Through the Eye

Advancing on Manhattan last week to accept the New York Board of Trade "Business Speaks" award, Michigan's Governor George Romney admitted that he had a problem. He wanted to avoid all discussion of himself as a possible candidate for the G.O.P. presidential nomination, he said. But how was that possible?

Romney confided that he had put his research staff to work for three weeks, digging in search of strictly non-political material. So what happened? "They went through all of the newspapers carefully in search of material, only to find that when they excluded everything that Barry Goldwater, Nelson Rockefeller and President Kennedy had said the day before, all they had left was the comics. The truth is that everything is political these days, and it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a public figure to give a nonpolitical talk."

Romney pretty well got through the needle's eye by talking about the economy. Said he: "It is time that technological change, including automation, be taken out of the shadowy category of a doubtful social and economic asset. The question we need to ask today of automation, as well as all other elements of technical change, is not 'Is it really good?' but 'How can we accelerate its application and make it work more bountifully for everyone?' "

U.S. economic problems, Romney said, are attributable to the inability of both labor and management to cope with automation's promise. If automation were truly accepted, he argued, the economy would be able to achieve a 5% annual growth and create "the millions of new jobs needed for our burgeoning population." The key to that growth lies in resolving the basic conflicts of economic power. "Competition and cooperation will achieve it; vast power conflicts and growing governmental power to control such conflicts will not."

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