Politics and Technology

What is perhaps most conducive to political controversy is the fact that advancing technology is beginning to promise immediate practical solutions to hitherto insolveable frustrations, if it is given the chance. As a practical matter there must first be expensive studies of the feasibility of technological innovations and then funds appropriated for research and development. If, as is increasingly the case, these funds must be substantial and there is no promise of relatively quick profit, then the market mechanism simply does not become engaged. Only the government can undertake the enterprise. It is true that in a modern mixed economy this does not invariably create a political dilemma. But in the United States it does more frequently than not. There may be no immediate political repercussions from the unusual amount of attention President Kennedy has been giving to conquering the problem of turning brackish and sea water into usable water. Seventy-five million dollars is being spent by the Office of Saline Water to ascertain the best of a number of competing commercial processes. Nor would there be a formidable political problem in governmental support, say, for eradicating malaria from the world (3 million deaths annually, 300 million people afflicted), which is something distinctly within reach at a cost of only $50 million spread over a ten-year period.

But consider the political reverberations should the government undertake the rescue operation that could be consummated for our moribund textile industry if technology were subsidized—as is being seriously considered in Washington—to master the task of applying high speed electronic computers to our textile looms, thus rendering American textiles competitive in the world market. Comparable practical achievements are within reach in a score of areas, were it not for the political obstacles—for instance, the revival of our East Coast shipping industry by the use of fast hydrofoil ships now anchored on drawing boards for lack of developmental money, ships quite capable of out-performing trucks (hence offering some relief to the traffic problem); or, for another example, creating a major new source of high protein food by making a systematic effort to harvest the ocean.

The questions posed by these considerations are ultimately and essentially political. They go to the heart of the political problem of how democratic government, one that is both responsive and responsible, reconciles technological promise with the will of the public. For decisions have to be made as to what public resources are to be devoted to what technological ventures—and who is to make the choice. Throughout the lifetime of the United States, our tradition has been to depend upon the market mechanism to register the people’s choices. It is the doctrine of consumer sovereignty, the revered “invisible hand” (which economist Robert Heilbroner usefully characterizes as a system “to mobilize and allocate human energies and to distribute the social produce in a manner to assure society of its continued existence”). However, the evidence is now becoming overwhelming that the traditional market mechanism of supply and demand, for all its uncanny power to articulate the public will, simply is not up to reflecting the long-range values that will have to be weighed if a rational use is to be made of the new technology. The point is that this is not a doctrinaire matter, a sly triumph by creeping socialists; it is a result of technological change.

The underlying dilemma arises from the fact that a democratic government must be responsive to the present electorate, yet, since it makes decisions that determine the impact of technology upon the environment of succeeding generations, it must also be responsive to future electorates. Government is now facing situations with increasing frequency where currently popular practices sanctioned by the market system (exploitation of natural resources is an obvious example) must be modified for the sake of this future. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, about the devastating ecological impact of pesticides, has wonderfully dramatized this issue.

This is to put the matter negatively, however. The political problem is not so much a matter of placing restraints on technology. It stems more from the fact that positive forces are now building up that urge us to circumvent the market mechanism and apply public funds directly to technology, as traditionally we have done only in wartime. What is slowly being realized is that the support of technology cannot any longer be confined to what the public wants. After all, the public can only choose alternatives among things it knows; it simply does not know enough to project its wants into the future, with the result that the market mechanism cannot be depended upon to nourish technological development. For the first time in our history the government has set up a unit, called the Panel on Civilian Technology, responsive to this fact. This little-known operation was established strictly for the purpose of encouraging technological innovation on the premise that new technology, as much as or more than new plant and equipment investment, is what stimulates economic growth. The 18-man panel, composed of industrialists, academics, and bureaucrats, is especially concerned with four industries suffering from technological lag—textiles, coal, housing, and transport. It reports to science adviser Jerome Wiesner, to economic adviser Walter Heller, and to Commerce Secretary Luther Hodges. It has already become a center of controversy in certain planning circles because of its first report, on urban transportation, in which it argues against support for rail transit and instead favors express buses on exclusive rights of way.

