A Cautionary Tale Senate Seat That Edward M

MONTAGE channel natural light to the Clockwise from left: Norman Foster very center of his buildings, designed the Swiss Re building in London to channel light and air throughout its astral while the Malaysian archi- form; a skyscraper in Doha, Qatar, advertises tect Ken Yeang gouges out the 2006 Asian games; Peter Eisenmann’s his buildings’ skins to cre- unbuilt design for the Max Reinhardt Haus ate profusely planted mi- rethinks the linearity of tall buildings. croclimates in sun or shade. Just as in the 1950s and ’60s there were reached tall buildings. In an clear resonances between the world of extension of their semiotic architecture—with its “pure, sleek” sky- role, their surfaces are being S e scrapers—and the minimalist creations rethought to carry visual TTY IMAG TTY of the fine arts world, says Johnson, today content and information. In e the influence of the information age has certain places in city cen- ITT/G ew ters, their exteriors have H e become not only battle- MIK grounds, but also more valuable than the space within. Johnson recounts landlord struggles with residential neighbors both- VATION) ered at night by illuminated signage, on the e ST EL ST one hand, and with tenants angered by re- e L, W L, duced daylight after an advertising scrim is e suddenly hung on the building. Recently, a developer was offered more money for the exterior of a building than the residential MOD (1:200 RANK F units inside could generate. ICK D R The fight for the exterior of tall build- e ings, Johnson says, is clearly the next big conversation. If we are indeed on the cusp HOTOGRAPH of a new reason for building skyscrapers, P CTS, CTS, Johnson’s view is that public art might e RCHIT play a role. “A tall building is de facto a po- A RS e tential work of art,” he argues. “It may be NMAN e ARTN P privately financed and occupied, but it is SY EIS SY e R + R e in the public realm—it is a wall of the pub- OST F lic right of way.” vJonathan Shaw COURT Brown surprised everyone by winning the A Cautionary Tale Senate seat that Edward M. Kennedy ’54, LL.D. ’08, had held for nearly 50 years. Inflation and its painful aftermath Suddenly there was the 82-year-old Volcker, summoned to the White House by david warsh to stand at President Barack Obama’s side as he announced that “the Volcker rule” would guide the administration’s efforts obert j. samuelson ’67 had the financial cataclysm of the last couple of to reform the banking industry—federally bad luck to send The Great Infla- years. insured banks should be barred from spec- tion and Its Aftermath: The Past and Lucky Sam. It turns out that there’s a ulative activity unrelated to their busi- R Future of American Affluence to double-barreled moral to his story. A little ness. Yet it had been more than 20 years the printer the spring before the recent like Edward Gibbon, Samuelson started since Volcker had retired as chairman of financial crisis became acute. The book out to write a history and finished with a the Federal Reserve reached stores just in time for the No- cautionary tale. Board. The banking Robert J. Samuelson, vember 2008 election, and, even though it Anyone born after, say, 1965, might have lobby, and the Senate, The Great Inflation received respectful reviews, it was swept been puzzled at the sudden prominence quickly dismissed his and Its Aftermath: The Past aside by events. Now Samuelson is back assigned to Paul Volcker this past January. rule. What could the and Future of American with a paperback edition, somewhat re- The Democrats had just lost their super- old man add? In fact, Affluence(Random vised and updated, with a new introduc- majority. A little-known Massachusetts under the circum- House, $17 paper) tion addressing the significance of the Republican state senator named Scott stances, Volcker was 22 May - June 2010 MONTAGE probably the next best thing to George Discontents: The American Dream in the Age of U.S. Treasury Department to quietly stop Washington. Entitlement—which argued that the Ameri- circulating silver coins in July 1967. Clandes- Anyone of college age or older in the can Dream had escalated into an unrealis- tine smelters, run by enterprising gangsters summer of 1979, when President Jimmy tic American Fantasy. In the next decade and amateur crooks, went to work and, all Carter named Volcker to the Fed, probably he spent most of his spare time writing The but unnoticed in the next two years, silver recognized that the appointment turned Great Inflation and Its Aftermath, “lest the entire dimes, quarters, and half dollars vanished out to be one of the two most memorable episode slip from our collective conscious- from the nation’s coinage, replaced by