradoxes. Here are a few chosen at random: "Not to want what is easy but what is hardest .... Not to will anything but to will nothing .... To

come to the All you must give up All." The corruption of the best is the worst.

After a point devotion cannot be distinguished from fanaticism. Misplaced tenderness, for instance, may preserve the unfit specimen. Still, to say, as Nietzsche did, that most saints are sophisticated invalids and Christianity but a religion of slaves and their resentment is a colossal, if characteristic, misunderstanding. On the whole, James has no hesitation in saying ("This is my conclusion so far"): "Economically, the saintly group of qualities is indispensable to the world's welfare.

Let us be saints, then, whether or not we succeed visibly and temporally."

With sanctity entering the stage, the plot thickens. The truth claim can no longer be shelved. "Religious persons have

IN THE WORDS OF WILLIAM JAMES Summing up in the broadest possible way the characteristics of the religious life, as we have found them, it includes the following beliefs: 1. That the visible world' is part of a more spiritual universe from which it draws its chief significance; 2. That union or harmonious relation with that higher universe is our true end: 3. That prayer or inner communion with the spirit thereof-be that spirit "God" or "law"is a process wherein work is really done, and spiritual energy flows in and produces effects, psychological or material, within the phenomenal world.

Religion includes also the following psychological characteristics: 4. A new zest which adds itself like a gift to life, and takes the form either of lyrical enchantment or of appeal to earnestness and heroism.

5. An assurance of safety and a temper of peace, and, in relation to others, a preponderance of loving affections.

I n illustrating these characteristics by documents, we have been literally bathed in sentiment. In rereading my manuscript, I am almast appalled at the amount of emotionality which I find in it. After so much of this, we can afford to be dryer and less sympathetic in the rest of the work that lies before us.

The sentimentality of many of my documents is a consequence of the fact that I sought them among the extravagances of the subject. If any of you are enemies of what our ancestors used to brand as enthusiasm, and are, nevertheless, still listening to me now, you have probably felt my selection to have been sometimes

;CExperience often, though not uniformly, professed to see truth in a special manner. That manner is known as mysticism." Though his own constitution shut him off from such disclosures, James describes four of its noncontroversial signs: ineffability, poetic quality, transience, passivity. There are or could be other typologies.

But here also one comes across a pathologic-not to forget lunatic-fringe.

Referring to alcohol and nitrous oxide (this James had tried), he comes out with a teasing aphorism: "The drunken consciousness is a bit of the mystic consciousness."

This is to confuse- "a bit!"-the symbolical with the literal.

Like the Vedic soma, the wine of the sufi and the Tantric may not be pure alcohol.

And yet, based on his experiment with nitrous oxide or not, James has left us an obiter dictum that bears repetition: "Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, while about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded."

Apropos, James mentions Swami Vivekananda, whom he personally knew, Yoga Vashistha, and the science of the sufis and the Christian mystics, at a time when it took some courage to mention these unmentionables.

Yet, "even if these offer us hypotheses which we may voluntarily ignore, but as

almost perverse, and have wished I might have stuck to soberer examples. I reply that I took these extremer examples as yielding the profounder information. To learn the secrets of any science, we go to expert specialists, even though they may be eccentric persons, and not to commonplace pupils. We combine what they tell us with the rest of our wisdom, and form our final judgment independently. Even so with religion. We who have pursued such radical expressions of it may now be sure that we know its secrets as authentically as anyone can know them who learns them from another; and we have next to answer, each of us for himself, the practical question: what are the dangers in this element of life? and in what proportion may it need to be restrained by other elements, to give the proper balance?

But this question suggests another one which I will answer immediately and get it out of the way, for it has more than once already vexed us. Ought it to be assumed that in all men the mixture of religion with other elements should be identical? Ought it, indeed, to be assumed that the lives of all men should show identical religious elements? In other words, is the existence of so many religious types and sects and creeds regrettable?

To those questions I answer "No" emphatically. And my reason is that I do not see how it is possible that creatures in such different positions and with such different powers as human individuals are, should have exactly the same functions and the same duties. No two of us have identical difficulties, nor should we be expected to work out identical solutions.

Each, from his peculiar angle of observation, takes in a certain sphere of fact and trouble, which each must deal with in a unique manner.

One of us must soften himself, another must harden himself; one must yield a point, another must stand firm,-in order the better to defend the position assigned him. If an Emerson were forced to be a Wesley, or a Moody forced to be a Whitman, the total human consciousness of the divine would suffer. The divine can mean no single quality, it must mean a group of qualities, by being champions of which in alternation, different men may all find worthy missions.

Each attitude being a syllable in human nature's total message, it takes the whole of us to spell the meaning out completely. So a "god of battles" must be allowed to be the god for one kind of person, a god of peace and heaven and home, the god for another. We must frankly recognize the fact that we live in partial systems, and that parts are not interchangeable in the spiritual life. If we are peevish and jealous, destruction of the self must be an element of our

thinkers we cannot possibly upset," true to his pragmatist posture, James held that "mystical truths exist for the individual who has the transport, but for no one else." Shades of verifiability! Reason, no arbiter in these arcane fields, has a role.

"To redeem religion from unwholesome privacy has been reason's task." Otherwise: "The metaphysical monster that the intellect offers to us is an absolutely worthless invention of the scholarly mind." Therefore: "Good-bye to dogmatic theology!" The only safe course, and here he acknowledges his debt to postKantian idealists and to Charles Peirce, would be pragmatic.

Another way out could be, James thought, a Science of Religions (Religionswissenschaft). But a religion of science

religion; why need it be one if we are good and sympathetic from the outset? If we are sick souls, we require a religion of deliverance; but why think so much of deliverance, if we are healthyminded? Unquestionably, some men have the completer experience and the higher vocation, here just as in the social world; but for each man to stay in his own experience, whate'er it be, and for others to tolerate him there, is surely best.

Remember that the whole point lies in really believing that through a certain point or part in you you coalesce and are identical with the Eternal. This seems to be the saving beliefboth in Christianity and in Vedantism .... It comes home to one only at particular times .... The more original religious life is always lyric- "the monk owns nothing but his lyre"-and its essence is to dip into another kingdom, to feel an invisible order.