The political inhibitions to direct government subsidy on any substantial scale remain enormous, of course. Suggestions such as those made at a Brookings Institution symposium on “The Uses of Economics”—suggestions for revitalizing our lagging economy by having the government finance research and development in areas like communications, transport, food, and industrial production—are still widely judged as heresy. In business circles they are viewed as the sure road to Communist despotism.

“To what extent should government finance or subsidize industrial research in general, or for certain industries as it has already done so productively for agriculture and defense?” asked Charles J. Hitch, former Chairman of the Research Council of the RAND corporation, at the Brookings meeting. Now an Assistant Secretary of Defense, Hitch went on to say that “relatively small expenditures” for deliberately planned research and development in the military sector “have been staggeringly, alarmingly, productive. . . . I have tried to think of any reasons why the military area should be unique in this respect; I can think of none. That it is not is suggested by our somewhat similar experience in agriculture, though on a much smaller scale. I suspect that there has been a serious misallocation of resources and that it corresponds to economists’ misallocation of their effort between problems of investment and problems of technological change.” Coming from so highly placed a representative of the power elite, these are words calculated to give pause. Hitch was impressively seconded in his main sentiments by Francis M. Bator, of M.I.T., whose cool disparagement of laissez-faire markets as an effective allocator of resources went unchallenged.

A fruitful way to gain a perspective on the force-feeding of technology by government is to recall the attitude of the ancient Greeks toward science. They viewed science as sacred knowledge. And, since the Greek city states placed a premium upon political and social stability, the esoteric knowledge of science, the secret of manipulating nature, was confined to the few, so as to preclude the social and political disruptions bound to follow in the wake of any widespread applications of technology. Everything had to be secondary to the ideal of a stable social order.

Now between this attitude and the modern American attitude the contrast is extreme. Our operating assumption has been that the essence of the free society is to encourage the unfettered intelligence and to accept all discoveries and their applications. Whether this attitude can be maintained is beginning to be insistently questioned today for the first time. Is our capacity for political inventiveness equal to the challenge of devising new political forms, alignments, and procedure that can deal effectively with technology and simultaneously preserve democratic vitality? In three recent symposiums organized independently of one another and along quite different lines, one in Santa Barbara, another in Boston, and the third at Arden House, Harriman, New York, the common subject was the social impact of new technology. These were three highly instructive sessions, illuminating many of the conundrums under scrutiny here. The imperative but largely unanswered question that eventually emerged in all the meetings was the question of political control, with special emphasis upon the relations between the private sector and the government.

One might assume that there is already a substantial literature on technology’s impact on politics. To be sure, there are numerous allusions to it in the late-blooming literature about the changes technology has brought about in social and cultural relations (though not even a professional journal on this subject existed until 1958, when Technology and Culture was founded). But there are no full-scale treatments of the specifically political relationship. Economist Heilbroner (at the Arden House meeting) noted that “the steady invasion of technology is the commanding reality that shapes the economic relation of man to nature in our day; how extraordinary, then, that the two most important economists of fullblown capitalism, Alfred Marshall and Lord Keynes, have virtually nothing to say about the impact of technology on the economic system!” No doubt the key to the absence of a literature on the impact of technology on politics is due to the fact that political structure is essentially reactive to economic forces, and only lately has there even been any explicit acknowledgment of technology’s undermining of the market system.

In any event, the division of opinion over the fundamentally political problem of whether man does or even can control technology became sharp and even impassioned in these symposiums. Lewis Mumford produced a characteristically eloquent paper for the Santa Barbara meeting pleading for the precedence of humanist direction. Wrote Mumford: “The quantitative overproduction of both material and intellectual goods poses, immediately for the Western World, ultimately for all mankind, a new problem: the problem of regulation, distribution, assimilation, integration, teleological direction.” In Mumford’s view, “The most dangerous notion an age of automation can entertain is the belief that machines have goals of their own, to which man must submit if he knows what’s best for him.” His colleague at Santa Barbara, author and scientist Sir Robert Watson-Watt, echoed this with the words, “There can, in fact, be no more disastrous undermining of the human condition than that of regarding technology as a self-propagated, self-propelled entity not fully controllable by the appropriately designed agencies of the body politic.”

