Between Apostles and Technicians: Mind-Blowing and Problem-Solving
Lekachman, Robert
MindBlowing and Problem Solving IN THE 1970s two ways of examining society, neither of them very satisfactory, will probably continue to vie for intellectual favor. One is the New Left...
...l Until they took to criticizing their acolytes' excesses, Herbert Marcuse and Paul Goodman were popular New Left gurus...
...Such sentiments turned Head Start into the most popular of the poverty program's experiments, approximately as safe from attack as motherhood itself...
...He asks whether the children actually read better, how long the effects last, and which teaching techniques worked best...
...The freer the market, the better...
...Ours is a society blighted by inequality...
...As BETWEEN APOSTLES AND TECHNICIANS tonishingly meek in Reich's idealization of them, the young will truly inherit the earth...
...Reich's argument, however, certainly overgeneralizes...
...There is no way to get there except by the patient construction of alliances of intellectuals with unions, blacks, and the poor...
...Most would gladly work and earn if only someone would employ them and care for the youngsters...
...Time— Lifee or the New York Times secure radio stations and television channels far more readily than Black Panthers...
...This is the rubric under which Reich enumerates the many benefits government confers upon its constituents, extending over additions to income in the shape of welfare, social security, and veterans' pensions...
...the artificiality of work and culture...
...In the reign of Eisenhower the Good, Americans agreed on autos and roads...
...Since they don't tell their masters how to turn the trick, the steady political temptation will be to assign low or zero weights to what the computers aren't programmed to evaluate...
...Indeed, experts employed by public agencies do represent clients other than the community to which their findings apply...
...That of course is an ideological decision, and one of considerably more importance than the selection of problem-solving technique...
...He wastes no energy railing self-indulgently against the system...
...He supports an experiment that OEO Administrator Donald Rumsfeld has characterized as "possibly the most significant social science experiment ever to take place...
...The courts have ruled that the communications act, which created the Federal Communications Commission awarded no property right...
...All these years apprehensive welfare administrators and humane politicians have been torn between the wish to alleviate hardship and the fear that generosity would damage the incentives of the poor, infuriate the taxpayers, and result in electoral defeat...
...They flourished on the New Frontier as planners and flourished as spenders in the Great Society, until Vietnam swallowed up the social programs they had formulated, nudged through Congress, and stayed to administer...
...Gorham asks, "Shall equal benefits to different individuals in the population be weighted equally...
...This modest definition of the expert's writ is difficult to quarrel with or, for that matter, to take very seriously as an innovation either in politics or social science...
...How well does the argument withstand scrutiny...
...The problemsolvers assume agreement where there is none and thus have nothing to say about the fissures that widen beneath the surface of American life...
...Are we dealing with anything more than another leisure class...
...It goes without saying that human thought and action is impossible without some kinds of preconceptions— philosophical, religious, moral, or whatever—since it is these that establish the purposes of all thoughts and action...
...Midnight Welfare Searches and the Social SecurityAct," Yale Law Journal, 72:1347 (1963...
...The generals, executives, and college presidents who pretend to run institutions lack conviction and purpose...
...Though less noisy, the straight students are more numerous...
...In so saying, the problem-solver intends neither to praise corporate officials nor criticize university presidents...
...IN THE END, the problem-solving style's disabling limitation is its tacit assumption of general agreement upon basic goals and values...
...The Greening of America has turned its author into an immediate celebrity...
...The problem-solvers can at most resolve tiny problems...
...Wilbur Mills, cautious and conservative (but Harvard Lawtrained), was described as particularly taken by the experiment...
...Reich summarizes these phenomena as the ROBERT LEKACHMAN recrudescence of an exceedingly dangerous version of feudalism...
...An acceptable political solution must emphasize local control because local control is the shared value that precedes and validates policy choice...
...The problem-solver begins rather than stops here...
...Militants seek excitement and Revolution...
...For example, Title 1 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act provides special funds to local school districts for the education of deprived children...
...Here, upon a dying fall, the witness curiously ends...
...Increasingly, property and benefits are linked to status and status is conferred either by the state or, even more dangerously, by a small number of very large private organizations which act as loosely regulated agents of the state, among them corporations, foundations, and universities...
...Their elders are mired either in Consciousness I, the atavistic remnants of frontier individualism, or Consciousness II, the grey spirit of the organizational mentality, bureaucracy incarnate...
...ROBERT LEKACHMAN Only after such technical queries have received satisfactory answers is it reasonable to expand, transform, or replace Head Start...