shiny things that happened to the United States ness.” The mistake that America made in silver-colored clad versions. between 1979 and 1987—that is, besides Vietnam looms large in historic memory, he By the late 1970s, the consumer price the personal computer, the AIDS pandem- writes; the mistake of inflation does not. index was rising at an annual rate of more ic, MTV, and Spy magazine. The other one True, it is hard now to remember, much than 10 percent. Inflation had become an was the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. less imagine, how differently money signi- infuriating, dizzy-making complication in all kinds of everyday de- cisions. A pair of explosions in the price of oil had con- vinced many Americans that the world was running out of the stuff. The economy was stagnant. Unemployment was high. The stock market had gone sideways for a decade. Pessimism was deeply ingrained. In The Zero Sum Society, Lester Thurow pro- nounced the political economy “paralyzed.” And then in late 1979, Vol- cker slammed on the mon- etary brakes. A year later, Reagan was elected. The two men made a “compact of conviction,” Samuelson says. Volcker assaulted in- flationary expectations, raising interest rates to un- precedented levels—banks’ “prime rate” reached a record 21.5 percent—and throwing millions out of work. Reagan provided political support. The president also cut taxes, fired striking air-traffic con- trollers, broke up the phone Samuelson originally wrote to explain fied in 1962. A candy bar or a copy of the company, and taunted the Soviet Union what he calls the “lost history” of the last New York Times cost a nickel, a beer 15 cents, with his Strategic Defense Initiative. 50 years—how the rise of inflation in the a gallon of gas 35 cents, a bag of groceries By the time the bitter recession ended in 1960s and 1970s produced one sort of cri- $5, and a full-sized Chevrolet $2,529. Credit 1982, the inflation rate had dropped from sis in 1980, and how the disinflation of the cards, to the extent they existed, were ir- 11 percent to barely 4 percent—and then 1980s and 1990s laid the groundwork for a regular company “charge-plates.” Inflation stayed there, despite big budget deficits. crisis of a different sort in 2008. He is well was just getting under way. The United States began a 25-year boom, qualified for the task, having begun writ- The United States was involved in a great the longest in its history. Samuelson calls ing about political economy (as a cub for contest with the Soviet Union in those this “the restoration of capitalism”—more the Crimson) when John F. Kennedy was days—racing to the moon, staving off a mis- stable and productive, but more crass in the White House, and having written sile crisis in Cuba, beginning a revolution in and cruel. In 1984, Jane Bryant Quinn and about it ever since—after 1984 as a colum- civil rights, going to war in Vietnam. Con- Samuelson replaced Milton Friedman and nist for The Washington Post and Newsweek. gress declared a second war, on poverty, Thurow (who earlier had taken over from A slow writer, he laboriously produced and in 1965, authorized Medicare and Med- Paul Samuelson, to whom Robert J. is no one book in the 1990s—The Good Life and Its icaid. The rising price of silver forced the relation) as the economics columnists at 24 May - June 2010 Illustration by David Vogin HARVARD TWO:Layout 1 22/3/10 17:59 Page 1 MONTAGE Newsweek. The change was emblematic: fine art print goodbye, great themes and expertise; hel- harvard yard lo, home economy and common sense. According to Samuelson, the traumatic inflation of the Sixties and Sev- enties didn’t have to happen. It was “a self-inflicted wound that resulted from collective hopefulness and intellectual overconfidence.” President Kennedy was led astray by his Keynesian advisers, with their counsel that he seek to maintain “full employment” and reduce “output gaps”— subtle technical concepts quite impossible to translate into salable political proposi- tions. Traditions of good housekeeping, such as balanced budgets and the neces- sity of occasional recessions to check inflation, were forgotten. The brilliance of Volcker and Reagan stemmed from the essential simplicity of their principles, he The traumatic inflation resulted from A meticulous, new etching by London artist Andrew Ingamells “collective hopefulness The first aerial view for over a century to depict all the buildings in Harvard Yard Ingamells is in the collections of HRH The Prince of Wales, The Museum of London, and intellectual The Paul Mellon Collection of British Art overconfidence.” American debut after etchings of Oxford and Cambridge Colleges says.

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