The University of Bordeaux’s Jacques Ellul, the chief spokesman at the Santa Barbara symposium for the view that man really no longer has any control over technology, caricatured the humanists in this passage from his hotly discussed paper: “An idea frequently to be encountered in superficial inquiries concerning Technique (technology) is the following: ‘At bottom everything depends on the way Technique is employed; mankind only has to use Technique for the good and avoid using it for the bad.’” Ellul’s paper is a demonstration of the, to him impossible task of discerning· the ultimate effects of technology and hence of bringing it under effective rational control. He contends that control eludes us because we never can foresee all the consequences of a given technological innovation.

The project that seems to have excited the chief alarm among the Santa Barbara participants is “Operation Chariot,” the Atomic Energy Commission’s plan to build a harbor by an atomic explosion. Professor Ritchie Calder of Edinburgh cited this project as exemplifying the demonic tendency of technology. It carries man along with it at a furious, mindless pace, unchecked because the public is ignorant of the full results of the project. Calder recoils at the prospect of what he calls “pseudotechnologists” such as the Atomic Energy Commission making decisions, since they have vested interests in the very technology they should be helping us to control. Calder speaks of humanity being at the mercy of “the faceless men at the elbow of the uninformed.” Professor Richard L. Meier of Michigan, a specialist in resource conservation, takes comfort in his belief that there are at least 500 people of Ph.D. level in government bureaucracy dedicated to preventing the misuse of technology. The “throttling process” they carry on suppresses the bad ideas like “Operation Chariot.” Professor Melvin Kranzberg contended that the fact that the RAND Corporation has been asked by the Pentagon to study the social implications of technology is most encouraging. Robert. M. Hutchins, never one to suffer facile optimism gladly, complained that although the difficulties for humanity if technology is not controlled had been made clear enough, no one had yet succeeded in outlining a program for control “which would not be subject to the charge that it might be worse for the human race than technology unchecked.”

Between the pessimists and the optimists it is possible to identify a pragmatic bridge or middle position. It has nowhere been better exemplified than in comments by Columbia philosopher Charles Frankel made at the 1961 National Conference on Social Welfare. Frankel takes off from the promise that “the justification of a system of decentralized capitalist competition is that it energizes and makes possible the spirit of invention and innovation. That system seems to be working very well and as a result not only do we have technological unemployment but we can count on it as a normal feature and sign that our system is doing well. It is the price we pay for our success, the inevitable defect that goes with our virtue.”

Frankel does not say we can foresee all the consequences of technological innovation. But he does say we have known for some time now that the social impact of technology is dislocating, and therefore we should not panic, treating the dislocations as an “accident,” as “something that shouldn’t happen.” Instead, we should deliberately establish permanent preventive institutions carefully designed to cope with such dislocations as we can anticipate. In this instance his concern was with technological disemployment, and he called for retraining and relocation agencies not created in an “ad hoc and retrospective basis” but as standing agencies no less a permanent and fully articulated part of our institutional framework than our school systems.

An effort along these lines is getting underway with the launching of the Manpower Development and Training Act under the newly created Office of Manpower, Automation and Training. It is one of the most significant pieces of legislation in recent years, since for the first time it establishes the national government’s responsibility for the reemployment of a labor force wracked by technological change. Not only does this act provide for $435 millions over three years to retrain 400,000 of the hard-core unemployed; it marks the advent of a Federal program that manpower experts in Washington say will have no end because so rapid is the pace of technology that workers much anticipate new jobs in new industries perhaps a half-dozen different times in their working lives. As (then) Labor Secretary Arthur Goldberg observed of it, “for the first time in our history we are setting out to make opportunity a matter of design, and not chance.” In the Congressional hearings on the law, conservative critics expressed anxiety that this was the beginning of an unprecedented control over the nations manpower by the central government. The law does in fact mean that a government functionary and not the individual retrainee determines what skill the latter is to be taught. It is decided on the basis of known manpower needs and on a judgment of the retrainee’s potential.

