Decades ago, I read an interview with the then Speaker of the House. (I believe it was Tip O’Neil, but I cannot swear to it.) There was some reference to the hundreds, thousands of bills that had passed his desk, but what struck the interviewer was his realization that the question of affordability (as in, “can we”?) or cost had never in all his years crossed the Speaker’s mind.
It was just never an issue. Not in my lifetime and before has it been an issue. Even in the Depression, cost was never an issue for the federal government. Our credit was good, we borrowed or printed money (in a time of serious deflation that wasn’t a problem). WPA, PWA, CCC—we created them all without worrying about cost.
Ditto World War II, the Cold War, building a national highway system, pouring billions into the educational system, Korea, the Gulf War, invading Afghanistan and Iraq, and on and on. (Have to admit that a major reason for stopping Vietnam was when Wall Street came down to Washington and pointed out that the war was hurting the economy. But we were already winding down.) By and large—going in to something—cost never needed to be a question.
The other day I went in for a substitute teaching job and got to chatting with the principal’s secretary. She told me, in an affluent suburban district, that if a computer broke down and needed a new part, there was absolutely no money to repair it. There was certainly no money for new technology.
Next year will be far worse if an election to maintain the present millage does not pass this spring. I wished her Good Luck in a neighborhood full of scared people. She was working on an election poster as we talked and kept repeating, “But this isn’t a new millage”.
It’s a neighborhood full of kids and new houses that happily supported millage to build an entire new high school ten years ago. (Already plans for further extensions have been shelved. For one thing, people are moving out—heading for new jobs or cheaper digs.)
In district after district I notice a lot of new, young faces among the faculty. Administrators are moving heaven and earth to get older, higher priced teachers to retire so they can be replaced with kids right out of college at the bottom of the pay scale. One older teacher told me, laughing, “Every time I step into the hall, the principal is there asking, ’What can we do to get you to retire’”. He teaches advanced English and also adjuncts at the community college. He’s good.
I pointed out to the secretary that her entire district had been cobbled together out here in the ’burbs when cost was no object. “No one,” I said, “in Lansing, Washington or the administration here has any real experience dealing with a situation in which the money simply isn’t THERE”.
“They have no idea how to deal.”
My wife returned to the community college this winter to take courses in art and photography. She had gotten a degree there twenty years ago. The contrast startled her. Whole departments are now basically staffed by adjuncts—no benefits, a fraction of the pay.
The cafeteria is closed—replaced by a privatized “café” with an extremely limited menu and prices twice as high as you would pay two blocks away. The school bookstore is run by Barnes and Noble—it carries no art or photography supplies. The faculty can only suggest stores.
A few years ago they could afford to build a whole new wing and a new library. Cost has now become a factor in their calculations.
I might add that everybody is sitting waiting, breathlessly, for the new bailout money from Washington. First of all, guys, it won’t be enough to meet all the needs. Second of all, it won’t go on forever. Then you’ll be back in the same leaky boat—with more stuff to maintain and support.
California is facing a deficit the size of most national economies. Unlike Washington, they don’t have a printing press for money in the basement. Many more states are in trouble—as is Michigan here.
Our whole economy has lost sight of the issue of cost. The other day I looked at one of my reasonably new (and expensive) pairs of shoes. It needs a minor repair. Twenty years ago I could have located someone to do it in an alcove of my grocery store. Today I cannot think of anywhere to take them—or even to buy the clips to do it myself.
People have stopped repairing things. Shoes, toasters, clothes—they have all become throw-away items. You don’t even try to fix them, you just toss them. What do you do when the cost of replacing them becomes an actual concern? When the money might not be there?
(When we go miniature golfing, we all carry our own putters. We’ve collected them over the years from neighbors who just put them in the trash. They weren’t the latest style? I have to say that over the last few months there has been nothing in anyone’s trash around here worth looking at. They may be hanging on to more things.)
The other day my wife took a trip to Chicago to visit some art museums. She had lunch in nice little restaurant in Greek Town. The food was still delicious; the price hadn’t gone up—but the portions were smaller. That’s true all over. Cost suddenly matters—you can no longer just raise prices.
Cereal boxes are shrinking. Sam’s Club no longer carries the large bag of rice we’ve bought for years. It has a different supplier with a smaller bag. (Rice isn’t as good, either.) Have you checked the size of a yogurt cup lately?
It’s a dirty little word, cost is. For decades we haven’t worried about it. By and large, we haven’t needed to. But it seems to be becoming a problem—in our governments, our homes and our grocery budgets. Most of us have absolutely no idea how to deal.
The world around us offers so few repairmen—and so few things that even CAN be repaired.