[In preparing the Varieties], the problem I have ,et myself is a hard one :first, to defend (against all the prejudices of my "class") "experience" against "philosophy" as being the real backbone of the world's religious life-I mean prayer, guidance, and all that sort of thing immediately and privately felt, as against high and noble general views of our destiny and the world's meaning; and second, to make the hearer or reader believe, what I myself invincibly do believe, that, although all the special manifestations of religion may have been absurd (I mean its creeds and theories), yet the life of it as a whole is mankind's most important function. A task well-nigh impossible, I fear, and in which I shall fail; but to attempt it is my religious act.

is really neither religion nor science.

He appears to be more at ease with nature mysticism, which is more of a pure experience, carrying its own authority.

When he quotes these quasi-pantheistic passages, one has a feeling of overhearing a confession. Here, for instance, are some lines of a sermon by Martineau, which he must have liked: The universe, open to the eye today, looks as it did a thousand years ago. We see what all our fathers saw. And if we cannot find God in your house or mine, upon the roadside or the margin of the sea; in the bursting seed or the opening flower, in the procession of life, I do not think we should discern him any more in the grass of Eden, or beneath the moonlight in Gethsemane.

Again James remembers how on a March day in Paris a jonquil in bloom had produced in Obermann a beatific reverie, to which the sensitives are specially prone: It was the strongest expression of desire, the first perfume of the year. I felt all the happiness destined for man. This unutterable harmony of souls, the phantom of the ideal world, arose in me complete.

I never felt anything so great or so instantaneous, this form that nothing will contain; this ideal of a better world which one feels, but which, it seems, nature has not made actual.

It is easy to imagine how such nostalgia takes one inevitably, if for a while, to a more than Platonic universe, of beauty unabridged.

The last characteristic of religious experience in James' list is automatism or inspiration. He refers to the subconscious (depend upon the psychologist to do so), but is not without a yen for the subliminal, which had heaved into public attention thanks to psychical research. He gives it a new name, the B-region of consciousness, to distinguish it from the A-region of ordinary consciousness. "The B-region is obviously the larger part of each of us.

It is also the fountainhead of much that feeds our religion." Indeed, to believe the yogi and the mystic, all our higher aspirations come from a region above.

The goal is the source. But of course a cautious commentator like James would not say that so openly.

After all this "broad treatment" of the subject James allows himself a few basic conclusions, not hard to guess: The visible world is part of an unseen order or universe; union with the higher world-or is it worlds?-is man's true end; prayer and inner communion with the Spirit, God or Law is a process in which spiritual energy is generated. The process cannot but produce a sense of peace and assurance, an added zest to living. It is also a step, though James does not say so, toward self-discovery.

He rules out the idea of a uniform or universal religion as unrealistic. His own passion for a Science of Religions is not above a slight reductionism. But on another issue, the rejection of religion as anachronistic survival and the further suggestion about "the deanthropomorphization of the imagination," he takes a strong, personalist line. The person is sacred, and uniqueness is to be respected, a wholly democratic decision. "Our responsible concern is with our private destiny, after all." (Private, not selfish, one hopes.) Man's basic religious impulse he locates in the love of life at all levels.

Faith is what man lives by, and, when occasion demands, lives for.

Two questions remain to be answered.

Is there a common nucleus behind all the religious varieties? And is it "true"?

As for the first question, James' answer is "yes." The answer to the second is naturally more ambivalent. He admits, indeed argues, that there is in man "some part of the Self unmanifested, an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and 'merely understandable' universe" -what he has, elsewhere, called "a sense of the More." Philosophically speaking, that which produces effects within another level of reality is itself real. The pragmatic approach, he repeats, is the right approach to religious experience. He honestly disclaims any knowledge of the "divine facts." All the same he has a hunch "they exist." Now is this ("they exist") an inference or an insight? fact or faith? Durkheim has called him "an apologist of faith." Who knows, James takes a last shot at the mystery wrapped up in a riddle, whether the poor Qverbeliefs of mortals do not help God to fulfill his own greater tasks? In a sense the question carries its own answer.

Sober, sensitive, pragmatic, James' "virtuoso performance," a widely acclaimed classic, has joined the documents humains it had set out to study. With its skill, range and good intentions it has become a part of the modern intellectual climate, and many of his phrases and categories have passed into common speech. Still in the light of later research, sophistication, the inner compulsions of the subject and a total approach to the religious phenomena one can see its limitations, areas which it ignores or maybe does not specifically explore.

By refusing truck - though not whollywith metaphysics and theology, James cuts himself off from some relevant areas of the religious complex. Worse, by removing religious experience from its cultural context, of myths, symbols,

rituals, he unnecessarily impoverishes the sacred scenario. To confine religion to the psychological peculiarities of a few disturbed souls is not enough. Thi& virtually implies that while there may be religious persons there will never be a is to fly facts religious society-which in the face. Is this why while James can suggest the unity of being, he is silent about the unity of culture?

No wonder the ideal of a balanced, holy living rarely comes through. James' saints appear to be more "cases" than models. He has sung, frankly, in praise of saintliness. All the same he cannot say, as did Arnold Toynbee (and was hauled over the coals by angry historians), that a Reign of Saints would be the culmination of the historical or evolutionary process. James, who does not look before and after, is unable to say much about the future of religion, which may be "beyond religion." Only the wiser among the mystics know (from the other side some rationalists are also coming round to the view!) that organized religions are based on creeds which are spiritual experiences brought down to a level where they are more easy to grasp, but at the cost of their integral purity and truth. James has, in his own way, tried to look steadily and whole, but for want of commitment and inwardness, religion's real thrust, its total meaning in the evolution of man and the future, escapes him. A friendly observer, ab extra, not an insider.

The good doctor has no doubt treated the patients etherized upon the table with the delicacy of a surgeon who, as Jacques Barzun has pointed out, wanted to save, not to kill. But the surgeon has the limitations of his strength. Pace James, pragmatism is not the best or inmost perspective on religion. Most religions recommend indifference to a calculating calculus. Even when the tree is to be judged by its fruits, and Karma is inexorable, the best advice is that we have a right to action, none to its fruits ..Religion is not action alone, it is also attitude, a with many mansions consciousness bordering on the unmanifest, the ineffable. The pragmatic criterion, its demonstrable value, is not the last word in dealing with man's ultimate concern. But, then, we can judge no further but by larger experience.

0 About the Author: Sisirkumar Ghose, professor

of English at Santiniketan, has also taught abroad. His books include Aldous Huxley, The Later Poems of Tagore, The Poetry of Sri Aurobindo, Metaesthetics and Other Essays, and Man and Society. He contributed an article on mysticism to Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Tvam Bhano jagataschhakshuh, Tvam atma sarvadehinam, Tvam y6nih sarvabhootanam, Tvamacharah kriyavatam.