Frankel’s paradoxical plea is for energetic centralized planning for the express purpose of avoiding political despotism. Such planning, says Frankel, must be shaped by the goal of lessening the inevitable disruptive impact of technology and the resultant pressure for political relief through oppressively authoritarian measures. “The pressures toward centralization in our society are very great,” he stated. “Without deliberate planning at the center they are going to become greater. The policies of dealing with emergencies, of creating ad hoc measures for problem after problem, multiply restrictions, regulations, laws and inhibitions on human energy. People misunderstand the true purpose of sound social planning. The purpose is to simplify, to rationalize, to provide a stable set of alternatives in which individuals are freer to act in security and in the exercises of their freedom of choice.”

It was writer Joseph Kraft, a participant at the Boston symposium on technology, who made most concrete and vivid the need for a new political superstructure if we are to manage the new technology. He made a plea reminiscent of Frankel’s for new institutions to control and direct technological change, but on a grander scale than Frankel. The author of The Grand Design: From Common Market to Atlantic Partnership, Kraft spoke with enthusiasm of the “important political advance” represented by the European Economic Commission on the one hand, and the Council of Ministers, on the other. The Commission consists of highly skilled technicians. The Council is supranational body of ministers of state charged with making the political decisions of the European Economic Community. What has impressed Kraft about the Common Market is how its political framework enables it to adjust to technological change expeditiously and rationally. He cites the fact that, with the adoption of a common agricultural policy last January, the result in the next decade will be to move a million and a half inefficient West German farmers off the farm and into labor-short industry, as France’s much more efficient farmers come to dominate Continental agriculture. His point is that this necessary and rational development would never have been possible if conventional German politics, with its powerful farm lobby, had prevailed. What has happened, in effect, is that the technical experts of the European Economic Commission have become a permanent political lobby in favor of rational response to technological change. The European Economic Commission is able to function so effectively because the Council of Ministers, being a supranational body, can then bring immense pressure to bear upon the individual governments to adopt the Commission’s recommendations. For then the individual government, in this instance the West German government, says to the farmers, in Kraft’s words, “Look, we understand your interests and are doing the best we can, but we don’t have absolute control. There are these other people we have to consider.”

Kraft sees the Commission and the Council as “an international system for diluting the responsibility of the individual governments” and thus enabling these national governments to go along with the reforms which conventional politics would otherwise have precluded. He sees the merging of the six Common Market powers as resulting, almost by accident, in a providential device for coping with technological change and feels that some such political device must be found by the United States if it is to overcome such standing blocks to progress as our inability to solve problems like subsidized farming, tax loopholes for industry, and featherbedding labor.

As a perceptive journalist, Kraft is impressed by how conventional political obstruction to needed technological adjustments has us currently immobilized in so many important areas. Herman Somers, the Haverford College political scientist, sharply questioned Kraft’s evaluation of the Common Market experience. He contended that Kraft was saying nothing more than that parliamentary procedures were simply in temporary suspension when the Economic Commission’s decisions were carried out and that as the Common Market countries evolved from an economic to a political unity the same “obstructionism” of parliamentary deliberation would again prevail. Neither he nor Kraft could then clarify how to escape the dilemma. Their colleague at the Boston symposium, economist and historian Robert Heilbroner (also prominent as a writer for the Arden House symposium), sees the impact of technology essentially as mortally challenging the traditional role of the market system as the organizer and arbiter of our political and social order.

