ANTI-EXPERT
Page 54
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GOING one better than Oxford, the University of Wigan, if my information is to be believed, has set up a transport department, with Prof. P. D. Jillow at its head. Although his work on the diminished seventh and the submerged one-fifth is known the world over to anybody interested in those things, he is not equally famous for his research on transport—which is hardly surprising, as he has not done any.
In accordance with the general line along which he intends to proceed, he has given a broadcast before he has even given a lecture. It is more than likely that readers will have missed the programme, and I should therefore be doing them a service by setting down some of the professor's observations, as nearly as possible in his own words as far as I can remember them. , "A degree in transport is what my pupils are supposed to be seeking," he said, "but it is the last thing they ought to Want. My main concern will be to ensure, if possible, that everybody fails. Then I will know my lectures have done good. The transport industry, or so it seems to me from half an hour's concentrated study of the subject, has suffered and is suffering from too many qualified experts. The more they know, the less sense they talk, and none of them does any good. For myself, I have never run a bus undertaking nor driven a train, but I am sure neither qualification is necessary for my job, and might even be a disadvantage.
"You will note that it is the qualified, and not the unqualified, experts whom I am attacking. It is often said that everyone thinks himself in a position to give his opinions on transport, and that nearly everyone does. And why not? It is essentially a subject that requires little study, and when it is forced upon one the circumstances are invariably melancholy. He who has had to endure with philosophy two hours in an unheated train just outside Reading at least knows where he is, although the knowledge May give him little pleasure. The expert (and I mean the so-called qualified expert) can tell him no more, let alone suggest any course of action except staying put.
Delay Not Criterion
"With no other industry do we have this state of affairs. If something goes wrong with a manufactured article—a television set, an electric light, a mousetrap, or a car—we are wise to wait for the expert to put it right. If we have to wait a long time it is annoying, but the extent of the delay is not the criterion by which we judge the expert's efficiency. In any case, he will probably blame road congestion or British Railways.
"Transport is completely different from the process of manufacture. If it goes wrong, this means that somebody (or something) is not at the place where he (or it) should be. The fault is all in the delay. However efficiently the transport operator may act when he finally arrives where you want him, he cannot wipe out the past. You have missed the boat or the funeral or the market or whatever else it was you wanted to catch. Speed is useless when it comes too late. We have no fondness for horses that trot gently round the course and then bolt for the stables.
"Of course, industrial processes must come into transport at certain points. Vehicles sometimes break down, in which case the engineer comes into his own. In our studies at Wigan we are leaving mechanical faults out of consideration, for they are not the main cause of transport B20 delays and confusion. In any case, we are not supposed to be training engineering apprentices.
"We are trying to get down to fundamentals, back to first principles. The experts quarrel among themselves and contradict each other. Nothing wrong in that, except that they choose to quarrel on ground where there ought to be absolute certainty. They persist in regarding transport as a science, as something purely mechanical; and, if this were a correct assessment, there should be no room for disagreement among the experts. Calculations should not have more than one answer, whoever carries them out. There is agreement on the best way of making steel ingots or bone china or soap—but not on the best way of making tea or of running a transport service.
"Transport is an art, and not a science, and in fact our students would be given an arts degree if they were misguided enough to deserve one. To put it another way, transport is organic rather than inanimate. It is like a living process, and biological rather than mechanical or industrial principles should apply. We know, or we should know, that life is not a machine. It does not work in accordance with unchanging laws, and it offers infinite scope for disagreement among the people who study it.
Bank Staff Left Out
"If you take some of the current transport problems and look at them from this point of view, you may not at 'once find a solution, but at least you will understand better what it is you are studying. The dispute within nationalized road haulage about the effect of raising the speed limit for heavy lorries provides a good example. Without claiming to know the whole story, and relying entirely upon what has appeared in the Press, I can at least make out that the drivers are striking because they are in the new agreement with their employers, and the bank staff are striking because they are left out. Neither of the parties with a grievance is able to give any reason that makes sense to me.
"Are we, therefore, to condemn the industry as illogical? It would be more constructive to look for some analogy among the social sciences. The most obvious field is matrimony, where the situation is very much the same. Those people outside want to get in; those people inside want to get out. Having established the resemblance, I am not sure what the next step ought to be, but it may well occur to me before long, and I will give the benefit of my advice to the proper authorities.
"Let me now give another example. Again it does not need an expert, but merely an assiduous reader of the Press, to know that for a number of years the railways have been steadily increasing their efficiency and have just as steadily been losing money and traffic. Here again the analogy, too close to be a coincidence, is bound up with the relations between the sexes. We all of us reckon that our way with the girls improves as we grow older—but alas! the results seem to get no better and they certainly cost a good bit more. There may be a moral in this for the railways, but if so I hesitate to point it out.
"One final observation, this time from life. The man who took my furniture to Wigan for me tells me that his costs are continually going up while his prices are continually coming down. Not having a ready explanation at the moment, T am proposing to ask my students to write a paper on the theme."