...poverty, distorted priorities, and law-making by private power...
...In short, the siren song of the problem-solver lures only those who have made up their minds that the public schools no longer serve or can be made to serve values that they esteem highly...
...Hence the Nixon administration's success or failure in enforcing the laws it has sought from Congress is light years away from mundane social-science computation of the relative cost-effectiveness of punitive and rehabilitative approaches to the treatment of criminals...
...and it is exactly such preconceptions that are the worst hindrances to knowing-what-one-is-talking about...
...An unknown but substantial percentage of the young harbor secret, subversive sympathies for individualism and organizational efficiency...
...The emotional appeal of this sort of thing needs no explanation...
...Reich leaves his readers with a fair prospect: The highly organized, scientifically planned society of the future, governed for the good of its inhabitants, promises the best life that men have ever known...
...Ralph Nader is an example of an honorable type, the muckraker...
...ALTRUISM, LIKE IDEOLOGY, is a poor guide to problem solution...
...Should we ask them whether they liked school any better or felt more confident of their abilities...
...Only ideologues (and congressmen) pour money into programs which careful evaluation reveals to be failing...
...Educational benefits may be measurable in terms of achievement test scores, and health benefits in terms of lives saved or days of sickness averted, 5 The following quotations are drawn from "Notes of a Practitioner," Public Interest, Summer 1967, pp...
...This design gives the educational theorists complete freedom to subsidize their favorite nostrums...
...Inevitably factories are financed by somebody's savings...
...In extreme versions it manifests itself in essay like Edward Banfield's The Unheavenly City, said to be widely admired in the White House...
...As a cultural phenomenon Reich is significant— though one should be clear just how...
...In the long run, the goal remains the good socialist dream of redistribution of privilege, power, property, and income...
...Problem-solving is a formula for periods like the 1950s when the natives are calm, politics are placid, and ordinary people leave government and administration to the professionals...
...He begins with a conventional checklist of New Left charges: American society is fatally corrupted by "disorder, corruption, hypocrisy, war...
...Moral: where there is general agreement, problem-solving works, especially if a healthy dose of anti-Communist ideology is available as a stimulant...
...The experts can't help themselves...
...City planning experts implement the policy preferences of the mayors who appoint them...
...Within OEO,e maximum feasible participation warred with an ethic of opportunity that stressed mobility through existing channels, and job creation instead of community organization...
...For his part, Reich emphasizes a distinction between largesse and other kinds of property, which simultaneously identifies a danger...
...If the kids do well, the contractors get full payment or even bonuses...
...Why shouldn't all groups of like-minded parents control their schools, as some groups already do...
...Net income measures corporate performance...
...In cities like New York massive educational establishments notoriously smother experiment and deprive parents of effective influence...
...Moreover, the time span is too short to allow safe conclusions about the lasting impact upon behavior of no-strings cash guarantees...
...The bastard Calvinism implicit in this vein of prejudice enjoins the smallest possible welfare payment, surrounded by the most humiliating conditions ingenuity can arrange...
...At this juncture, Reich offers nothing but more rhetoric...
...Particularly noticeable has been a large delegation from the Harvard-MIT socialscience and urban-planning axis...
...Moreover, what the public school does not do is very nearly as socially virtuous as what it does...
...As far as the young are concerned, their new way of examining experience is nonpolitical or even antipolitical, although it has already been a cause of political response by others...
...As the fifty-year-olds die, decline into their dotage, or, more unusually, join the revolution, their juniors will succeed them in power...
...Since real-life public schools differ enormously in intellectual quality, class stratification, ideology, and racial mixture, sensible men will replace their nostalgia for a sentimentalized past with open-minded experiment...
...The Bill of Rights protects ordinary citizens against unreasonable searches conducted without proper warrants issued upon the demonstration of probable cause...
...He is a 42-year-old law professor at Yale, esteemed until only yesterday at his university as an extraordinarily gifted teacher and beyond New Haven's borders as the author of exceptionally provocative law-review articles...
...Those who chose to supplement the guarantee by their own efforts were asked to surrender as little as 30 and as much as 70 percent of their earnings from paid labor...
...To shelter the solitary human spirit does not merely make possible the fulfillment of individuals...
...It is a good thing to lighten the weight of the Pentagon, diminish tax inequities, agitate for redistributive negative income taxation and universal health care, preserve the environment, and tighten public controls over large corporations...
...A home for more moderate expression of the problemsolving nonideology is The Public Interest, a journal about which more will be said later...