In a prophetic concluding essay elaborating his viewpoint in his new book The Making of Economic Society, Heilbroner, like Gerard Piel at the Santa Barbara symposium and Bator at Brookings, sees the market mechanism as having “declining functional relevance” in a society of advanced technology: “The market is an assiduous servant of the wealthy consumer, but an indifferent servant of the poor one. Thus it presents us with the anomaly of a surplus of luxury housing existing side-by-side with a shortage of inexpensive housing, although the social need for the latter is incontestably greater than for the former. Or it pours energy and resources into the multiplication of luxuries for which the wealthier classes offer a market, while allowing more basic needs of the poor to go unheeded and unmet. . . . These shortcomings are all indicative of a central weakness of the market system—its inability to formulate public need above those of the market place.” Hence planning arises in the advanced market society, which has mastered technology precisely to offset that society’s inherent goal-setting weakness.

Technology further accentuates this goal-setting or planning deficiency of the market mechanism for two reasons. First, as Heilbroner puts it, “In a society of very great abundance, not only these cultivated desires but even the basic incentive to maximize income or minimize expenditures may well lose the ability to direct human behavior. (Who will clean the sewers and handle the garbage, for instance?) In that event the market system would cease to wield its necessary control over individual action, and society would have to look to some other means of social control to insure the necessary accomplishment of its basic tasks.” It was apropos of this that RAND economist Charles Hitch at the Brookings symposium asserted, “If we don’t have an adequate theory of efficiency in a non-market economy, and we certainly don’t, it is high time we developed one.” Hence the underlying theme of all the symposiums—the impending political crisis.

A recurrent note was that technology demands central planning because it presents a bewildering array of alternative actions and because it creates an enormously complex order in which all enterprises are interdependent, with each action exerting a chain reaction. A political superstructure capable of central planning becomes essential if only to prevent chaos. This is to express it defensively. The offensive was taken, as noted earlier, first at the Brookings symposium on economics, which served as a platform for suggestions that technological research and development be directly organized by the government so as to achieve planned socio-economic goals. At Santa Barbara, the same note was sounded (and occasioned profound alarm) and the “declining functional relevance” of the market system was implicit throughout the discussions. There economist Robert Theobald quoted a Stanford Research Institute report to the United States Senate as follows: “We have invented the art of systematic invention. Organized scientific research and development, which has become a great industry in the last few decades, is itself on of the most significant social inventions of the twentieth century. It is unlocking the secrets of nature and putting the knowledge to practical use at an unprecedented rate. Also we have invented the art of systematic innovation.”

The tremendous extent to which the United States is already devoting its treasure to technological advance under direct government auspices was recently shown in the testimony of Dr. Jerome Wiesner, the Director of the Office of Science and Technology, before the House Committee on Government Operations:

This fiscal year the President proposes to put about $12.3 billion into research and development—more in one year than the Federal Government spent for research and development during the entire interval from the American Revolution through and including World War II. This $12.3 billion, although representing but 15 percent of the total Federal budget, is in effect well over one-third of that portion of the budget which is susceptible to control; for a great part of the budget, as we all know, is inevitably committed to fixed requirements such as debt retirement, etc. In addition, the Government now accounts for at least two-thirds of the Nation’s entire annual expenditure in research. That is, the Federal Government spends twice as much for research and development as all of industry, universities and private foundations combined. This budget is not only large, but it has been growing at an unprecedented rate—for what in 1950 amounted to $1.2 billion has grown in the intervening 13 years by a factor of 10.

One great effect of this has been clearly explained by Professors J. S. Dupre and W. E. Gustafson of Harvard in a paper entitled “Contracting for Defense” (Political Science Quarterly, June 1962). “The government has had to devise new standards in its contractual relationships with business firms. Essentially, the government now assumes the financial risk involved in innovation. Free competition no longer characterizes the process of bidding for government contracts. While private firms have thus been freed from the restraints of the open market, they have acquired new public responsibilities. They are no longer merely suppliers to the government, but participants in the administration of public functions.”

