RESOLUTIONS FOR THE NEW DECADE
(As Seen by Harvard Faculty)

(Continued from last issue)

5. Authoritarian capitalism

Stephen Marglin, professor of economics, seems to be the opposite of Prof. Nozick, for he wants more government, not less, or at least more planning, democratic planning, as he puts it, that involves the shop foreman as well as the corporate executive. Capitalism has been authoritarian, and this is the real culprit, not government. He wants to limit capitalism by what he calls “democracy.” The fellows on the production lines are to have a hand in running and planning big business as well as the Henry Fords, he is telling us, and that is his response to the magazine’s query as to our most serious problem.

It is incredible that the professor could see “authoritarian capitalism” as a serious problem while international communism is not even mentioned, not by any of the professors. Even if they did write before the present crisis in Iran and Afghanistan, one would think that men who are wise in world affairs would see totalitarian regimes and atheistic communism as staggering problems.

6. Mass poverty in the cities.

We would expect a professor of city planning to speak to the problem of the cities, as does Peter Rogers. He refers to poverty on a mass scale, not just in isolated pockets, in the great cities of the world. Of the 4.3 billion now in the world upwards of half of these are very poor and 500 million are in extreme poverty. These poor of the world continue to migrate to the cities. In 1800 less than 2% of the world’s population lived in cities of 100,000 or more, and a hundred years later it was still only 5.5%. But today 26%, or 800 million, live in the cities, and this will increase to 40%, or one billion more, in the next 20 years. By then there will be 40 cities in the world with 10 million people. Mexico City will likely be the largest of all with 30 million people!

Prof. Rogers tells us that history shows that rural people never riot, only city people. Riots, coups, revolutions will be the fruit of the frustration of these large cities of the near future, for they will be worse than Calcutta now is. These cities will be like giant powder kegs, capable of blowing the entire world into social and economic instability.

He notes that both the pope and Castro, in their talks before the United Nations, called for a sharing of the wealth through foreign aid, the latter specifying 300 billion over the next decade. But Rogers notes that such aid is not the answer, for it would take 200 billions to provide sanitation facilities alone for these vast cities. What is needed, he says, is for these poor nations to get a fair shake in the world market, paying less for what they import and getting more for their own resources. They have long been exploited by rich nations. If they had an OPEC cartel, like the mid-east nations have for their oil, and thus get a better price for their coffee, tea, tin, copper, etc., their world would change in a hurry. In the meantime foreign aid should go toward building the means of production in these nations, not for commodities such as food. Their technology must develop so that they can create jobs for rural people, thus stemming the constant flow to the cities. He says this nation should lead the developed nations in giving 0.7% of their GNP each year for this purpose, which is what the United Nations is asking. That would double what we are now giving, to 13 billion a year. If the other nations followed, much of the world could be economically renewed, and tomorrow could be saved.

7. Control of nuclear weapons.

David Riesman has long been one of Harvard’s renowned profs, and from his chair in social science he points to arms control as the most crucial issue facing the world. He was not optimistic about the immediate future, even before Iran and Afghanistan. He says we must find some way to work with the dissidents within Russia who oppose the “metal eaters,” as they are called, those within the Soviet union who are bent upon an arms race.

I would be interested in how you, the reader, would see our problems as we face the 1980’s. In terms of the church’s mission we have to recognize that the Church of Christ upon earth is still divided and the world is not yet won to Jesus Christ, and those two are surely related, according to Jesus’ prayer for the oneness of all believers. A warring, divided, carnal church will never reach our troubled world.

He was in the world, John wrote as he described the eternal Logos becoming flesh. He was in our kind of world, the problems not being all that different. We are in that same world, and there is a sense in which we are to love it, as he loved it, and to bless it, as he blessed it. Our churches must become conscious of “the geography of world need” and apply the power of the gospel to those needs. To become more conscious of our world out there and its problems is part of the answer. --- the Editor