...Once Congress states a principle and appropriates the funds to implement it, the money should be rationally administered and its effects reviewed...
...However, any sensible establishment finds space for flexible souls like Moynihan who are temperamentally equipped to adjust to various holders of office, as well as genuine conservatives of the Edward Banfield stripe...
...Performance contractors, usually corporations that make teaching machines or other hardware, promise to improve verbal and mathematical skill as measured by standard achievement tests...
...Among them, entrepreneurs, theorists, and altruists will almost certainly hawk a variety of merchandise considerably more diversified than is now available to the ordinary parent...
...Reich's point is sharp: the networks retain enormously valuable property on the condition that they barter away at least part of their First Amendment rights to free speech...
...As an intellectual construction Reich's argument amounts to rather little...
...Though Gorham's own final word is naturally more optimistic about his technique's prospects, he sees a narrowly limited role for this mode of problem-solving: While the big choices may not be greatly illuminated by cost-benefit analysis, the narrower ones can be...
...They also avoid the snobbishness of elite eastern imitations of English public schools and the militarism of the West Point copies...
...Liberals endorsed the program, as egalitarians and conservatives approved it, out of fiscal anxieties over rising welfare and police expenditures...
...But all of this is persuasive only for those prepared to jettison the public schools as unsalvageable...
...The chosen families were offered income guarantees ranging from 50 to 125 percent of the then poverty line of $3,300 for families of four...
...Howe denies the existence of the latter and makes the most of the former...
...As the Penn Central recently demonstrated, even the mightiest may fall...
...There is a second controlling ideological element...
...Reich's transformation is almost as startling as the greening of America that he preaches...
...Peaceful persuasion and demography will make this revolution...
...they are conceptual...
...Yet what he has discovered and the opposition he has aroused are educational to the community and grist to the radical's mill...
...In his successive campaigns, Ronald Reagan has run against student violence, drugs, and high taxes just as though all three had not increased during his term of office...
...Without organizational routines and hierachical administration, can there be survival of such life-supporting mechanisms as transportation, power, heat, light, and food distribution...
...These people run the world and it is right that they do so...
...I "know," because narcotics-enforcement administrators have told me so, that marijuana at best is psychologically addictive and at worst leads its consumers toward much more dangerous drugs...
...None of this yet constitutes a sufficient or inclusive radical program, but it is an essential immediate perspective for radicals...
...I conclude that no quantity of scientific inquiry will modify opinions deeply tied on the one side to a structure of sentiment deeply hostile to the life-style of the young and on the other to deep rebelliousness against existing authority and the idea of America cherished by many older Americans...
...IV N THEIR DIFFERENT WAYS, the Reichians and the problem-solvers have taken flight from real politics...
...One is the New Left rebellion against the organizational rationalism of a complex technological polity...
...They recall Bell and Kristol's analysis of ideological error: "it is the nature of ideology to preconceive reality...
...There is a related point...
...it also gives society the power to change, to grow, and to regenerate, and hence to endure...
...Radicals need to play conventional politics with the McGoverns and Hugheses and slightly less conventional politics with the Naders and Banzhafs...
...Such a result is considerably more than most people expect from criticizing public-school officials...
...Large commercial farmers get most of the agricultural subsidies...
...decline of democracy and liberty, powerlessness...
...One more example of the problem-solving technique should suffice...
...For this libertarian radical, contemporary politics is about equality, which is both a value and an ideology...
...But there is a roaring lion in the path to Utopia: If the individual is to survive in a collective society, he must have protection against its ruthless pressures...
...Here are such familiar names as James Q. Wilson, Nathan Glazer, Robert Solow, James Tobin (transplanted to Yale), Carl Kaysen (ditto to Princeton), and David Riesman...
...A Reichian, I suppose, would dismiss this pathology as cultural growing pains...
...BETWEEN APOSTLES AND TECHNICIANS are defined from the start by contending ideologies and they are "solved" or, more accurately, handled in accordance with the political interests of the strongest contenders...
...MindBlowing and Problem Solving IN THE 1970s two ways of examining society, neither of them very satisfactory, will probably continue to vie for intellectual favor...
...It is typical of largesse that it can be capriciously granted and removed at the pleasure of administrators endowed with alarming discretionary power either by congressional intention or by their own statutory interpretations...
...California's tax and fee structure combine to generate subsidies for middle-class youngsters financed mostly by repressive taxes levied upon their financial inferiors...