You, 0 Sun, are the eye of the world, You are the soul of all embodied beings, You are the source of all creatures, You are the discipline of all engaged in work.

THE LATEST IN SOLAR ENERGY Since the beginning of time on this planet the sun has given the earth nearly all the energy it needed, and much more, to sustain itself, to grow and evolve-light and heat, firewood and flowingwaters, the wind and the rain in an endless cycle, and then coal, oil and natural gas.

Now, faced with the alarming prospect of exhausting the energy capital stored underground, technological man is turning once again to the sun, the primal source of all power.

Fortunately, enough sunlight falls on the earth every day to meet human needs for three years at current rates of use. But all of this is not usable: A third is reflected back into space; a fifth drives the hydrologic cycle. Even so, 47 per cent is available for conversion. But the energy is dilute and varies in amount, low in the morning, none at night. These disadvantages are being overcome with the development of new technologies and the refinement of old ones.

With its huge potential of virtually untapped free energy, the sun may well be a life saver for a world in which the traditionally used fuels-coal, oil, natural gas, which are not renewable~are getting exhausted. Nuclear fuels too are limited in supply. In another hundred years much of the present balance in the energy bank will have been withdrawn. During the last 25 years fuel consumption has trebled, oil and gas consumption has increased byfive times, and the use of electricity by seven times.

A smooth transition to a world powered by nonfossil fuels must therefore be effected in, say, 50 years.

The crisis is neither sudden nor unexpected. Then why this flap, this trauma? As biochemist Isaac Asimov puts it, "People havebeen too lazy to work out the engineering problems involved in the direct use of solar energy-so long as cheap coal and oil wereavailable-and too unimaginative to see the necessities and possibilities far enough in advance."

The technical feasibility and social desirability of solar energy sources are now questioned by nobody. Less environmental damage, enhanced security of the energy supply, a greater self-reliance for individuals and nations (with a consequent

lessening of regional political tensions), and an energy system that is sustainable for as long as the earth remains habitable: these are the broad advantages of going solar.

William Heronymus, a world authority on alternative energy systems, sums it up elegantly: "Solar energy could perhaps do more to improve the material well-being of mankind, without increasing his tensions, than any other good available."

Several technologies to harness the energy in sunlight, wind, falling water and biomass already exist. A few of these technologies are fairly well developed; others are being expanded and refined at a quickening pace. Essentially they are all aimed at converting the incident solar energy into usable power. Examples are the flat-plate collector to warm water or air; concentration of solar rays by mirrors to achieve high temperature at a chosen point; use of the energy contained in water at a height, in the difference in ocean temperature at different levels, in the tide and the wave and the wind, photovoltaics (direct conversion of sunlight into electricity), and biomass (solar energy captured and converted by plants). All these are dependent on the continuous, perennial energy income from the sun; they do not use up the energy stored in fossil or fissile fuels. Many countries in different corners of tbe world have already taken their first steps into the solar energy era-albeit in a small way.

Flat-plate collectors using little more than metal and glass to produce cheap, low-grade heat have been in extensive use for 10 years in Australia, Israel and Japan. They can heat water up to 30 degrees Celsius and air up to 80 degrees. In Australia more than 30,000 houses are equipped with solar water heaters. In the United States some 50,000 "solar houses" function with satisfying efficiency. The Governor of California has plans to solarize 1.5 million homes in that state in the next five years. Dr. George Lof, solar energy veteran from Colorado, expects that there will be 2.5 million solar-heated homes by 1985 in the United States.

In Italy a 400-kilowatt heliostat system has already been successfully tested, and a one-megawatt facility is under construc(Text continued on page 40)

Laboratory for the Sun On a high plateau in the desert near Albuquerque, New Mexico, a field of 1,775 mirrors catches the rays of the midday sun and reflects them onto the center of a steel plate attached to a concrete tower. The steel glows, shimmers and begins to melt. In less than two minutes, the concentrated light raises the temperature of the metal to more than 1,650 degrees Celsius-and the world's largest solar installation has passed its first operating test.

The 70-meter tower and the mirror field are the basic components of the Central Receiver-Solar Thermal Test Facility operated by Sandia Laboratories for the United States Department of Energy (DOE) to test designs and materials proposed by scientists and manufacturers for use in solar electric power plants.

Much of the most important and extensive work on solar energy in the United States is being done in this sprawling

complex of research and development facilities. Here, long-range and technically difficult systems for the collection and conversion of solar energy are tested and retested under controlled laboratory conditions for the U.S. Department of Energy.

Many private American companies are full partners in this quest for sun power and provide some of the experimental equipment and knowledge.

The Solar Thermal Test Facility de- . scribed above is one of the key projects.

The first operating test of its power tower took place in May 1977 while construction of the $20-million facility was being completed. Only 1,775 of the 5,550 mirrors then installed were used in that . tune-up test. Since then, the mirror field (photo at lower right) has been enlarged to 7,500.

In other installations nearby, Sandia is testing and evaluating for DOE a variety of other components, designs and systems

PHOTOVOLTAIC CONVERSION: Solar cells-5 centimeters in diameter and capable of producing 7.4 watts of power in sunlight-are packed in cones of reflective material and housed in a plastic bubble (below, far left) which concentrates the sunlight on the cells and increases the output of electrical energy.

HIGH-TEMPERATURE THERMAL ENERGY CONVERSION: The Solar Thermal Test Facility at Albuquerque, New Mexico, consists of a 70-meter tower surrounded by a mirror field, 222 suntracking heliostats (left), each of which

is a computer-controlled mobile unit of 25 one-square-meter mirrors. Resting on steel supports, the mirrors catch the sunlight (below) and reflect it on the tower to boilers filled with fluid.

These are heated to produce steam pressure sufficient to turn a generator.

MIDTEMPERATURE TOTAL ENERGY SYSTEMS: A parabolic trough solar collector (left) focuses reflected sunlight on a fluid-filled steel tube coated with highly absorptive black chrome. This system uses the solar energy collected to heat, cool, and generate electricity, not allowing any wastage. The heated fluid is pumped to thermal storage tanks, and then to a heat exchanger where its thermal energy vaporizes a low-boiling-point fluid and drives a turbine generator.

The remaining energy is used to heat or to cool air in buildings.

