Stagnant economy warning

I know a man, a New Yorker who now lives in Florida. A novelist who is as much of a professional as any farmer or surgeon. I mean that his work is organised according to a strict and unchanging daily timetable.

He's the temperamental opposite of those writers who, after a swift bout of writing take a walk or scuff their heels on the lawn or brood and await the next spasm of what they call 'inspiration.' This man, who agrees enthusiastically with the remark of the late James Agate that a professional is a man who does his best work when he doesn't feel like it and that no householder would tolerate for a minute a plumber, who being summoned to an emergency a leaky tap and an overflowing bath tub, look the situation over and said, 'Sorry, I just don't feel inspired at the moment'. 

This man gets up at 5.30 every morning. He stands at a sloping desk in his apartment, buzzing his chin with an electric razor and reading, at the same time, one chapter of Dickens. When he gets through all the novels, he starts again. After a cup of coffee, he sits down at his typewriter at precisely 6.15 and he begins to write. He finishes his first stint at about 11 a.m. and then swims 20 lengths of the apartment house pool. After that, a light lunch and a nap and by about two o'clock he's back at the morning’s manuscript. He goes over it, he rewrites, he retypes till 6 p.m. when he puts it away neatly in a folder and leaves his desk as clean as a demonstration model. He watches the evening news, he has his dinner and then he reads. Sometimes he's asleep by ten o'clock, if so he wakes at 2 a.m. If he goes to sleep at 1 a.m., he sleeps through till five. He puts out one novel a year and has been on this routine since the early 1930s. 

He's plainly a healthy man but the irregular, or rather the odd, thing that you notice is the remarkably short night he gets by on. Four hours sleep is his limit. He'd make an interesting case history, I think for the University of Minnesota biorhythm department which has a lab devoted entirely to the study of humans' sleeping habits. They've been at it for several years now and have made some remarkable discoveries, one of which is that if you put somebody with perfectly regular habits in an underground apartment where there's no daylight and you give them everything they need by way of food, drink, icebox, stereo deck, books, so on – no television, no radio, no clock or watch – they will gradually work out an entirely personal rhythm and one that becomes less and less attuned to the 24-hour day. So that, for instance, and even though they may use all sorts of mental devices to mark the passing of day and night, they can be depended on to go wrong about how long they've been down there. 

Now you'd think, I'd think, that being cooped up that way, sleeping and eating when you felt like it, the days would lie heavy on your mind and that, when you were let out, you'd greatly exaggerate the time you'd been cut off from light and dark and the 24-hour clock. On the contrary, without fail, they always think they've been down there for a shorter time than they have. They calculate, say, that they've been isolated for five days and nights, when, in fact, they've been there for eight days and nights. 

Not the least of the University of Minnesota's useful contributions to human knowledge is the debunking of age-old superstitions, the most tenacious of which includes such hoary clichés as 'that we all need eight hours sleep a night' and 'early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy', never mind 'wealthy' or 'wise'. They've also done some work, complementing the full-time research of the Goddard School of Aeronautical Medicine in Maryland on what happens to the human brain in space flight, in jet flight, and especially the tricky cycle of human behaviour which goes under the beautiful name of the circadian rhythms. What happens to your body, your brain when you fly from San Francisco to London, say, and find yourself eight hours behind the clock? My own modest contribution to this research may be summed up in a theme song I've suggested for all California London jet travellers. 'I left my heart in San Francisco and my bowels in New York'. 

Obviously these thoughts have come up because I've been boning up a little on the sleep research bit, but only because I was looking to see if any university, or neurological centre, has done work on what happens to the human brain when it's working in the dog days, in high heat and humidity. Of course, I'm sure the actual changes in pulse rate, respiration, brainwaves and so on are well known but whereas the Goddard people have come to the conclusion that no transatlantic flier should make an important decision within 24 hours of his arrival at either end, something goes wonky with the judgement – paging Dr Kissinger. Nobody, so far as I know, has suggested that in our fairly hideous summer, mid-summer, no government official should put out a statement of policy before checking with several departments and the Congress, not to mention his doctor. 