...These powerful disaffection readily ally themselves with the community power sentiments that now agitate groups as diverse as BETWEEN APOSTLES AND TECHNICIANS White Citizens' Councils, campus radicals, homosexuals, black militants, tax avoiders, and white ethnic minorities...
...Persistent losses result in bankruptcy and the men responsible are thrust into the cold world...
...Little that occurred during the Kennedy– Johnson regime was any freer from ideological overtones, despite the professed attachment by New Frontiersmen and Great Societarians to "nonideological" problemsolving techniques...
...This formidable array just begins the difficulties: Even if we could conceptualize and measure the benefits of particular programs, there is the fact that benefits of different programs go to different people...
...Milton Friedman was among the first to advocate turning over to parents an allowance in lieu of presently collected school taxes...
...Possibly because they alleviated disabling anxiety, cash gifts appeared to encourage individual initiative...
...ROBERT LEKACHMAN tions...
...Ours is larger because we are richer and we make a practice of collecting large numbers of young adults in compounds called universities where their keepers fail to find sufficient diversions for them...
...access on indulgent terms to grazing, mining, and lumbering on public lands...
...They are increasingly easy targets of infiltration...
...It is far from obvious how the benefit of most health, education, and welfare programs should be defined...
...Licenses are mere privileges, initially granted for three-year terms and, thereafter, renewed or revoked by FCC decision...
...Public functionaries see this largesse as acts of grace...
...In the autumn of 1970 even comparatively liberal political candidates were heavily suggesting that many of the poor were lazy, dissolute, and prone to the breeding of large numbers of children for the sake of more generous welfare allowances...
...The thing to do is tie the corporate contractor's fees to his success in generating the skill improvements and the behavioral alterations which social programs are designed to achieve...
...tion to cope with Catholic schools might be to consider them as functioning entities, endowed with assorted virtues and flaws...
...Like other academics, I deal with many young men and women who approximate Consciouness III insofar as it is defined by aversion to routine and sustained intellectual effort, and affection for rock music, drugs (on which Reich is fuzzy), and informal human relationships...
...Should an additional hundred dollars in welfare payments going to a mother with six children in Mississippi be weighted the same as an additional hundred dollars in Social Security payments going to an old man in Chicago...
...Presumably it will flower most lushly in the gardens of competition...
...Wouldn't any rational soul join the economist Robert Levine in his preference for "the problem-solving style" over the "politics of provocation...
...If the objective is to save lives through control of disease, it is clearly helpful to examine various disease control programs and try to estimate how many lives would be saved per dollar expended on each type of program...
...On both sides the definitions are ideological...
...The upshot was the Revenue Act of 1964...
...subsidized commercial mail delivery, cut-rate savings-bank and home-construe 2 See, as examples, "Individual Rights and SocialWelfare," Yale Law Journal, 74:1245 (1965...
...Its contributors have ranged from Robert Heilbroner's rational radicalism to Daniel Moynihan's emotionally tinged romantic conservatism...
...I need scarcely say that the immediate prospects for radical economic reconstruction are bad...
...BETWEEN APOSTLES AND TECHNICIANS tion insurance...
...The moral is plain to see...
...The vital sanctions and enclaves are never identified...
...It is possible to group programs and potential programs which have the same objective and to examine the effectiveness (relative to cost) of each in reaching the objective...
...Nothing works better than a good Republican recession to remind Americans that the United States is not a land of free goods...
...Some are technical...
...When these benefits are forced into monetary terms, a great deal of violence is inevitably done to their heterogeneity, and useful information is suppressed...
...Inflation is a disease of distorted expectations, an attempt upon the part of the many to reach for standards of life thrust upon them by the mass media...
...As a society, we do not take money away from disloyal millionaires...
...As far as they reach, preliminary results have been encouraging...
...Is it equally important to raise the educational attainment of a suburban child and a slum child...
...Although recent judicial interpretations have somewhat improved the situation, welfare recipients are most exposed of all to demands for barter of their rights and reprisals when they resist such demands...
...Conscientious analysts mention what they cannot measure...
...The problem-solver is a dull fellow and it is easy to ridicule his slide rules, office machines, and computers...
...The familiar public school myth claims that full citizenship is accelerated by common schooling and other common experiences...
...No tenure protection and no AAUP shield incompetent corporate executives from the consequences of their inadequacies...
...The editors have naturally been hospitable to the floating establishment of academics and bureaucrats who move in and out of universities, public agencies, founda BETWEEN APOSTLES AND TECHNICIANS tions, and governments in exile like the Brookings Institution and the Kennedy Institute of Politics...
