How to solve America's problems is profoundly and beautifully simple: just turn everything around and start going the other way. This would keep America moving, but now we'd be moving in the right direction, backwards - from the complex back toward the simple, from the new back to the old, from the ugly and shoddy back to the lovely and the sturdy.
This would cause no unemployment, because there'd be just as much work undoing all the things we've done recently as there was doing them; actually it will be more work, the way we're going to do it. The real cause of unemployment is mechanisation, right? Well, not only are we going to demechanise America, we are going to demechanise her, insofar as possible, quietly and slowly, without using any noisy machines, and that's going to be a lot of work.
Taking down skyscrapers will be done carefully - with no noise or dust. Hardhats will stand proudly and respectfully and quietly as the mayor says a few grateful words to them at the joyous ceremonies celebrating the unlaying of a cornerstone. Taking up the asphalt and concrete would be done by friendly groups of overweight businessmen working easily together with sledge hammers and crowbars, for the sound of the air compressor and the jack hammer would pass from the land. And as the good earth is revealed again under all the crud we've put over it, how lovely it will be!
There would be a great need for people to raise and train horses. What a job it would be to dismantle all the automobiles, melting down all the steel and ultimately replacing it in the ground in a form as close to iron ore as possible.
Most Americans would live in small towns, but there would be isolated rural areas and there would be moderate-sized, tenable, livable cities for those that wanted them. The economy would be basically agricultural - small farms, unmechanised, family-owned, and family-worked - but there would also be small, local industries manufacturing things well.
It would be twice as easy to persuade Americans to get rid of all this junk as it was to persuade them that they wanted it in the first place. In fact, once a kind of conspicuous deconsumption pattern started, it would be hard to control. No one would want to be last on his block to get rid of his colour television set, especially after all television programming had ceased forever.
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