Laboratory for the Sun

conrinued

for using solar energy. At the Midtemperature Solar Systems Test Facility, sunlight is gathered by different types of collectors and focused on pipelines, raising the temperature of fluids in the pipes to about 300 degrees Celsius. The heated fluids are used in experiments with so-called total-energy systems that provide electric power as well as space heating and cooling for clusters of homes or manufacturing plants, shopping centers and other small communities.

Some of the most promising designs are already at work in an applied research project-providing electric power, space heating and cooling for Sandia's 1,100square-meter Solar Projects Building.

Other experimental total-energy systems are being installed at a military barrack in Fort Hood, Texas, and a knitwear factory

in Shenandoah, Georgia.

Sandia's prototype systems make use of an average 63 per cent of the thermal energy collected, whereas conventional electric utilities average only about 30 per cent thermal efficiency. Energy savings as substantial as this could mean rapid commercial application of total-energy systems in the next few years.

Sandia is also testing solar cell (photovoltaic) systems that convert the sun's radiation directly into electricity, in the National Solar Photo voltaic Conversion Program.

Modern solar cell electrical systems are a product of the space age-they provide on-board power for satellites'- but the Department of Energy is bringing them down to earth.

Researchers are experimenting with

THE LATEST IN SOLAR ENERGY

different solar-cell materials and manufacturing techniques in an effort to reduce the cost of making the cells. To increase the electrical output per cell, they are devising ways to intensify the solar radiation on the surface of each cell.

Photographs on the preceding pages show research and testing programs in progress in each of the three primary development areas: high-temperature thermal energy conversion, midtemperature total-energy systems and photovoltaic 0 conversion.

This parabolic dish solar collector captures sunlight for an experiment at Sandia Laboratories. Its silvered glass segments are continually adjusted by computers to focus maximum sunlight reflection on the chrome-plated receiver in the center.

continuedjrompage37

tion. Odeillo, France, has a large facility in which 63 identical mirrors (heliostats), each 45 square meters in area, focus concentrated thermal radiant energy of 1,000 kilowatts to produce superheated steam which drives generators. French technologists using the same facility have even built a centrifugal furnace of high temperature.

Solar power towers are springing up in many parts of the world. In New Mexico three 130-meter towers, with a combined output of 50 megawatts are being planned.

The sun-baked village of Schuchuli in Arizona, 50 kilometers north of the Mexican border, on the Papago Indian Reservation, has been chosen as the site of the world's first solar village. This village, which enjoys 4,000 sunny hours every year, will have all its energy needs met by the sun.

India gets 3,000 hours of sunshine a year, most of which is high grade-in terms of energy content-this being a tropical/semitropical country. The dispersed state of India's half million villages, many of which have no electricity, makes it advantageous to have self-contained, decentralized powergenerating units.

Indian planners and researchers have been working at solar energy conversion techniques for almost 30 years, with the emphasis at its peak now in keeping with world trends. Their efforts have already borne fruit. Consider the wide variety of experimental and operating techniques being employed in the country today: â&#x20AC;˘ Flat-plate collectors heat 800,000 liters of water from the wintry 10 degrees Celsius to a comfortable 25 degrees for an allweather swimming pool in a five-star hotel in New Delhi. â&#x20AC;˘ A solar oven (cost: Rs. 350) fabricated at the Central Arid Zone Research Institute in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, boils water, cooks, roasts, and bakes in one half to one hour. â&#x20AC;˘ A "sun basket" made of materials available in any village focuses sunlight on a cooking vessel; the gadget, cheap and simple as it is, works efficiently.

India has also begun making use of solar energy for agriculture and industry. In agriculture, solar energy is being used mainly for drying crops. At Annama1ai University in Tamil Nadu a paddy dryer has been constructed with one ton capacity. It has

a nine-bay flat-plate collector and an electrically driven pump.

Experiments have shown that the flat-plate collector can dry moist grains with fluctuating amounts of sunshine.

The Indian Institute of Technology (lIT), Madras, has also developed solar dryers for removing moisture from grain hygienically (the traditional method is to spread it on the ground), a desalination plant and cold-storage systems.

The College of Agricultural Engineering at Jabalpur, in Madhya Pradesh, is using a solar-powered blower. This is a black-painted cylindrical stack placed at a focal point.

The Central Salt and Marine Chemicals Research Institute at Bhavnagar in Gujarat has built a solar cabinet dryer which can dry magnesium carbonate at a cost of Rs. 400 a ton, while drying by electricity costs Rs. 2,000 a ton.

The Government of India's Department of Science and Technology has recently integrated the entire research and development program in the area of solar energy. Laboratories and institutions have been assigned clear-cut roles in this program. Manufacturing organizations, both private and governmental, have been associated in this work.

Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (BHEL), one of the major firms involved in the program has broadly divided its activities into four categories: solar collector development, solar cooling, heating and refrigeration, solar water pumps, and solar power generation.

BHEL has installed about 2,000 square meters offlat collectors for water, space heating, power generation and refrigeration systems in Hardwar, Delhi, Madras, Hissar, Hyderabad and Bombay.

The BHEL guest house at Hardwar, the Indo-Australian Cattle Breeding Farm at Hissar and the lIT, Bombay, have medium-sized convective water-heating systems whose designs have been optimized for maximum solar energy collection by using a differential temperature controller.

More than 30 centers all over India are conducting intense solar energy research. The lIT, Madras, has tested a IO-kilowatt solar power plant. Each unit, when ready, will have the capacity to energize a village, operating water pumps, lighting homes and supplying power for community radio and television receivers.

BHEL is working on the development of solar packages

(20-kilowatt vapor turbines) for use in villages.

The Government of Tamil Nadu is setting up a solar-powered desalination plant on an island near Rameswaram, on the southern tip of India. It will initially provide 2,200 liters of distilled water a day: pure drinking water from the sea.

The lIT, Delhi, has developed a solar icemaker. Roorkee University scientists have also designed, built and tested a solar icemaking machine using ammonia/sodium thiocyanate. It can produce two kilograms of ice a day at minus 5 degrees Celsius.

Solar cells are another important area of research. A research group at the lIT, Delhi, has developed a 10 per cent thin-film cadmium sulphide solar cell using a spray pyrolitic technology.

Central Electronics is developing silicon-film solar cells. Already a village-type house has been set up near its factory off New Delhi where silicon cell panels generate sufficient electricity to provide lighting, to run radio and TV sets, and to work a water pump.