What is happening is that in the past companies competed on a bid basis in the open market for government contracts. Now, with immensely complicated projects whose evolution and ultimate costs can only be roughly surmised in advance, contracting firms negotiate agreements with the government to be reimbursed for costs. These firms are selected not on a price basis so much as on a basis of technical expertise, on their management calibre and their facilities. This is posing very delicate political issues with respect to conflict of interest. “Such public goals as cost control, the insurance of competition, and protection for small business all come into conflict with the profit motive,” note Dupre and Gustafson. They point out that a prime contractor must take on management responsibilities in the public interest that are unnatural for a profit-seeking, competitive corporation. As prime contractor the firm has to make all kinds of judgments in acting as the overall coordinator. All the while it has to think of its own fortunes, for example in successfully competing for future contracts, and this accentuates its reluctance to make information available to participating contractors who may later be competitors.

Action has recently been taken by the executive branch responsive to precisely this situation in another instance of political decision following directly upon the admonitions of the academic community. In September the Defense Department announced that firms doing research-and-development work (”the lackeys of the death industry,” as they were referred to at Santa Barbara) were to be barred from competing also for “hardware” contracts. This is a far-reaching decision because it puts at least a temporary halt upon the practice of nonprofit corporations created by the government from intruding on the lucrative engineering and technical work of the established defense companies. This decision is the first to emerge from the analysis of the government’s research and development program being undertaken by a committee headed by former Budget Director David E. Bell. The committee’s underlying concern is the increasingly blurred dividing line between the economy’s public and private sectors.

Dupre and Gustafson conclude that “business is no longer merely a supplier but a participant in the management and administration of a public function . . . negotiation and cost reimbursement have channeled public money into the private sector without the use of the market mechanism. Business, like government, must then become subject to non-economic checks to avoid abuses.” What non-economic checks is the precise question before the house, of course.

In his testimony to Congress pleading for more money to pay for scientists, Wiesner said that the step-up in government-subsidized research and development was bound to accelerate quite apart from defense or space work because it has now become clear that our rate of economic growth is increasingly dependent upon technological development. All the technology meetings noted the increased dependence of the economic growth rate on technological development. John T. Dunlop, the Harvard economist who edited the book on the Arden House symposium said: “The industry of discovery opens up a new vista of the long future in which substantial resources in increasing amounts are devoted systematically to…reshaping the physical environment of mankind and to providing increased living standards and cultural opportunities…the rise of the industry of discovery suggests that we should be able to look forward to doubling productivity and living standards . . . every fifteen years (a rise from 3 to 5 percent in the yearly growth rate). These potentials underscore the common gains to be shared by increasing productivity and the possibilities of insuring adequately those who bear the costs of the adverse initial impacts of some technological changes. The industry of discovery also raises a host of issues and questions which are slowly coming to the fore . . . To what extent shall the direction of invention be left to the individual spirit and curiosity, to the market, and to what extent directed by priorities established by what bodies?

Thus the signs are accumulating that we are on the threshold of an increasingly hot and divisive national debate on this very question and that it may very well bring us to the brink of a constitutional crisis which cannot yet be precisely envisioned but will focus on the relations between the executive and legislative branches. It will be the central domestic issue of the 1960s and the 1970s. The manner in which the question is answered will determine our governmental framework for a generation, and especially the pattern of relationship between the national government and the other great power center, business, the administrator of the market system.

How distant, really, is the time when, as Robert Theobald stressed at Santa Barbara, the issues of biological and genetic control will be forced upon the agenda of government responsibilities under such prods as the population explosion of the senile and chronically ill, the possibilities of organ transplants, new miracle drugs and artificial insemination. Professor Somers cites the work of the British physician Ffrangcon Roberts, an expert on medical economics, who uses the wry term “medicated survival” to describe technology’s accomplishments in forestalling death. He sees the market system as nourishing “antiplutic medicine,” that is, treatment wherein society remains burdened despite treatment because the disease is congenital or the result of old age—“antiplutic” since the very success of the treatment exacerbates the cost to society. But the examples need hardly be so esoteric. The pressures are mounting behind such familiar questions (forcefully raised at Boston) as whether a decentralized democracy traditionally infatuated with “local initiative” can cope with automotive congestion, originating across different state and city boundaries; or whether, as open land in metropolitan areas shrinks, we can devise institutions to prevent corrupting land uses; or whether the potential of television, now about to become international, is indefinitely to be determined by its effectiveness as a sales instrument for advertisers.

