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日本語版への序文----
はじめに(Foreword)
第一章 リベラリズムの死(The Death of Liberalism)
第二章 ウォール街の新たな宗教(Wall Street Finds Religion)
第三章 バブルの国への道(Bubble Land: Practice Runs)
第四章 資金の壁(A Wall of Money)
第五章 ドルの津波(A Tsunami of Dollars)
第六章 大規模な清算(The Great Unwinding)
第七章 勝者と敗者(Winners and Losers)
第八章 均衡の回復(Recovering Balance)
原 註(Notes)
解 説
For connoisseurs of misery, the ten years from 1973 through 1982 are feast of low points.
The rate of economic growth was one of the worst for any comparable period since the end of World War II. The country endured one of the worst periods of inflation in American history, and foreign investors fled the dollar as if it were the Mexican peso.
Japanese companies humiliated American standard-bearers in one flagship industry after another. Layoffs and short shifts spread through heavy industry. America's once-humming industrial heartland transmuted into the Rust Belt.
The OPEC nations increased oil prices tenfold and strongarmed their way into ownership interests in Big Oil's production arms.
There were war protests and campus battles. Cities were awash in crime and disorder. New York City went to the edge of bankruptcy. A president was forced from office, and his vice president resigned over charges of bribery and corruption.
Helicopters evacuated Americans from the embassy rooftop in Saigon, fleeing a lost war. The Soviet Union visibly stepped up the missile race and sent 100,000 troops into Afghanistan. President Jimmy Carter spent the last months of his presidency negotiating ransom payments for fifty-two American hostages held by Iranian radicals.
Economists even came up with a measure of how awful it felt. In 1980, the Misery Index, the sum of the inflation rate and the unemployment rate, was the highest ever. An ugly new word, "stagflation," entered the political vocabulary.
Events so pervasive and so consequential are usually overly determined. There is no one cause, but lots of causes. The 1970s disasters had at least three primary roots---the loss of business vision, demographic shifts, and gross economic mismanagement.
Business Embraces Incompetence
Consider a listing of the top American companies from about 1910 or so:It would include U.S. Steel and Bethlehem Steel; Standard Oil and Gulf; Swift, Armour, and General Foods; AT&T, General Electric, and Westinghouse; Anaconda Copper and Alcoa; Dupont and American Tobacco. Then look at a listing from the late 1970s. Except for companies from new industries, like General Motors and RCA, it's much the same. Despite all the vicissitudes of mergers, name changes, and antitrust, the top companies in 1910 mostly held their positions for the next seventy years.
The winning companies of the early 1900s had emerged from the most savagely Darwinian industrial maelstrom in history. Rockefeller, Carnegie, and their ilk clawed to the top through ruthless efficiency and lethal execution. The best German or British chemical and steel companies could beat the Americans in this or that niche, but across the board, the United States possessed the most formidable array of industrial power ever seen.
And then Americans slacked off.
Almost as soon as U.S. Steel was born from a string of mergers in 1901, its chief, Elbert Gary, started working out market-sharing and price-maintenance agreements with his competition. U.S. Steel was born controlling more than half the market; Gary argued that if his fellow steel moguls just adopted U.S. Steel's high price structure, they would each maintain their market shares and all could flourish together. After the Standard breakup in 1911, the oil industry fell into a similar pattern, and eventually so did newer industries, like automobiles and televisions. A steel company chief once explained the logic of price maintenance to a Senate antitrust committee: "If we were to lower our prices, then it would be met by our competitors, and that would drop their profit, so we would still be right back to the same price relatively.
War preserved and extended Americans' lazy hegemonies. Companies could wax fat on wartime weapons orders and postwar reconstruction, and at the same time help destroy their overseas competitors. A 1950s steel sales executive bragged, "Our salesmen don't sell steel; they allocate it." But by defanging competition, Gary's system of "administered pricing" froze technology. The locus of innovation in steel-making shifted to Europe and Japan.
Big Labor was inducted into the system in the 1950s, with the General Motors formula for labor settlements. The industry price-setter usually took the land in union negotiations. Contracts would normally cover three years and would include wage awards in line with forecasted productivity increases. Later, as inflation ticked up, contracts includes both the expected productivity increase plus annual adjustments for inflation accelerated at the same time, the companies were left with a cost problem they could not wish away.
Even contemporaries understood that the 1950s and early 1960s were something of a golden age. Big-company pay-settlement standards percolated throughout the smaller companies that supplied them, and most companies were adding pension and health benefits. For a large slice of the population, the American dream of a house with a lawn and a decent school for the kids came true. John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society (1958) announced that the problem of production had been solved, that consumer wants were on the verge of being sated, and that it was time to focus on "expelling pain, tension, sorrow, and the ubiquitous curse of ignorance."
Labor schools for union activists flourished in the 1950s and 1960s. Most of them were run by Catholics, many at Jesuit colleges. (The big industrial unions were often two-thirds Catholic.) The schools taught bargaining and organization techniques, labor law, and labor economics, while extolling the "solidarist" power-sharing arrangements characteristic of Catholic Europe. Businessmen often attended the courses. Union leaders and executives began to regard themselves as industrial statesmen.
At the business schools, the reign of the big companies was taken as part of the natural order. The hot topics of the 1950s and 1960s were organization and finance, essentially rearranging furniture within the stable multi-unit enterprises of modern "managerial capitalism." There was a 1960s merger movement, but it had an academic, chalk-dust smell. The idea was that if companies assembled diverse portfolios of businesses, they could smooth out their earnings cycles. Absurdly, Exxon went into office equipment; Mobil bought a circus and a department store chain.