On the road and breakdowns

Reading Charles Kuralt's A Life on the Road, which I found in a Little Free Library across the street from Beth and Kevin's in Queens. Not a great book, but lots of interesting stuff.

Kuralt tells the tale of his coming to New York in the 50s to work at CBS as a reporter -- first on radio, then on TV (at first considered a backwater within the organization, compared to the mighty radio). Already by the late 50s, he was going around the country chronicling the demise of family farms. So that's a very long-running story, which runs counter to the Republican and sometimes also Green mythology of farms being under threat only recently. There wasn't some halcyon period of rural plenitude under Eisenhower following the hardships of the Depression and the shared sacrifice of WWII.

Secondly, Kuralt says that in the 50s and early 60s CBS didn't have bureaus in secondary cities, just NYC and DC, not even Chicago and LA (plus Paris, Bonn, Rome...). So the interior was covered by just Kuralt and Harry Reasoner running around. This after in 1955 Harry Markowitz advanced the theory of efficient markets, that markets reflected all available information. The problem was, nobody knew anything. I was reminded of the rudimentary level of analysis being carried out at the Fed in the early 90s when bank analyst Mike Mayo went to work there, per his account of his time there in Exile on Wall Street. Again, there was lots of dynamic terra incognita for markets to process in pricing securities. In some real sense there still is. But Markowitz was still right in essence because no one person or computer can grasp it all and make consistently good judgments.

Lastly, Kuralt chronicles at lengths the problems that his team had with different models of recreational vehicles as the "On the Road" segment that would prove his lasting legacy to the world found its feet in the 60s. Continual breakdowns of wheels, tires, brakes, engines... Things that happen rarely now. It is impossible for us to understand the benefits we all derive from the manufacturing revolution that began in Japan and particularly Toyota in the 70s-80s and has been enshrined in the practices of TQM (Total Quality Management) and kaizen (continuous improvement). Not just in cars but in all things manufactured. The role of standards is also huge.

But I also wonder if all of those breakdowns didn't have a purpose, in that they slowed Kuralt and team down and made them talk to people on the highways and byways over which they passed. Could be that the breakdowns made "On the Road" so good. And that we miss out on this forced engagement with those with whom we have little in common, those in flyover country, metaphorically. And they miss out by not meeting us.