That may be a change coming to a neighborhood near you. Or me. I really do hope so.

Times have changed interestingly since Thomas Jefferson suggested we should be predominantly a nation of yeoman farmers. That meant, as the Bible puts it, that each man would till his own piece of land, have his own spring or cistern, sit under his own fig tree and raise his own grapes for wine.
It was a busy, hard life—both in ancient Israel and in colonial America, but there was an element of freedom to it. If you needed to go relieve yourself, you didn’t have to check with the foreman. Had you used up the seven minutes of toilet break provided by your union contract?
The work didn’t keep coming at you on a mechanized line over which you had no control. You didn’t keep welding the same spot over and over, hurrying to get it done before the line moved it past you. Your foreman was the weather and your own inclination.
Get firewood chopped by winter—or be very chilly. Get the cow milked by six o’clock or risk a serious injury. Even here there was always a bit of leeway, a bit of your own control in play. Not so any more. The assembly line brooks no independent thought or desire. Neither does the modern office.
The office at least tried to give you the illusion of personal freedom. Up until now you pretty much chose when to use the toilet, get a drink, or stop for some idle gossip. But the office had its own mechanical lines—projects and reports that were due with the same pitiless regularity of another car coming down the line.
Unlike the factory worker you could take them home and do them there or come in extra days, take them with you on vacation or stay late. And, unlike the yeoman farmer, it was never your choice which to do when. You did whatever the assembly line demanded be done first.
You never wanted to admit it, but management’s view of you—on an assembly line or in an office—was essentially that you were a gerbil on a treadmill. There was always the tension, in management’s view, of how fast you could make the gerbil run and how little you could feed him to keep him going.
I got my first real insight into that when I found myself responsible for the three small offices of a temporary jobs agency. One office manager had been with the company for years. She knew every employer in her small town, what they wanted in a worker, whom they wanted, the days when they would most likely need our help. The companies knew and trusted her.
I gave her considerable latitude because she always got her work done, always kept the customers happy. The bean counter in the company suddenly realized that she had been around enough years to get enough raises to be making more money than other managers.
I argued that her proven capabilities and her profound knowledge of the market made her valuable enough to be worth the money. The president of the company sneered, “We can replace her with somebody else who makes a fraction of her salary.” That was all that mattered to him. He saw no other use for her than as a replaceable desk warmer. I was ordered to get rid of her. (Retail management is notorious for the same attitude. So is General Motors.)
Too much food for that gerbil. Or maybe she wasn’t running fast enough? In any case the trend has been going on ever since people were pulled off their own farms or village shops to work away from home in factories and office buildings.
The creation of factories—where you worked to make profits for stockholders rather than yourself—made a vast difference in working life. This became especially true when engineers and managers decided to get “scientific” about work and how it was done.
Frederick Winslow Taylor, one of the first management consultants (born 1856), introduced the idea of using a stopwatch to reduce the amount of time taken for each industrial operation. He wrote very candidly, “Only through ENFORCED standardization of methods, ENFORCED adoption of the best implements…, and ENFORCED cooperation” could true efficiency be achieved.
He added that anyone “stupid” enough to choose hard manual labor is “unable to comprehend the science” of it—thus the need for enforcement. He called this “scientific management”.
Frank Gilbreth (“Cheaper by the Dozen”, born 1868)) used a camera to show how the number of movements could be reduced for each job. Another scientific advancement.
Gone was the time when sunup was the only foreman on the job—when you could choose which task to do when, choose the tools to do it with, choose which motions to use. Now science—and the relentless mechanical assembly line were masters of a worker’s fate.
Now scientific management is coming to your office. “BusinessWeek Magazine” ran an interesting article last week. “How much is that worker worth? (p.46)” Now that there is a computer at nearly every work station, notes BW, “…employees leave a digital trail detailing behavior, their schedule, their interests, and their expertise.”
This can be used to calculate “the return on investment for each worker“. (How fast or long does this gerbil run?) Human Resources has to be taught “number crunching skills”. Soon they will be “doing the numbers on ’human capital’”.
In some tests, after the numbers are crunched, each employee is assigned a colored circle on a chart. In a downturn, “small and pale circles might be a good place to start cutting.” (Could make you think twice before using more than seven minutes a day on potty stops.) Sort of like a farmer figuring out which member of the herd to cull—based strictly on milk production. Perfectly Darwinian.
Neither the Bible nor Mr. Jefferson foresaw the day of cubicles and evaluation by numbers. Even Mr. Jefferson’s slaves were permitted to fish and grow the vegetables of their own choice. All you can say now is, Run Gerbil, Run!
What did Satchel Paige, the great Negro League pitcher say? “Don’t look back; something might be gaining.”