These fall in the category of high technology and are in keeping with current world efforts aimed at drastically reducing the cost of solar cells.

Currently under negotiation is an important collaboration between BHEL and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology to develop sun-tracking types of solar collectors.

An entire institute devoted to solar energy research, the first of its kind in India, has been established at Vallabh Vidyanagar University, 40 kilometers from Baroda, Gujarat. Gujarat Agricultural University has launched an "energy plantation" project to produce wood fuel from quick-growing trees over an area of 400 hectares. This will be the first "energy forest" in the country, and in four years sufficient fuel is expected to be available to run a five-megawatt power-generating station. The forest will be continually renewed.

Much of solar energy research in India has been devoted to solar cookers. These were first developed in India more than 20 years ago, but did not attract mass attention. One reason for this was that nobody liked to cook in the open and exclusively in the daylight hours. This tripod-mounted light-concentrating device was thus a flop.

But unjustifiably so, according to Dr. Jerome Weingart, a

With the energy crisis shooting up the price of gasoline, the search for alternative fuels has produced some interesting innovations: cars run on alcohol, electricity (to be featured in the next issue of SPAN) and sunpower. Photograph above shows Ken Earcett in his solar-powered automobile at the start of a cross-country trip ji-om Santa Monica, California. The car draws energy ji-om the sun through its overhead panel and has a maximum speed of 40 kilometers per hour.

sun enthusiast and head of scientific communications at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria. During a visit to India, when I met him, he pointed out the feasibility of a solar cooker that cooks indoors at night. Water could be heated up to 80 degrees during the sunny hours and stored in specially insulated containers. When the cooking hour approaches all that the village housewife has to provide by way of energy is an additional 20 degrees or so, the extra heat needed to boil the water. This calls for some subsidy to the village home, but that is more than paid back by the 80 per cent saving provided free by the sun.

Indian scientists have also tested the following solar cookers: • A wooden hot box which is lined with blackened metal and has a top consisting of double-glazed solar panels with an adjustable silvered glass reflector. Summer and winter trials have shown that most dishes can be cooked within three hours.

The maximum temperature achieved is 78 degrees Celsius.

• A solar oven which employs a well-insulated cooking chamber with a double-glazed top and eight silvered glass reflectors. The maximum temperature reached has been 350 degrees Celsius in summer and 250 degrees Celsius in winter.

• Solar steam cookers that use the heat from the sun to heat water circulating in a flat-plate collector and then pass it through a double-walled cooking chamber containing three food compartments. 'fhese cookers are slow, and take up to two and a half hours to boil rice.

• Another type of cooker uses an aluminum parabolic reflector to focus sunshine into a black-bottomed cooking pot.

The reflector needs regular adjustments to match the movement of the sun.

Dr. Weingart also spoke of the vast amounts of solar energy at present wasted in the deserts of Rajasthan. At least a part of it could be used for the thermochemical production of hydrogen at a cost of about Rs. 8 a barrel. If it is piped to Bombay (add Rs. 8 per barrel for transportation), that major industrial city will have access to another resource which many scientists consider the "fuel of the future."

In Japan the Ministry of International Trade and Industry has chalked out a l6-year energy development program designed to reduce the country's dependence on oil from the current 75 per cent to 43 per cent of its overall energy needs. One target is 12 million home solar-heating systems and solar batteries.

Sweden has plans to base its entire energy supply on the sun by 2015, with 12 per cent in the form of solar heating, 62 per cent from fuels obtained from biomass (alcohol, hydrogen, methane), and 26 per cent in solar electricity, including hydropower.

Scientists claim that the solar pond idea tried out in Israel is the first big breakthrough in making the sun a commercially viable electric power source. A thin layer of fresh water.covers a thick layer of salt water in an open pond. When sunlight heats the water, the lower, heavier layer cannot rise to the surface and hence retains the heat, raising it often to the boiling point. The heat is led off by pipes to a turbine, which works not on superheated steam but on low-heat water vapor (the energy is produced by the difference in temperature, not by the peak temperature). The facility has only one moving part (the turbine shaft) and hence is extremely simple and durable. A sun pool half a hectare in area now produces enough electricity to fill the heating and cooling requirements of a 200-room hotel on the shores of the Dead Sea in Israel.

The same principle of extracting energy from temperature difference is used in Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC).

A one-megawatt OTEC unit, scalable up to four 25-megawatt units and giving a total of 100 megawatts, is being designed in the United States. It uses ammonia as the heat-exchanging fluid.

An even more far-out but perfectly workable idea has been developed in the Soviet Union-the "solar carpet." After being rolled out in the sun for the whole day, it can meet a large portion of a home's electricity needs. The method is based on photosynthesis, plant-mediated conversion of sunlight into organic material-or, to put it more simply, nature's way of using the sun's heat for plant growth. Soviet researchers have discovered that 99 per cent of a green leafs chlorophyll act as antennae to capture the sun's electromagnetic radiation, which is then accumulated in the protein parts of the plant, called photochemical centers. These proteins generate a powerful electric fieldand presto! electricity directly from the chlorophyll.

Equally fascinating is the proposal to use a prolifically growing water plant called cattail (reed mace). One of the most efficient converters of solar energy yet discovered, the reed grows in wetlands and marshes and therefore does not compete for land usable for crops. Its starch can be converted into alcohol or, after drying, the reed can be compressed into fuel pellets.

Attempts are also being made to extract energy from water hyacinth and other plants by photosynthesis.

Unquestionably the most exciting and at the same time the most promising solar energy technique is the direct conversion of sunlight into electricity by using photo voltaic cells. This method of energy production is clean, has no moving parts, consumes no fuel, produces no pollution, is extremely simple to use, operates at environmental temperatures (no thermal pollution, direct or indirect), has a long lifetime going into thousands of years, can have modular systems at sizes from a few watts to megawatts, requires little maintenance and can be fashioned from silicon, the second most abundant element in the earth's crust.

Then what's the problem? It's one of cost. Efforts are now being made to make it more economical. According to figures given to me by Dr. Weingart, a solar cell which cost Rs. 48 per peak watt in 1978 is expected to go down to Rs. 16 now and to Rs. 4 by 1985. The aim is to reduce it to about 40 paise per peak watt by mass production and further research.

Meanwhile, scientists at the Stanford Research Institute in San Francisco have found a way to manufacture silicon at a vastly reduced cost-a tenth as cheap-by a one-step method.

It is not empty optimism to expect that in less than three years this method of producing electricity will compete vigorously with every other resource.

