Ira Levin - who died this week at the age of 78 - was known for his bestselling novels Rosemary's Baby, The Stepford Wives and The Boys from Brazil, all of which became successful movies. But another of his novels, This Perfect Day, deserves to be better known than it is. Indeed, given its tight plot about a revolt against an all-providing world government, I don't know why it hasn't gained the attention of Hollywood. As libertarian historian Ralph Raico wrote in The American Enterprise back in 1998:
This Perfect Day belongs to the genre of "dystopian" or anti-utopian novels, like Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's 1984. Yet it is more satisfying than either. Not only is its futuristic technology more plausible (computers, of course), but the extrapolation of the dominant ideology of the end of the 20th century is entirely convincing.
The novel is set 141 years after the Unification, the establishment of a world government guided by a central computer. The computer, Uni, provides all the members of the human race with everything they need - food, shelter, employment, psychotherapy, and monthly "treatments" that include vaccines, contraceptives, tranquilizers, a drug to prevent messy beard growth, and a medication that reduces aggressiveness and limits the sex drive.
It's a perfect world, as described in the children's rhyme that opens the book:
Christ, Marx, Wood and Wei, Led us to this perfect day. Marx, Wood, Wei and Christ, All but Wei were sacrificed. Wood, Wei, Christ and Marx, Gave us lovely schools and parks. Wei, Christ, Marx and Wood, Made us humble, made us good.
Everyone loves Uni, which gives them everything they could want. And the great medical advances of the Unification ensure that everyone lives to the maximum human lifespan of 62. No one questions the wisdom and benevolence of Uni. Except Chip, whose crotchety grandfather gave him that secret and illegal nickname and urged him to try to think about things just before he got his monthly treatment. Eventually Chip's thoughts take a radical turn, and he meets a few other people who are similarly disgruntled at the perfect world. A rip-roaring plot ensues.
I love a good dystopian novel in which a few hardy rebels try to make a revolution. And Raico is right to note that Levin did a good job of imagining an extension of some of the intellectual trends of the 20th century. In today's papers we can read of politicians and intellectuals on both right and left trying to use government to increase happiness and "socially desirable behavior." Uni is the consummation of those desires, but Levin understands that government-provided happiness isn't all it's cracked up to be.
But in one way Levin was himself caught in the intellectual milieu of his times. (The novel was published in 1970.) He understood the cost to freedom of a government that controlled and provided everything. But he did seem to believe that such central planning would be efficient. He had Chip worry that if the rebels managed to shut down Uni, planes would fall out of the sky, people would die, trains would crash, food wouldn't get to the dinner table.
In this starry-eyed view of the economic efficiency of planning, Levin was led by the world's most famous economists. John Kenneth Galbraith, for instance, wrote, "the Russian system succeeds because, in contrast with the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower." And Paul Samuelson wrote in his widely used textbook: "What counts is results, and there can be no doubt that the Soviet planning system has been a powerful engine for economic growth.... The Soviet model has surely demonstrated that a command economy is capable of mobilizing resources for rapid growth." Actually, Levin, a novelist writing in the late 1960s, can be excused for his misconceptions more than Galbraith and Samuelson, economists who wrote those lines in the 1980s, only a few years before the final collapse of Soviet-style socialism.
In 1985, I had the economist Don Lavoie send Levin a copy of his fine book National Economic Planning: What Is Left?, inscribed something like "in the hopes of persuading you that central planning is no more workable than it is humane."
But this is a minor quibble about a great novel. The big problem with This Perfect Day is that it's out of print. If that isn't a market failure, I don't know what is. Publishers, filmmakers - wake up! Bring this book back into print and onto the big screen.