The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [19]
With the exception of Germany and Japan, the non-oil-producing nations were punished by balance-of-payment trade deficits. The International Monetary Fund projected that this imbalance would grow throughout the eighties. As deficits, devaluation, unemployment and inflation continue, the fever of protectionism spreads, making cooperative solutions less likely. To keep afloat, many smaller nations—and their bankers—follow New York City’s example and borrow or lend excessively. The debt of underdeveloped nations is variously estimated to be between $150 and $250 billion. Much of that mushrooming obligation—as New York’s was prior to the 1975 market collapse—is short-term debt. The Fourth World, like many older American cities, cannot compete and has nowhere to turn. Bangladesh does not have the luxury of worrying about inflation. Each year, 70 million people, according to the World Bank, face starvation; one-quarter of the earth’s population—1.1 billion human beings—live in countries where annual incomes are less than the $265 weekly earnings of a U.S. auto worker.
An international economy, like a city bond market, is largely predicated on confidence. By 1978, many worried about the “global crisis syndrome,” as the Club of Rome dubbed it, about the American dollar, about trade deficits, loan defaults, war in the Middle East or Zaire, the arms race, post-Tito Yugoslavia, inflation, unemployment—about the collapse of confidence in the world economy. Perhaps this explains why Paul Erdman’s novel The Crash of ’79 led bestseller lists in 1977 and was read by many as a work of nonfiction.
A BLEAK PICTURE? Perhaps too bleak. As I write this, no American soldiers are being killed or maimed in foreign adventures; fewer Americans are starving; there is at least more talk about human rights and even evidence of success; England is beginning to tap its North Sea oil riches; Anwar Sadat’s peace initiative and Jimmy Carter’s spirit of Camp David have inspired people around the world. New York has a new mayor with high expectations; you can actually see citizens bending to shovel the dog shit with their pooper-scoopers, the result of a new law that is being obeyed. And, there is always E. B. White:
It is a miracle that New York works at all. The whole thing is implausible. Every time the residents brush their teeth, millions of gallons of water must be drawn from the Catskills and the hills of Westchester.… The subterranean system of telephone cables, power lines, steam pipes, gas mains, and sewer pipes is reason enough to abandon the island to the gods and the weevils.… By rights New York should have destroyed itself long ago, from panic or fire or rioting or failure of some vital supply line in its circulatory system.… It should have been wiped out by a plague starting in its slums or carried in by ships’ rats. It should have been overwhelmed by the sea that licks at it on every side. The workers in its myriad cells should have succumbed to nerves, from the fearful pall of smoke-fog that drifts over every few days from Jersey, blotting out all light at noon and leaving the high offices suspended, men groping and depressed, and the sense of world’s end. It should have been touched in the head by the August heat and gone off its rocker.… Mass hysteria is a terrible force, yet New Yorkers seem always to escape it by some tiny margin: they sit in stalled subways without claustrophobia, they extricate themselves from panic situations by some lucky wisecrack, they meet confusion and congestion with patience and grit—a sort of perpetual muddling through.
Despite this book’s catalog of depressing facts and its view—expressed jointly by urbanologists George Sternlieb and James W. Hughes, that New York City’s “immediate past … may be the future”—this pessimist is optimistic enough to live here. In some ways, what I think doesn’t square with what I feel.
I love New York.