...Unfortunately, problem-solving techniques leave the difficult issues of social choice just ROBERT LEKACHMAN as they were—intractable...
...They lack magic as the solvers of major dilemmas of power, income distribution, and racial equity...
...The number of the infiltrators steadily rises...
...But even on this hypothesis, it is hard to believe that when Consciousness II and Consciousness III slug it out in large organizations, victory is foreordained for the latter...
...The study's key question is, will income guarantees damage work incentives...
...absence of community...
...Middle-class parents are apprehensive about educational quality...
...The problem-solver implicitly declares that organizations differ primarily in their reward structures and relative efficiencies of operation...
...His enemies are more tangible: ghetto youngsters' poor reading scores, deficient manpower training techniques, gaps in neighborhood legal services, urban housing shortages, congested roads and subways, dirty air and water, and so on...
...Alas, if men and women save they defer gratification and backslide into the older worlds of sensation...
...These coercive powers of government over individual access to largesse are extensive and growing, With few signs of popular dissent, Congress has decreed that, Any person shown by evidence satisfactory to the Administrator to be guilty of mutiny, treason, sabotage, or rendering assistance to any enemy of the United States or of its allies shall forfeit all accrued or future benefits under law administered by the Veterans' Administration...
...In a curious way the failure of analysis is repeated in Reich's book...
...There is a feature of the New Jersey experiment particularly encouraging to problem-solvers: when the conditions are propitious, scientific research has political effects...
...Among its partisans, community control is much more than an alternative administrative technique comparable to state, regional, or metropolitan modes of organization...
...Altruists can store up treasure in heaven by charging fees below cost...
...Although such a society is overripe for change, successful revolutions require revolutionists...
...Implied are confidence in the wisdom of local residents and distrust of experts, mandarins, and professional politicians...
...This is public welfare...
...Performance contracting and educational vouchers are only two of the possibilities...
...And Supreme Court prayer decisions or not, Southern public schools especially have often been conducted as Protestant parochial academies...
...Parents of all varieties seem convinced that the schools have done less than they might have to control drug abuse...
...It is a law of public largesse that great social need accompanies small political power...
...Given the chance, will poor people simply down tools and coast along on their subsidies...
...Our regressive tax structure sufficiently distorts reality so that many people are convinced that we cannot afford Scandinavian standards of public health and communal amenity...
...By channeling funds to low-income school districts, the Act explicitly registers a preference for more rapid improvement in the education of the poor than of the rich...
...Caution is advisable...
...Is social science "truth" a really effective solvent of ideological prejudice...
...Understandably, expert solutions are frequently experienced as the acts of interested parties and the expressions of hostile ideology...
...The second is the style comfortable to the social scientists and bureaucrats who administer such societies, a style ostentatiously prosaic, empirical, and nonideological, lineal descendant to Benthamite felicific calculation and the Fabianism of the Webbs...
...Bill of Rights or not, welfare investigators have specialized in midnight searches of their clients' homes, in the attempt to establish male presence and thus terminate benefits...
...Cost-benefit analysis, the heart of the analytical mode, struggles unsuccessfully against a very serious bias in favor of the readily quantifiable...
...The challenge of the future will be to construct, for the society that is coming, institutions and law to carry on this work...
...128 tripartite construction—inner-directed, otherdirected, and autonomous individuals—to which Reich's three consciousnesses display considerable affinity...
...On the evidence, I should have no confidence in Consciousness III's capacity to reform factories and offices...
...Who disagrees with the proposition that there are ways to improve the human environment of work and otherwise to civilize large organizations...
...The preliminary research findings just summarized apparently sufficed to persuade the House Ways and Means Committee, no haunt of Consciousness III, to report the Nixon extension of income maintenance for the working poor to the full House of Representatives which unexpectedly passed the measure...
...Reich is worth consideration as a brandnew cultural phenomenon, or, as Harry Golden might say, Only in America...
...From the law flows a corollary: the powerful, not the needy, get a disproportionate share of the cash...
...On compelling evidence, black parents believe that public-school teachers dislike, undervalue, and humiliate their children...
...Yet how sensible he is...
...In the world struggling to be born, organization and technology, today's enemies, will be made to enlarge the individual and enhance his experience...
...Rejecting hierarchy, competition, and routine, how will the children of the new age inherit the earth, as Reich is certain that they will...
...Cash and promotion reward individuals who increase net income...
...Since as a practical man he neither loves nor hates major corporations, he is free to convert corporate strengths into the service of effective, curative social action...
...Enter the young as vessels of new truth and heightened conciousness...