As the inadequacies of the market system become increasingly evident under the impact of technological change, there is a developing consensus that we are bound to witness a kind of intervention now feared by most Americans. Practically the only precedent we have for it is the Employment Act of 1946, which for the first time in Federal law stipulated that full employment and equitable income distribution were to become an explicit governmental concern rather than be left up to the market system. That law was passed in response to the national anxiety that the economy would falter with the end of wartime spending. (As it turned out, massive pent-up consumer demand more than compensated.) It was no radical dismissal of our system, but rather an acknowledgment that, in an age of technological disruption, supplementation of the market system by political action is essential for rational allocation of resources and the meeting of public needs. This year’s Manpower Development and Training Act is the most important addition to the law so far.

Almost certainly we are also going to witness the development of a new kind of national economic budget going beyond annual Federal accounting (what we essentially do now) to set forth a five or six year projection of all our national resources viewed against our national goals. We will then have something close to national programming of explicit policies, in which the overriding consideration will be the role of new technology.

Just what government body will emerge as the key agency for national planning no one could say now. But it could conceivably be the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, a Council further strengthened by law and with vastly increased responsibilities and powers. It is such a body that must to a substantial extent fulfill the crucial function the European Economic Commission fulfills for the Common market. One of the best prescriptions for such an agency as this is developed in the extraordinarily penetrating statement on automation issued by the Research Section of the Industrial Union Department, AFLCIO. It calls for “A Permanent Commission on Technological Change” to act as “a central clearing house in which there will be gathered, analyzed, and evaluated, all pertinent information on public and private plans involving technological change.” It would operate within the executive branch of the national government. Recently Arthur Burns, the former economic adviser to President Eisenhower, came forward with a surprisingly similar proposal.

The development of any such planning body and such a new kind of national economic budget to cope with technological change will no doubt create and be part of a great political ferment. But by then the domestic political context may also have been modified somewhat to ease the impact. For example, in the years immediately ahead we can anticipate some modernization of the organization of Congress. As the reapportionment movement slowly eliminates the most egregious abuses and begins to alter the complexion of our government, it may in time modify the American custom of putting local interests ahead of the national interest.

We will also witness the growing power of a new constituency in the electorate, a constituency created by technology itself. I refer to the burgeoning army of scientists and other intellectual workers of the new technological order. If Professor Daniel Bell of Columbia, a participant at the Boston symposium on technology where he first unveiled his now much-discussed version of the “post-industrial society,” is correct—and his statistically awesome arguments were compelling—this new constituency will soon come to rival the dominant voice of the past, the business community. The rise of this constituency could be the most important single political development of the new technology. Dr. James R. Killian, Jr., Wiesner’s predecessor as Presidential science adviser, has urged that scientists run for Congress. Noting that they have begun to appear in state legislatures, Killian suggested that a technological society must have scientists “in the public arena if it is to deal wisely with all the great policy matters arising out of science and technology.”

In any event, one thing is clearer day by day. The American instinct for freedom, the talent of political inventiveness permitting a maximum of individual freedom combined with optimum collective performance, is to be put to a rugged test. To meet the test we will have to arrive at a far better comprehension of the full impact of technology. With planning to a much larger extent superseding the market mechanism as the director of our energies, there is bound to be much more discussion as to what worthy ends our political and social institutions should serve. There will be a growing consciousness that, as Robert Oppenheimer recently elaborated in his piece on science and culture in Encounter) whereas technology is a cumulative process ever building on its advances and thus moves only in the direction of progress, our moral and political life lack cumulative growth and can at any time just as easily regress as progress. As of right now Americans are still floundering in a strange transitional state of mind, for the most part blindly addicted to the notion that the old market system will make everything come out all right; the rest uneasily awakening to the realization that only our resilience as a free people will see us through the crisis.