A new plastic, doped polyacetylene having the remarkable A working example of solar energy is the large water-heating system at Delhi's Qutab Hotel. The solar collectors shown below can harness enough energy to effect a 40 per cent saving infuel consumption.

ability to carry an electric current has been developed in the United States. the thin sheet looks silvery and metallic and can stretch, pucker and snap-and convert sunlightto electricity.

The "amorphous materials" (actually semiconductor substances whose molecules are jumbled together without the regular patterns of silicon) have also shown notable sunlight-conversion properties. Their main advantage is that they are far cheaper than crystalline silicon.

The quantity of solar energy falling on the globe is about 10,000 times the total anthropogenic energy release. But what about the quality of its end uses? The higher the desired quality, the higher the cost. (Electricity is high-quality energy; heating water with coal is low-quality energy.) Sources and uses must be carefully matched in order to obtain optimum benefits. Would anyone use a sledgehammer to drive a nail into a plank of wood?

A hot bathtub contains more energy than a flashlight battery, but the electricity in the battery is of a higher quality than the heat in the tub. It is thus wasteful to heat the bathtub water by electricity.

An improved wood-burning stove for cooking represents a wellmatched source-and-use combination. Therefore, village electrification as a general concept without qualifications is wasteful and unimaginative. Here, too, solar technologies, especially the silicon cell and biomass approaches, would score over oil, gas or even cable-transmitted electricity.

Along with developments to harness solar power, scientists have also been working on the related problems of storage and waste. Since sunlight is intermittent on a regular (day or night) and a random (cloud cover) basis, storage becomes essential.

More research has to be done on this subject in order to discover the most economical way of storing the energy extracted from the sun.

Denis Hayes of the Worldwatch Institute, Washington, has drawn up a "solar energy timetable" which visualizes the dawn of a postpetroleum society, 50 years from now, with five-sixths of the world energy budget based on solar technologies.

Such a global society would need 70 billion square meters of solar collectors, about 8 million megawatts of solar cells, quadrupling of the hydroelectric output, 5 million wind turbines, and the exploitation of about 15 per cent of the world's forests for wood and wood products (which will be systematically renewed).

He is convinced that solar energy will create more jobs and cause less environmental deterioration per unit of energy than any other source.

Isaac Asimov looks at the problem from another angle. Nearly 20 million square kilometers of the planet's surface is hot desert which lies exposed to the sun unused. Solar cells, with only 10 per cent efficiency (up to 20 per cent efficiency is certainly possible), need no more than 77,000 square kilometers of sunlight -just 1/250th of the total desert area-to meet all the energy needs of the world today.

Solar cells seem to be the most feasible. Not necessarily as giant power-generating plants with all the attendant problems that lead to waste or mismanagement, but as relatively compact units dispersed throughout the land, with decentralization of authority but directed by one policy. Multimegawatt stations serve a purpose, especially when close to major industrial urban centers, but the big can coexist with the small beneficially.

The ideas suggested here hold a challenge and a promise.

They will tax human skill. But everyone can get into the act: There is plenty of room for the free play of imagination.

As Dr. Weingart says, sunlight represents a "safe-fail" technology which can never be abused or misused by anyone. D About the Author: M. V. Mathew is an assistant editor with the Times ofIndia in Bombay, and a well-known science writer.

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Journal

© 1977.

be removed by equity-oriented small As production declines, less and less befarmer programs. comes available for export, and revenue The profitability of agriculture is Profitability is the mainspring declines. These ~arketing boards also become the employers of individuals who reduced in a goodly number of lowof agricultural modernization. are politically certified. Such boards have income countries by external trade barriers imposed by potential importers of agri- When profitability exists, little mercy for the economic well-being cultural products. The list of such products of farm people. farmers turn sand into gold. is long indeed. A classic example of an • Many low-income countries promote internally imposed trade restriction is and protect high-cost commercial fertilizer that on cane sugar. The comparative production which seriously limits the cost advantage in producing sugar is peacetime production of the world's agrj- adoption of high yielding crops (varieties) strongly in favor of cane sugar. Yet .culture has become remarkably stable. that are fertilizer-responsive.

Governmental policy that is equitytemperate zone countries-Europe, the It is mjlch more stable than industry, with Soviet Union, the United States and its booms and abrupt declines in plant motivated and that mandates low food and others-persist in producing high cost utilization and associated unemployment. low food grain prices inhibits agricultural • Modernization tends to reduce the modernization. This approach to the beet sugar. The result is that two-fifths of the world's sugar production is in the adverse effects of weather on agricultural equity problem rests on the political production. Evidence in .support of this doctrine that it increases the real income wrong places.

Since the comparative advantage of attribute is strong for wheat in the Plains and employment of the urban poor, and each type of agriculture within and be- States and for corn throughout the corn that the only losers are large farmers. But most of the very poor people in lowtween countries depends on location, the belt of the United States.

• The entrepreneurial function of income countries live in villages and on gains to be had from these specific location farmers cannot be performed efficiently farms. Their economic lot is worsened by advantages are often lost by centrilized this policy. The decline in the real cost of planning and by equity-oriented policies. by government.

The political market is not a substitute producing farm food grains through the The basic resource attributes of comparative advantages from location prevail for the economic market when it comes to modernization of agriculture is thwarted, regardless of farm size. External aid, the requirements of agricultural moderni- and the optimum welfare gains that could however large it may be and however zation. Among the reasons why the po- be had from more and cheaper food are free from constraints, is not a substitute litical market performs badly in meeting not forthcomjng. Moreover, urban food shortages and rationing are frequently il for trade in deriving the benefits to be these requirements are the following: • The politicians of most low-income consequence of this policy. had from differences in location-specific countries are bent on obtaining cheap food costs of producing agricultural products.

National policies' seriously thwart the for urban people currently, now and at A closing remark What can economists do to reduce the basic underlying comparative advantage once. But quick modernization of agriculture is a will-o'-the-wisp.

There are no large gap between the political market and ofdifferent parts of agriculture within and short cuts because capacity-increasing the economic market in the area of food betweencountries.

There is the argument that trade de- investments take a good deal of time. and agriculture? It will obviously not be presses the price of agricultural products For farmers to undertake the required done by being a handyman at the beck and relative to other product prices. This investments, optimum incentives for a call of government agencies. To serve as advocates and. proceed to rationalize the argument that the secular decline in the couple of years will not suffice.