...Others do creditable jobs of college preparation...
...The Public Interest has kept this faith...
...National consensus on any topic is nowhere in sight...
...Evidently, Congress thought so when it wrote Title 1 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act...
...THIS ANALYSIS iS persuasive...
...There must be sanctuaries or enclaves where no majority can reach...
...Poor performance costs the contractors financial penalties...
...A recent poll reported the alarming news that a fifth of the young admire the Vice-President...
...Reich, not so incidentally, says little about the dark side of Consciousness III, the minority freaked out on drugs, the few attracted by violence, and the many who, according to the campus psychiatrists, are unhappy and neurotic in spite of (or because of...
...Congress originally may have intended license limitation as a pressure upon broadcasters to meet minimum criteria of public service...
...West and south of New Haven, there are campuses where President Nixon is applauded and hecklers must at some expense be imported...
...The latter is a familiar offshoot of rationalist Marxism, and its organizational expression on college campuses is Progressive Labor...
...FHA loan guarantees facilitated middle-class flight to the suburbs, and in the deserted cities' urban renewal has diminished the inventory of lowcost apartments, which have been traded for convention halls and luxury flats...
...In principle one cannot distinguish their labors from those of the RAND alumni who at McNamara's behest refined the tools of cost-effectiveness and applied them to Vietnam...
...In fact 53 percent of the families earned more from their own efforts after guarantees were supplied than before they became available, and only 29 percent earned less...
...bus, trucking, airline, and taxicab franchises...
...beneficiaries esteem it as similar to older varieties of property...
...The universe of work and the private cosmos of sensation will be rejoined and the ancient pangs of alienation at last be relieved...
...The "straight" students are the offspring of poorer families, usually first-generation college attenders, and quite as determined as older predecessors to acquire the marketable skills which will make them eligible for material benefits...
...They suspect technology and organizational hierarchies...
...It cannot really be a good thing that intelligent students prefer Reich to Marx and Hesse to Tolstoy...
...Participation in an experiment of itself often generates untypical conduct...
...Could Consciousness III run the world...
...Public largesse enriches the wealthy and adds power to the powerful...
...The story would end better if the Senate were less determined (after receiving the same social science evidence as the House of Representatives) to slaughter the Administration's Family Assistance Plan...
...Hatred of bureaucratic styles is one thing, successful definition of alternative ways of doing the world's work quite another...
...The study excluded unemployed female heads of families...
...Extra funds for the poor were Congress's way of compensating for decades of inadequate funding of ghetto schools and decades of preference for the interests of the middle class...
...In the United States the practitioners of social management are most comfortable during liberal Democratic administrations when there is money to be spent...
...If the public schools are valued ideologically, their disrepair is an impetus to programs of rescue...
...For everybody's sake one can hope for a time when community agreement upon values and objectives presents the ROBERT LEKACHMAN problem-solvers with the agenda of small issues that they are equipped to cope with...
...Are the social scientists really on the verge of the cheerful discovery that the best way to stimulate individual effort even for the poor is to increase the hope of reward...
...The Third Consciousness may be grappling with a substantial vein of youthful romanticism...
...and free technical information for farmers and corporations...
...it] is the nature of ideology to preconceive reality...
...Meanwhile, there are other immediate tasks...
...I may be quite wrong...
...Modern factories turn out work clothes and jeans, not to mention motorcycles, hi-fi equipment, and jet aircraft...
...See the volume by Levine already cited and Daniel P. Moynihan's Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding...
...The magazine has been steadily devoted to the evaluation of alternative public policies...
...New capital depends upon past saving...
...For the Administration the polit ical point of the exercise is preservation of the enemy for ritual annihilation during forthcoming electoral hunting seasons...
...government jobs...
...occupational licenses...
...As he ponders the treatment of these specific ailments, the problem-solver typi cally is handicapped by neither institutional nor ideological hangups...
...What warrant justifies shearing a veteran of benefits earned by past service because of poor behavior at some later date...
...But in the ongoing OEO voucher experiment, the notion has attracted such liberal sponsors as Harvard's Christopher Jencks...
...Americans, a few sour dissenters excepted, briefly joined hands in a national refusal to lose the Big Game with the Red Machine...
...Nevertheless, the heavily quantitative techniques of the problem-solvers suffer from glaring defects...
...Once more the practice of public largesse involves a threat by sovereign power to personal freedoms...
...The problem-solver is prone to identify the realities which ideology masks...
