The Good Society The Triple Revolution

...d. Organization of the unemployed so that these voiceless people may once more be given a voice in their own economic destinies...

...to work out alternatives to defense and related spending that will commend themselves to citizens, corporations and unions as a more reasonable use of common resources...

...9. The use of the licensing power of government to regulate the speed and direction of cybernation to minimize hardship...

...essential to recognize that the tradi-This undertaking we consider to be tional link between jobs and incomes essential to the emerging economic, is being broken...

...In retrospect, the establishment of the right to an income will prove to have been only the first step in the reconstruction of the value system of our society brought on by the triple revolution...

...It is clear, however, that the distribution of abundance in a cybernated society must be based on criteria strikingly different from those of an economic system based on scarcity...

...We propose: I. Massive public works...

...We estimate that tens of thousands of employment opportunities in such areas as teaching and research and development, particularly for younger people, may be thus created...

...The aim throughout will be the conscious and rational direction of economic life by planning institutions under democratic control...

...However, these are not speculative and fanciful matters to be contemplated at leisure for a society that may come into existence in three or four generations...

...The economy of social and political order in this counabundance can sustain all citizens in try...

...Left to the ordinary forces of the market, such change, however, will involve psychological misery and perhaps political chaos...

...The technological revolution has related virtually every major domestic problem to a world problem...

...2. A massive program to build up our educational system, designed especially with the needs of the chronically under-educated in mind...

...Education has never been primarily conducted for profit in our society...

...The measures so far proposed have not been "transitional" in conception...

...2 billion or more a year should be spent in this way, preferably as matching funds aimed at the relief of economically distressed or dislocated areas...

...We do not pretend to visualize all of the consequences of this change in our values...

...Consequently national policy has hitherto been aimed far more at the welfare of the productive process than at the welfare of people...

...With public policy and research concentrated on people rather than processes, we believe that those activities and interests commonly thought of as falling within the public sector will absorb the time and the commitment of many of those no longer needed to produce goods and services...

...it represents the first and most obvious activity inviting the expansion of the public sector to meet the needs of the period of transition...

...5. A public power system built on the abundance of coal in distressed areas, designed for low-cost power to heavy industrial and residential sections...

...The statement, too long for complete publication here, began with an analysis of "The Cybernation Revolution" which "results in a system of almost unlimited productive capacity requiring progressively less human labor...

...To this end an expansion of the use of excess profits tax would be important...

...In late March there was released in Washington a statement called "The Triple Revolution," prepared by W. H. Ferry, associated with the Fund for the Republic, Gerald Piel, the science writer, and Robert Theobald, the economist...

...The democratic requirement is planning by public bodies for the general welfare...

...8. The trade unions can play an important and significant role in this period in a number of ways: a. Use of collective bargaining to negotiate not only for people at work but also for those thrown out of work by technological change...

...The primary tasks of the appropriate institutions should be: —to collect the data necessary to appraise the effects, social and economic, of cybernation at all conceivable rates of innovation...

...We are not able to predict the long-run pattern of human activity and commitment in a nation when fewer and fewer people are involved in economic production, nor are we able to forecast the overall patterns of income distribution that will replace those of the past full employment system...

...Planning by private bodies such as corporations for their own welfare does not automatically result in additions to the general welfare, as the impact of cybernation on jobs has already made clear...

...The outlines of the future press sharply into the present...

...until it comes to a normal stop...

...The present system encourages activities which can lead to private profit and neglects those activities which can enhance the wealth and the quality of life of our society...

...The hardships imposed by sudden changes in technology have been ac knowledged by Congress in proposals for dealing with the long- and shortrun "dislocations" in legislation for depressed and "impacted" areas, retraining of workers replaced by machines, and the like...

...In no way can these disconnected measures be seen as a plan for remedying deep ailments but only, so to speak, as the superficial treatment of surface wounds...

...Perhaps for this reason they have had little effect on the situations they were designed to alleviate...

...Society as a whole must encourage new modes of constructive, rewarding and ennobling activity...

...We must develop programs for this transition designed to give hope to the dispossessed and those cast out by the economic system, and to provide a basis for the rallying of people to bring about those changes in political and social institutions which are essential to the age of technology...

...7. Development and financing of rapid transit systems, urban and interurban...

...The Weapons Revolution," which leads to the possibility of obliterating civilization but not winning wars...