This proposal is not wholly facetious. I have noticed for years that, in the dog days, the news, especially news of policy, of what American policy is, lurches alarmingly between opposites. It may be because Congress is taking a month's holiday and so the White House, for example, can make big, dramatic statements without stirring an instant cry of protest on Capitol Hill. But I suspect that midsummer madness tends to induce midsummer optimism or confusion. While we're waiting for Congress to get back to Washington and work on, say, an energy bill, all sorts of other interested parties have time to sit down and put out ingenuous or cheerful suggestions in the manner of pep talks. Let me illustrate! 

The other morning there was a full-page ad in The New York Times and since it was placed there by a national oil company, I'm sure the ad appeared also in many more metropolitan dailies. It is topped by a drawing of a happy-looking motorist with his happy dog leaning out of the rear window. This is to show that he's got his air-conditioning off. The slogan says, 'The less you use your car air-conditioner, the more you save!' Which is a glimpse of the obvious people don't care to take in the broiling days. With your air-conditioner on, you use, at the very least, ten per cent more petrol. It then offers, on behalf of your friendly oil company, the following recommendations: don't carry excess weight, keep your tyres properly inflated, avoid jack-rabbit starts and sudden stops, combine short trips with other riders, form carpools, keep your engine tuned. 

All this, of course, is splendid advice and, if followed by America's one hundred million motorists – half the population – it would drastically reduce our dependence on imported oil. In fact, the government put out a report, only a couple of weeks ago, saying that after the last Arab price hike and in the wake of all those queues at petrol stations, the traffic on main highways across the country dropped by 15 per cent. 

It was rough on country motels and tourist agents in the mountains and the lakes and the national parks and so on, but the whole country saved, in one month, more petrol than the president had said was necessary to offset the restrictions on imported oil. Alas, the queues vanished because the demand was down and the supply was up, so now we've decided the crisis is all over and traffic is back to within one per cent of what it was at the peak when the alarm rang out. There's trouble ahead. 

So this oil company was being very civic-minded when it published its list of dos and don'ts. It was creditably obeying our beloved president who urges us to save oil not only for cars but for things like, er... kerosene, diesel oil for heating, come the Arctic winter. So what is our president, himself, doing about it just now? 

Well, the same day as the ad, a bulletin came out of Washington announcing that the government, with the president's approval, has just sold $47 million worth of kerosene and diesel oil to Iran, a government which makes a policy of hating the United States and which has had appalling press here for the 400-odd executions of the Ayatollah Khomeini. The oil company and the president, are evidently working on different lobes of the brain. Maybe it's the heat, maybe the stupidity. 

Another weird example of informing the people by announcing opposite findings: on his holiday, or campaign trip, down the Mississippi, the president made headlines one day by saying that all the evidence leads him to feel optimistic about the nation's economy. By the end of the year, he said, we will see the inflation rate turning around and start going down again. Whose evidence has he been studying? How about that of the government of the United States congressional branch? 

His optimism followed the publication of a report by a body of Congress which has extraordinary influence because it is not the work of a partisan body. Congress has something called the Joint Economic Committee, it's a committee of both Houses of Congress and is recruited from both parties, from senators and congressmen who are also members of the standing committees that touch on the economy, such as the committees on commerce, on banking and currency, on finance, on ways and means. Twice a year, the Joint Economic Committee analyses the economy. It is well aware that its findings could themselves powerfully influence the economy one way or the other so, usually, its reports are pretty measured, pretty cautious. 

Well, the new one isn't. It says, flatly, that what was once the pride of Americans, their man-hour productivity has declined so badly that the 1980s will be dismal indeed unless the government acts now to raise productivity and, quite apart from the dent in the economy that might be made by the oil price problem, productivity in private business has registered the largest quarterly decline, 5.7 per cent, since statistics were first kept in these matters 30 years ago. This, the committee says, points to a stagnating economy and a drastic drop in living standards. Ten years from now, it sees petrol at $7 (£3) a gallon, a loaf of bread at £1, the cost of the average house at £70,000 ($151,000) and, even to stand still, the middle average household income would have to go from the present $15,000 to $36,000. 

Time for the Congress and for Mr Carter to come home to Washington. They should meet each other some time.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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