...As an anonymous reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement said of C. P. Snow's Last Things, "Many of the characters in his books are scientific civil servants, administrators of one sort or another...
...Thus we must admit—or, if you wish, assert— that such an emphasis is not easily reconcilable with a prior commitment to an ideology, whether it be liberal, conservative, or radical...
...The experts share an ideology of their own, a confidence in technique which equips them to generalize beyond specific localities, deploy tools of analysis and choice inexplicable to the laity, and achieve conclusions that are better for ordinary people, but not fully comprehensible to them...
...It is couched in the tongues of ideology, and perceived on all sides as an engagement between old and young, Establishment and radicals, middle Americans and effete Eastern snobs...
...Their mystery converts them into wire-pullers, manipulators, and secret rulers...
...Some Catholic schools have done better at integration than their public rivals...
...Businessmen can rely upon a well-understood and exceedingly powerful set of incentives and penalties...
...In the North residential segregation by color, income, and religion turn the public schoolmen's integrative ideal into farce...
...The techniques of problem solution are themselves judged by all parties ideologically...
...We do not wish to avoid these implications, or pretend to be blind to them...
...It is much harder to document the university's altruism than the corporation's efficiency...
...Both shared a feeling for children...
...2 These essays on property, government regulation, and 20th-century feudalism contain the roots of the assault upon organizational power, which is the most satisfactory portion of The Greening of America...
...Presented with the new commercial opportunity, educational entrepreneurs will open the sort of schools their customers seek...
...The alternative to them is far more likely to be universal repression than the sort of radical renewal of our society that socialist egalitarians yearn for...
...Reform is all but hopeless...
...The Law of the Planned Society," Yale Law Journal, 75: 1227 (1967...
...Just as the Homestead Act was a deliberate effort to foster individual values at an earlier time, so we must try to build an economic basis for liberty today—a Homestead Act for rootless twentieth-century man...
...In the mid-1960s a somewhat weaker consensus favored more rapid economic growth and accepted tax reduction as the way to get it...
...In selecting highway routes, it is much easier to compute construction costs per mile than the relative esthetic and scenic penalties attachable to several possible choices...
...Head Start illustrates why this is so...
...Communications policy illustrates the point...
...If we seek to cut infant mortality, rational decisionmaking will be facilitated if analysts assess the relative efficiency of different health programs...
...During the 1970s, conventional politics are unlikely to be uplifting...
...As for the political tactic, in the absence of a radical party I plan to give what help I can to the more progressive among conventional politicians...
...If cost-benefit analysis "forces people to think about the objectives of government programs and how they can be measured," splendid...
...The Act implemented a brief American inclination to redeem long neglected promises of racial equality...
...In short, the Public Interest has sympathized with an ethic of rational social management by the people who "run the world" as "it is right that they should do...
...Catchwords like crime in the streets, permissiveness, law and order, pornography and drugs resonate with Consciousness I. For adherents to Consciousness III, permissiveness is personal freedom, pornography is openness to esthetic revelation, and drugs are the well-marked pathway to the expansion of the consciousness...
...Knowing what one is talking about" is a deceptively simple phrase that is pregnant with larger implications...
...and welfare benefits in terms of families rescued from poverty...
...In the heyday of the Great Society, Lyndon Johnson's presidential fiat applied Pentagon program-budgeting to the civilian agencies...
...Thus from its noisy beginnings to its present glum decline, the There Are Some Matters On Which a Marxist Just HAS to Draw the Line Millett's book, as an experienced reader can detect, was written too rapidly, or not rewritten or edited enough, and it has faults as well as virtues...
...Externally imposing, the Establishment is really little more than a hollow shell...
...Worse is yet to come...
...If the weights should not be equal, what should they be...
...and "loss of self...
...These were the objects which property sought to achieve and can no longer achieve...
...The Public Interest will be animated by a bias against all such prefabrications...
...Or shall we wait a decade or two and see how much they earn as adults, and whether, in fact, the cycle of poverty has been broken...
...That inflammatory phrase, "maximum feasible participation of the poor," expressed a conception of democracy sharply contrasted to the tacit elitism of most social scientists...
...Reich will be a hero on the campuses for some time to come...
...Vouchers start with the critical social observation that the public education coalition has fragmented...
...4 This is an income maintenance study involving 575 working poor families in New Jersey, 150 more in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and a further 635 in scattered loca 4 See Preliminary Results of the New Jersey Graduate Work Incentive Experiment, OEO Release, February 18, 1970...
