The New York Times columnist David Brooks put in writing last week what has long been true of Pittsburgh. The “Steel City” has traded its industrial past for the new economy of services marked by a downtown of gleaming, modern tower-like headquarters (one is literally encased in mirrors) of the nation’s most advanced and sophisticated medical facilities and research centers.
This conspicuous agglomeration of modernity is surrounded by the decaying ruins of the city’s industrial origins, a comatose ring of rundown steel and coal hamlets inhabited by resentful men and women crammed cheek-to-jowl into rotting wooden houses next to gjn mills, second-hand shops and tattoo parlors.
Brook used what he saw in his tour of Pittsburgh to make the larger point that the new economy of the city’s downtown was good and the old economy of the decaying industrialism is bad. (He overlooked the wage and income hierarchy of the service economy but let’s leave that for another day.) We should not mourn its passing.
In the course of a day in this Valley, I, too, experienced versions of the new and old economy, but not in quite the same way as Brooks. First the old. I drove to a nearby power equipment dealer to pick by my tiller from its repair shop, a week after the technician called to explain my likely bill (around $100, he said). When I picked up the machine and went to pay up, I was given an itemized list of the parts and labor down to the price of a new spark plug (which I had not expected, but was pleased to get, all the more so because it cost just about what I would have paid at the local auto parts store). I paid the bill ($117) and when I got home I started up the tiller; it fired right up and I couldn’t help but smile, thinking that the successful repair had spared me the cost (some $350) of a new machine. Plus, I knew what I had paid for.
A few hours later the mail arrived with an item from one of my dental insurance companies. The carrier explained, as it usually does in such cases, why the service I’d received a month earlier was not being covered. When I asked why, the clerk recited a paragraph of incomprehensible technicalities that still leave me puzzled. Then she asked a few questions, the most inane of which was, “Do you have additional coverage?”
I said of course I have another policy because this one (which is offered to public sector retirees) is so limited. We went back and forth and she agreed to resubmit the claim without indicating how this would shake out. I would not be so concerned were it not for another encounter soon after with a back-up provider that sold me insurance three months ago — but with a catch.
The coverage for basic procedures wouldn’t start for six months after I signed up and started paying — and for a year for more complex procedures.
I should not have been surprised by the inefficiency and double-talk of the insurers. After all, such companies are in business to make money and most of them cannot make money without skimping on coverage or denying it, erecting “barriers” in the words of a former industry executive who’s since gone over.
Such scams aren’t really unique to insurance, as anyone familiar with the fine print of guarantees will tell you.
What is unique is that I could not use a service I was paying for. What if your lender told you that you couldn’t drive the car or use the fridge you just bought until it was paid in full?
The other oddities of Brooks’ vaunted service economy are medical bills that are not itemized — or conversely laden with charges inflated to dizzying heights. What if your supermarket or repair shop emulated the billing protocols of the medical industry?
The bright and shiny offices of downtown Pittsburgh are more pleasing to the eye than the dark and satanic mines and mills of a bygone era. The old economy was dirty, gritty, smelly and sweaty; its workers surely drew on services of various kinds, but they themselves were all about production, making concrete things you could see, touch and use.
There was a certain transparency and integrity to the old artisan economy and its industrial successor that is sorely missing in the new economy.
Bruce Laurie of Pelham is professor emeritus in the history department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.