• The politics of these countries abhors behavior of the political market clearly terms. of trade of agricultural products is not a solution. To do so is to sell ecois caused by international trade is false. profitability in agriculture. If modernizanomics short. In my view, the first requiretion is not profitable for farmers, the The real prices of such crops had not development of a productive dynamic ment is that economists see clearly that the declined because the real costs of producinadequate production of farm food and ing these crops have fallen. If the real agriculture is impossible.

• The additional capital that is required fiber products in low-income countries is prices of such crops had not declined over time, the absolute level of real in- will be forthcoming in large measure from in large measure caused by the political come and consumption would be sub- the savings of farmers provided it is market. The second requirement is to take profitable to invest in the new forms of on analytically the task of determining stantially below what it is at present. capital that are an integral part of the the precise adverse effects of each of the Agricultur.almodernization and politics process of modernization. various governmental policies, programs Modern agriculture has several basic • Commodity agreements may be good and management regulations that inhibit politics, but they are not conducive to the modernization of agriculture. All too economic attributes and consequences over time that the shortsightedness of agricultural modernization. On this score, little of this necessary analytical work is politicsfails to see. Let me list five of them. it may be fortunate that commodity being done by economists.

The third requirement is the most • The agricultural sector declines agreements have a short life. While they relative to the rest of the economy. are active, however, they inhibit the important: it is facing up intellectually This means that a declining fraction of a modernization of the commodity under to inadequacies of existing institutions country's total resources is required to the agreement. that determine the role and functions of produce farm food and fiber products.

• Agricultural marketing boards that the political market and of the economic have a monopoly in buying and selling the market country by country. The insti• The terms of trade of agricultural products decline relative to other products farm products of a country tend to destroy, tutions are in the long run shaped by ideas as a consequence of the reductions in real the comparative advantage of exportable and social thought. Fundamental thinking costs in the agricultural sector crops. For a time they provide revenue for pertaining to this ever-present social prob• From year to year, leaving the effects the government from the difference in the lem of the organization of society is price paid to farmers and the export price. indeed in short supply. of weather aside, the normal annual 0

CONTROLLING THE POWER TO DESTROY In this address to the United Nations General Assembly's Committee on Disarmament on October 18, the director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency states U.S. policy and reviews the progress of negotiations in five major areas of the international arms control effort.

The fact that some $450,000 million is spent the world over every year for arms, the fact that 1,000 missile warheads could kill more than 100 million people, the fact that conflict anywhere could result in destruction everywhere-these facts make the pursuit of peace a necessity for all humanity.

The fact that this committee now deals only with disarmament and security, the fact that more nations than ever before are actively participating in the consideration

WOBlD AB.

of disarmament issues, the fact that there are some nine international arms control conventions in effect which have been adhered to by most of the nations of the world-these facts testify to a simple conclusion: Arms control and disarmament are the province of all nations.

We have an immense task ahead of us.

It is difficult enough psychologically for any nation or people to share responsibility for their security with other nations.

How much more of a revolution in think-

SPENDING ATA GLANCE According to the latest annual report on World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers by the U.S. Arms Control and Disarma-

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The graph above shows military expenditures in million dollars of the world's leading nations and the Third World as a group in 1977.

ment Agency (ACDA), the Soviet Union leads the world in military spending. In 1977 (the most recent year for which data are available), the Soviet Union spent about $140,000 million for military purposes. This is almost one-third of all defense spending in the world (about $434,000 million), and nearly 40 per cent more than the United States spent the same year-$lOl,OOO million.

Furthermore, Soviet expenditures went up .3 per cent in 1977, while United States' spending continued the downward trend that set in at the end of the Vietnam war.

China, according to the ACDA report, had the third largest military budget, at $35,000 million, followed by Germany (FRG) with $16.3 million and France with $14.8 million.

Third' World nations together spent $97,000 million on arms.

A comparison between NATO and the Warsaw Pact shows that although the two alliances spent almost equal amounts for military purposes in 1977-$164,700 million and $163,000 million respectively-the burden was far greater for Warsaw Pact states.

While NATO spent only 4.5 per cent of its total gross national product (GNP), Warsaw Pact nations spent 11.7 per cent of their 0 combined GNP on defense.

ing is required for nations to see security as a function of reducing the very arms that often have been the only means that they have had to ensure their security!

Arms control, in short, does not come naturally, and any progress-though it may fall short of our hopes-should be welcomed as a step toward security through restraint of arms and as a step away from the tradition of security only through arms.

Because so many challenges remain, progress should not mean complacency.

We cannot be satisfied with the security of the world as it is. The weapons we have within our collective hands are too numerous and too awesome to entrust our common destiny to good fortune and chance.

We must actively seek a safer world and never falter in that search.

The U.S. Government has negotiated and supported two SALT treaties, because we believe that strategic arms limitations that are equitable can enhance the security of all nations.

No agreement constructed on unilateral gain or fiat can long endure, even if it were possible to achieve in the first place.

Consensus on a strategic arms limitation treaty between two nations, or on any other arms control issues among many nations, is a difficult but unyielding prerequisite for success, for we are dealing with fundamental issues of security and survival.

The process of SALT confirms that serious negotiations, seriously conducted, can move forward provided they do not bear impossible burdens. No arms control talks will succeed if they must right every age-old wrong. And no arms control talks can make progress if political advantage, rather than the enhancement of mutual security, is the principal purpose. My Government is firmly committed to arms control agreements based on principles of equity and improved security - for

all. Five arms control subjects demonstrate that our task ahead is not without challenge, as it is also not without hope.

I want to begin with the new agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union to limit strategic offensive nuclear arms, SALT II. SALT II is not the millennium, nor will it stop competition, nor will it guarantee permanent stability.

But it is still a remarkable accomplishment: • The United States and the Soviet Union have established, for the first time, equal ceilings on strategic nuclear forces; • We have negotiated equal subceilings on strategic systems carrying multiple independently-targetable warheads; • We have begun the much desired process of reductions; • We have taken major steps to control the technological arms race, such as limiting the numbers of warheads allowed on each missile; • We have broken new ground in verification procedures; .

• And we have renewed our commitment to the long-term process of strategic arms limitation. In crafting a framework of equality between two different strategic forces,we have built an essential bridge to deeper reductions and further qualitative restraints in SALT III. I want to reaffirm the commitment of the United States and President Jimmy Carter-as expressed in the SALT II agreement itself-to begin negotiations to achieve further limitations and deeper reductions in nuclear arms promptly upon entry into force of SALT II. We take this

obligation with the utmost seriousness. It is an obligation between two nations, and it is an obligation of two nations to all nations.

