During the twenty years since CSEP's creation, attention to ethical concerns has grown in many professional associations, business firms, and governments. Codes of ethics have been enacted, updated, or tightened. Political office-seekers and appointees have come under ever- stricter scrutiny. There has also been increased consideration of the moral foundations of American society. Consider, for example, the recent best-selling Book of Virtues (now a television series)—or two scholarly tomes, Trust and Integrity. The author of the latter is at work on another, Civility.

All this, though healthy, is, it seems to me, a mere eddy. The dominant current of the last twenty years has been in another direction: elevating purely economic values and downgrading nearly everything else.

End of the "Opportunity Era"
1973 was a watershed in America's ethical history. The country was then fixated on "Watergate", the scandal that would eventually force a U.S. President to resign the office to which he was twice elected. Observers of politics regularly say, "Power corrupts," but Watergate still seemed unusual. Not only did the corruption reach the highest office, it also touched many respected members both of business and of the legal profession. A broad rededication to certain standards of conduct seemed essential and in fact resulted.

In the longer view, however, 1973 was much more important because of another development, one less apparent at the time. 1973 was the "last good year". Up till then, most Americans had benefitted from the post-1945 economic boom, a rising tide that really did lift all, or nearly all, ships. Workers could justifiably expect that—with greater experience, steady exertion, and continuing education—their real income would increase each year. After 1973, the increase in income stopped: slower growth in productivity, tougher management, more foreign competition, have all contributed to a significant decline in worker's real income.

This surprising, even bewildering, reversal of expectations—by now both thoroughly documented and widely publicized—is linked to other economic disruptions. Major industrial plants, sometimes whole industries, have closed down or moved. Major corporations have "downsized". Computers have replaced many clerks and skilled tradesmen. Jobs that once promised lifetime employment and secure retirement have become temporary "contract positions", with few or no health, va- cation, or retirement benefits. More people work longer hours or two jobs, while others have gone from unemployed to unemployable. The market for new college graduates is weaker even as business demands more education of those it does hire. In short, we have less security and less economic opportunity than we had two decades ago.

Duck and Cover
The repercussions of this change have been enormous. The problems are economic but their ramifications are social and psychological. The good society is one that draws on the talents of—and provides some measure of status and security to each of its members. But post-1973 America is a country where more and more people are under-used or redundant—and feel it.

Like other Cold War children, I was taught to duck under my school desk if the siren sounds. That is how many have responded to the economics of the last twenty years. They have hun kered down, pulled in, hoped for relief; they have struggled to "keep up appearances" and worried over possible remedies.

Both public and private life seem to have experienced a decided shift from the humane potentialities that sit atop Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs toward the baser ones at the bottom. What sphere of life has not been affected? Even motherhood—once (with apple pie) among our most revered values—has gone out of fashion because two incomes are now needed where one used to be enough. People who cannot afford to have someone pump gas into their car and clean their windshield can hardly afford to stay home to raise children! Though remarked less often, the commitment to fatherhood has also been undermined, in part because fewer men now earn "a family wage". Partly in consequence, the proportion of white children born out of wedlock has risen to over a quarter, and for black children, up to almost three- quarters.

More germane here are changes in the professions. Medicine and law are both increasingly "businessified", with practitioners and clients suffering as a result.

Physicians (and pharmaceutical firms) openly advertize for customers. Their patients are forced—by employer or cost—to participate in a health maintenance organization, for- profit "provider network", or other new form of "health care delivery," the success of which seems to depend in part on denying services physicians might prefer to offer and patients to receive. Physicians can no longer find an outlet for the desire to aid others that typically attracted them to their profession; nor can they hope for the same financial security their predecessors had. They chafe under the new paperwork, the need to explain decisions to cost-control clerks many miles away.

Lawyers have similar difficulties. The field has turned from its communal and moral foundations. "Rampant in- dividualism", a tendency to think in terms of "economic survival" and to regard oneself as a "profit center", endangers not only the well-being of individual lawyers but, according to Benjamin Sells, "the Soul of the Law" itself.

The same is true for journalism. Broadcasters used to consider news an essential public service. But as economics has forced out other considerations, newscasts have come to be judged much as any other programming is—and been distorted accordingly. What do we have now? Sensationalism, "infotainment", talk radio that angers rather than edifies.

Shrinking Common Commitments
As a political scientist and public administrator, I am especially concerned about the effect that this narrowly economic attitude is having on government.

Government and market are fundamentally different. Government is the system through which we pursue mutual objectives: protection from enemies, education of our children, smooth roads, pleasant parks, unpolluted water. The market, on the other hand, merely satisfies individual wants: a good job, fine meal, camcorder, new car.

Government and market are nonetheless interdependent. Markets work best under stable, effective government. A review of the U.S. Constitution shows that many of its provisions were included specifically to establish institutions—postal service, patent protection, uniform currency, standard weights and measures—that are prerequisite to an efficient market. At the same time, the market, not government, generates the wealth upon which government services depend. Government and market are the yin and yang of America's prosperity and glory.

Yet government, like so much else, has been a victim of the increasing "economicization" of the last twenty years. In the 1960s, the country could still "afford" to improve schools, extend health care to the elderly and poor, strive to reduce poverty, and put a man on the moon. Since then we have had tax revolts, attacks on economic and environmental regulation, and charges that government itself is the cause of our problems, not a resource in solving them. Hostility to government is now widespread even though every day's news includes a business's plea for government's help (for example, airlines asking Washington to pay part of the cost of new security measures).

Even more general is (what might be termed) "the corporatization" of the public sphere. Some politicians have come to rely on marketing consultants, focus groups, and oversimplified or misleading ads to communicate (or even formulate) policies. Public employees are told to regard those they serve as "customers" rather than as taxpaying citizens. They are urged to view themselves as "entrepreneurs" rather than as executors of legal mandates. There are calls for the "privatization" of important governmental functions, among them prisons, highways, hospitals, and social security. Whatever the merit of particular proposals, the underlying assumption seems to be that government is always inefficient and generally unnecessary, a burden on society rather than the precondition of both economic success and non-economic well-being. It too has been marginalized.

Conclusion
Not one of these problems—income stagnation, the over- commercialization of professions, work pressures that limit the attention of parents to their children or each other, or the declining regard for government—has an easy remedy or even an obvious one. All that seems certain is that the trend of the last twenty years, an increasingly narrow focus on the economic short-term—on "cost savings" and "tax cuts"—cannot long sustain us.

Efficiency is a virtue, but our success in invention, industry, commerce, and the professions, the vigor of our public life, depends on other virtues—in-cluding trust, integrity, and civility —that transcend a simple calculus of profit and loss. Acting otherwise, we have lost much of the popular confidence our professions and institutions once enjoyed. If the next twenty years renew our recognition of the importance of such non-economic virtues, we will be much better off.