...c. Obtaining a voice in the investment of the unions' huge pension and welfare funds, and insisting on investment policies which have as their major criteria the social use and function of the enterprises in which the investment is made...

...to bring about the conditions in which men and women no longer needed to produce goods and services may find their way to a variety of self-fulfilling occupations that are a consequence of the era of abundance...

...Wealth possessed by lack of employment can be produced by machines rather than brought within the abundant society...

...Federal programs looking to the training of an additional 100,000 teachers annually are needed...

...and the use of minimum wage power as well as taxing powers to provide the incentives for moving as rapidly as possible toward the goals indicated by this paper...

...We regard it as the only policy comfort and economic security wheth-by which the quarter of the nation er or not they engage in what is com-now dispossessed and soon-to-be dismonly reckoned as work...

...The need is to develop and put into effect programs of public works to construct dams, reservoirs, ports, water and air pollution facilities, community recreation facilities...

...to develop ways to smooth the transition from a society in which the norm is full employment within the productive system to one in which the norm will be non-employment, in the traditional sense of productive work...

...But the primary weakness of this legislation is not ineffectiveness but incoherence...

...to recommend ways, by public and private initiative, of encouraging and stimulating cybernation...

...Since the debate over the Employment Act of 1946, it has been increasingly understood that the federal Government bears primary responsibility for the economic and social well-being of the country...

...to integrate domestic and international planning...

...The historic discovery of the postWorld War II years is that the economic destiny of the nation can be managed...

...The problems of joblessness, inadequate incomes, and frustrated lives confront us now...

...From "A Conversation on Jobs, Machines, and People," Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions...

...by men is still wealth...

...and "The Human Rights Revolution...

...The program here suggested is not intended to be inclusive but rather to indicate its necessary scope...

...We urge, The unqualified right to an income therefore, that society, through its ap-would take the place of the patchpropriate legal and governmental work of welfare measures—from uninstitutions, undertake an unquali-employment insurance to relief—defied commitment to provide every individual and every family with an signed to ensure that no citizen or resident of the United States actually starves...

...3. A major revision of our tax structure aimed at redistributing inincome as well as apportioning the costs of the transition period equitably...

...4. A massive program of low-cost housing, to be built both publicly and privately, and aimed at a rate of 7000,000-1,000,000 units a year...

...The era of cybernation will reverse this emphasis...

...This policy statement was signed by a number of prominent political analysts such as Seymour Melman and H. Stuart Hughes, by the civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, and also by the trade union leader Ralph Helstein...

...The Negro's is the most insistent voice today, but behind him stand the millions of impoverished who are beginning to understand that cybernation, properly understood and used, is the road out of want and toward a decent life...

...b. Bargaining for perquisites such as housing, recreational facilities, and similar programs as they have negotiated health and welfare programs...

...Principal among these are activities such as teaching and learning that relate people to people rather than people to things...

...Planning agencies should constitute the network through which pass the stated needs of the people at every level of society, gradually building into a national inventory of human requirements, arrived at by democratic debate of elected representatives...

...Among other signatories were DISSENT editors Irving Howe and Michael Harrington, and the economist Ben Seligman, who contributes frequently to our pages...

...Such misery is already clearly evident among the unemployed, among relief clients into the third generation, and more and more among the young and the old for whom society appears to hold no promise of dignified or even stable lives...

...and other programs to cope with the spreading problems of the great metropolitan centers...

...the American Negro, in his rebellion, asserts the demands—and the rights—of all the disadvantaged...

...The vast inequities between the industrialized and the underdeveloped countries cannot long be sustained...

...We estimate that for each $1 billon per year spent on public works 150,000 to 200,000 jobs would be created...

...6. Rehabilitation of obsolete military bases for community or educationaI use...

...Robert Theobold: One of the worst stories I've ever heard was about one of the automobile companies where if a person dies while the assembly line is operating and he is in a place where he can't be got at, he lies there until the line breaks down . . . Ralph Helstein...

...Subsidies and tax credit plans are required to ease the transition of many industries from manpower to machinepower...

...After analyzing the consequences and inter-relation of these developments, the statement proceeds to specific proposals—the bulk of which we print below: As a first step, it is adequate income as a matter of right...

...We recognize that the drastic alterations in circumstances and in our way of life presaged by cybernation and the economy of abundance will not come about overnight...

...to determine the optimum allocation of human and natural resources in meeting the requirements of society...

...The essence of management is planning...