I would like to turn now to the subject of the comprehensive nuclear test ban, for no arms control measure has been consistently assigned a higher priority in this chamber over many years. Indeed, the very fact that negotiations are underway on such a treaty can be attributed in part' to the dedicated efforts by many nations and individuals to build strong international support for such a ban.

That support is well-founded. A comprehensive test ban will place an important qualitative constraint on the nuclear arms competition, and it will be an important contribution to the international community's efforts to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.

The trilateral negotiations are proceeding actively in Geneva. Agreement has already been reached on many of the features of the treaty, including some issues that just a few years ago seemed insurmountable obstacles. Verification of a comprehensive test ban is extremely important. Innovative cooperative measures will be required-as both sides have recognized. Work is now continuing on these and other aspects. A number of these problems have been less susceptible to prompt solutions than we had hoped.

But my Government continues to place great importance on the conclusion of these negotiations.

Success will require hard work. But success, I believe, would be a statement of

hope no nation could ignore.

As with the negotiations for a comprehensive test ban, progress in the talks between the United States and the Soviet Union on chemical weapons has not been rapid, but it has been substantial. In August of this year, our two nations provided a detailed report on these negotiations to the Committee on Disarmament.

A treaty providing for the elimination of chemical weapons would be a unique and far-reaching accomplishment: • For the first time, an entire class of weapons that has been used in a major conflict would be banned and eliminated; • The international community would be e~tablishing, and participating in, cooperative measures of verification of great breadth and complexity; • And a technology capable of inflicting widespread and horrible destruction of human life would be safeguarded for peaceful uses.

These are some of the reasons why my Government attaches high importance to the chemical weapons negotiations. We fully recognize that many other countries have a direct interest in a chemical weapons prohibition. Many nations could produce them on short notice. And all nations that adhere would be affected by the verification procedures that are a necessity if such an agreement is to promote stability and confidence. In this connection, I would like to note that my Government is grateful for the important work on verification which is being pursued by a number of countries.

The Committee on Disarmament has a

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vital role to play in the process of achieving international convention.

August 1980 will mark the date of the a chemical weapons convention. The second review conference on the NonUnited States fully appreciates the improliferation Treaty. The SALT II agreeportance of that committee's role, and we ment, with its commitment to continuing are giving serious thought to how we can the process in SALT III, reflects the contribute to making the committee's work in this area most effective in advanc- determination of the United States and the Soviet Union to fulfill their obligation ing the objective we all seek.

The complete prohibition and elimi- under Article VI of the Nonproliferation nation of chemical weapons has been an Treaty. My Government is deeply conimportant goal of the international com- scious of its obligations to the nations munity for many decades, ever since, in party to this treaty which have forsworn the first great world war of this century, nuclear weapons. Their continued rethese weapons were used on a massive straint, and that of other nonnuclear scale. Even though that war is receding weapons states, is essential to preventing in time, I can still remember, as a boy, a dangerous multiplication of the risk the vision of men returned home, but that conflict or miscalculation could lead gasping for breath forever. That is a to nuclear war.

In this regard, the United States welvision we should eradicate entirely from comes the recent adherence of the nations the memory of man.

We could be haunted by another class of Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and Bangladesh.

We can further buttress nonproliferaof weapons never used but with a similarly dreadful potential-radiological weapons. tion and nuclear stability by the establishThe number of facilities producing radio- ment of nuclear weapon free zones. The active byproducts has multiplied many- full realization of a nuclear weapon free zone in Latin America is drawing closer. fold in recent years and the accumulation Additionally, the United States strongly of materials is accelerating.

I am pleased to note that significant supports efforts to establish nuclear progress was achieved this year to deal weapon free zones in other regions of the accordance with the criteria with such weapons. The United States world-in and the Union of Soviet Socialist Re- which we believe can permit the successful publics have presented a joint initiative establishment of zones that promote the to the Committee on Disarmament to ban security of the participants.

The development of effective interall radiological weapons.

The United States hope~ that the United national arrangements for assuring that Nations General Assembly will encourage nations that forswear nuclear weapons the Committee on Disarmament to build will not be threatened by nuclear attack on this achievement and to elaborate an is an effort which deserves our serious

consideration. Such arrangements would help create a climate of confidence and would reduce incentives for additional countries to develop nuclear weapons.

The United States would like to reiterate its proposal made last July in the Committee on Disarmament that there be a General Assembly resolution setting forth the various undertakings made, by the five nuclear powers, to give assurance to nonnuclear weapon states against the usc' of nuclear weapons.

I am also happy to refer to the progress which has been made on a number of significant and potentially useful studies currently underway, such as the pilot test of a standard format for reporting military budgets, the study on the relationship between disarmament and development, and the study of regional arms control.

The United States, for its part, will continue to give these studies wholehearted support. They are investments in the future.

My life has been dedicated to the security of the United States. Yet, I see no greater security for my nation than peace among all nations. We share a common goal-peace with security. For, we share, in this nuclear age, a common bond for survival and a common search for the ability of us all to live in a secure world.

We are all involved in an undertaking to shape our destiny. As President Carter said in Vienna: "If we cannot control the power to destroy, we can neither guide our fate nor preserve our own future." 0

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ORROIT'S CATALYST: RENAISSANCE CENTER Less than a decade ago, Detroit, plagued with every urban problem, was known as America's dying city. It needed a renaissance-and got it.

Henry Ford II masterminded a $350 million hotel and office complex, Renaissance Center, as a "catalyst to make other things happen," to provide an uplift for the economy and spirit of beleaguered Detroit.

Opened in 1977, the center's showpiece is the 73-story, 1,400-room Detroit Plaza Hotel, which is surrounded by four 39-story circular office towers. Futuristic in design, the hotel's lobby (below, far left) has a tiered cloth sculpture that rises through the center of the eight-story atrium. The spin-off effect that Ford antic-

ipated as part of this unique crash urban development program is visible in the spate of building projects for housing, commerce and recreation.

Unemployment came down to 7 per cent in 1978 from 17.4per cent in 1975. Old shops (above) and the farmers' market area (left) have been renovated and are attracting more customers as visitors to the new, improved Detroit increase. The city's new mood is one of cheer, symbolized by the two children and their snowman (top).

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DETROITRENAISSDCE