On Preventing Useful Activity

By Otto Friedrich

I attempted to rise, but was not able to stir: for as I happened to lie on my back, I found my arms and legs were strongly fastened on each side to the ground . . . I likewise felt several slender ligatures across my body, from my armpits to my thighs . . . I felt something alive moving on my left leg, which . . . I perceived to be a human creature not six inches high, with a bow and arrow in his hands.

--Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels

Do you recognize the little fellow? He might be a lawyer or an income tax supervisor, an editor or a banker or a Medicaid investigator, or a number of other things. At least that might be the view of anybody who had recently been engaged in rebuilding a house or paying taxes, writing something or borrowing money or paying a hospital bill, or a number of other things. In fact, almost anything. The question is this: What is the ratio, in our vast, booming $3 trillion economy, between the people who actually make things or actually provide services and the people who are paid to prevent the others from making things or providing services? One to two? One to three? And if this is the case, why is it the case?

Consider, for example, the sad story of Warner LeRoy's attempt to help rebuild Manhattan's Bryant Park, a nine-acre urban oasis now inhabited largely by drug peddlers. Almost four years ago, New York City authorities announced a grand rehabilitation scheme that would feature the construction of a glass- walled cafe-restaurant. LeRoy, who operates the city-owned Tavern on the Green in Central Park, offered to build the restaurant with $12 million of his own money. "That will help make the park a great, wonderful public gathering place," said LeRoy, "like the Via Veneto or the Piazza San Marco."

LeRoy did spend several hundred thousand dollars on architectural plans, legal fees and so on, but there had to be protracted negotiations with the city parks department and the Bryant Park Restoration Corp. and the New York Public Library (which adjoins the park) and all the private watchdog groups that doggedly keep watch over the fall of every sparrow. After nearly four years of effort and expense, with no actual building begun and no end in sight, LeRoy this spring abandoned the whole project. "The process has so many hands in it that it is terribly hard to do without being reduced to mediocrity," said LeRoy. "I don't know what the answer is. I know you can't ! just do it with endless committees making endless comments."

It is easy enough to blame such situations on the proliferation of government regulations and the heavy hand of government itself. President Reagan, for one, took that approach a while back when he publicly denounced his own Medicaid administrators for paying $12,000 a month to keep 3-year-old Katie Beckett in a hospital but refusing to pay the mere $2,000 it would have cost for her to live at home. When Presidents intervene, of course, bureaucrats tend to see reason. Katie was duly sent home, and a new committee was named to check on the several dozen other Katies caught in similar red- tape tangles.

It is worth remembering, though, that most government regulations have their origins in some situation that needed correction. The Food and Drug Administration, for example, was invented to stop people from selling poisonous food. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is frequently criticized for its fussing over microscopic details of how ladders are to be built or where water faucets are to be located. Nonetheless, that kind of fussing helped reduce the very real toll of fatal job accidents by about 20%.

Most of the nation's most diligent preventers regard themselves either as preventers of bad things (Does that park really need a $12 million restaurant?) or of personal injuries (If Medicaid provided for home care, would hospitals start expelling the chronically ill?). They see themselves, in other words, not as preventers but as guardians, or improvers, and the trouble starts when the guarding and improving become ends in themselves. Hence the lugubrious history of the Sergeant York antiaircraft gun, which kept being made more complicated, more computerized, until it became so fancy that it could not function in combat and was canceled last year at a net loss of $1.8 billion.

Another theoretically worthy goal of the preventers is to make society more equitable, more representative and accessible, to make sure that police forces are not all white and male and that the Internal Revenue Service listens to complaints. But when anyone tries to make the government do its various good deeds more effectively, the preventers mobilize. Take the testing of teachers' competence, which certainly seems a desirable reform. When a disproportionate number of black teachers began flunking, teacher organizations went to court (in Alabama, Arkansas and Texas so far) to invalidate the tests as racially discriminatory. Well, are they discriminatory, and if so, can't they be fixed, or will that arouse new outbursts of prevention?

One thinks in terms of the government because the government makes so many of the rules, but the passion for prevention extends all through our society. "The sad thing about many older and tradition-bound American companies," as Rosabeth Moss Kanter wrote in The Change Masters, "is that they may recognize the need for innovation as a matter of corporate survival but not know how to go about getting it. Accustomed to setting up controls and to avoid risk, they may have forgotten how to permit experimentation. Used to setting policy at the top, they cannot easily free the levels below to contribute new ideas."

Then there is the growing terror of lawsuits. Doctors estimate that they now annually perform $15 billion worth of medically unnecessary tests, procedures and paperwork, all designed to combat possible lawsuits. If you go to a lawyer about some problem, on the other hand, you may have to pay substantial sums to protect yourself from other lawyers, even if the danger is purely theoretical and no lawsuit ever occurs.

So prevention takes all kinds of forms and acquires all kinds of justifications. There is a celebrated American novelist who spent several years of his youth as a street-corner preacher of hellfire and damnation. He still ruefully recalls that he once proclaimed to his parishioners that the world would come to an end on the following Saturday. "What did you tell them the following Sunday?" a cynic asked him."Why, I told them that the world had been miraculously saved by our prayers," he said.

He laughed. Sort of.