...If we want to raise the earning power of unemployed or under-employed individuals, it makes sense to examine various kinds of training and employment programs in order to compare the effectiveness of these programs in raising the earnings of people being retrained...
...The result was a massive highway construction program that continues inexorably to pave the country long after the consensus upon which it was based has dissolved...
...Private property in general originates in economic activity performed in private markets, while largesse both reflects and reinforces the existing distributions of political power...
...Should we test the children to see whether their reading comprehension, or their arithmetic achievement, has improved faster than would have been expected...
...The new journal, said the editors in their opening statement, aspired "to help all of us, when we discuss issues of public policy to know a little better what we are talking about—and preferably in time to make such knowledge effective...
...Somehow choices must be made about what is to be produced and who is to get it...
...I can do no better than cite the testimony of a friendly witness...
...From an article in The Militant, "Irving Howe: a Reformist Rankled by Kate Millett," by George Breitman Office of Economic Opportunity has been a battlefield contested by hostile social theorists...
...Once ideological preconception is dispelled, real experiment becomes easy...
...Such clashes of perception, such opposed structures of reality, are at issue every time Congress writes a crime statute and a state legislature considers a university appropriation bill...
...What is it that we want to measure...
...The younger radicals cherish one-to-one relationships, diffusion of power, and immediacy of sensual gratification...
...and, most famous of the group, "TheNew Property," Yale Law Journal, 73:733 (1964...
...There may yet come a time when useful employment will be found for the problemsolvers...
...Sputnik legitimized the moon race...
...Reich is as vague as he is cheerful about "humane" technology and unrepressive organization, just as in his earlier work he was similarly unhelpful in the identification of the enclaves required to shelter individuals against the enroachments of public power...
...Reich may be quite correct in his identification of one of those creative minorities which set the tone for sluggish contemporaries and ultimately convert them to new truths...
...At the risk of inflammatory utterance, one must describe these issues in the language of ideology, as any of Gorham's queries serves to illustrate...
...Accordingly, in the short run I attach myself to a criterion of judgment and a political tactic...
...Why not...
...Good questions all...
...To begin with, is there a new consciousness, even as a powerful metaphor for altered cultural and social outlook...
...Above all public schools are constitutionally debarred from messing about with religion like the infamous parochial schools...
...Experts protect their own positions, opportunities, and reputations, and often they do so most effectively by serving the ideological interests of their employers...
...The New Property," the best of the articles, focuses upon governmental "largesse" as a dynamic of alteration in property relationships...
...Bell and Kristol possess a Fabian respect for experts and an equally Fabian hope that experts can educate politicians...
...Voucher schemes are one means of devising a free educational market...
...Consolidated Edison's financial savings at Storm King are easier to quantify than the damage to scenery, marine life, and the Hudson River...
...If major corporations are more efficiently managed than major (or minor) universities, anyone but an ideologue will select Litton, Philco, or Western Electric as a Jobs Corps contractor rather than a university qualified only by a debatable altruism of motive...
...Shall we wait and see whether they drop out of school less frequently, commit fewer crimes as teenagers, or go in greater proportions to college...
...Hence the integration of Italians, Irish, and Jews, hence the impending integration of blacks...
...What else is new...
...This is just as ideological a judgment as that of the self-confessed ideologue who frankly prefers altruistic impulse to profit maximization and locates his preferred motive in universities rather than in major corporations...
...subsidies to farmers, shipbuilders, and a long list of other clients...
...For good or ill, Reich's Third Consciousness bids fair to match the celebrity of such catchwords as repressive tolerance, identity crisis, The Medium is the Message, and David Riesman's 1I refer only to the libertarian and anarchist branches of the New Left, not to its much less agreeable authoritarian division...
...No need for one's tone to become acid, for there is much to be said in behalf of the problem-solvers...
...The free market may be a way out, and there doesn't seem to be much to be lost by trying...
...Even when amenity and esthetics are not directly at issue, the problem-solving technique is dangerously subjective, and open to the convert influence of individual ideology...
...I shall support any proposal which, however slightly, diminishes inequality and strengthens potential radical alliances...
...Some of the faults are serious, such as Millett's attempt to avoid a position on what preceded the patriarchal family while at the same time making concessions to the idea that society has always been patriarchal...
...They advise their political masters to evaluate the unmeasured and the unmeasurable...
...Until then there is no escape from politics and ideology...
...Perhaps a better way than perpetual litiga s Robert Levine's history of the poverty program, The Poor Ye Need Not Have with Ye (MIT Press, 1970) presents the evidence of Head Start's failure to effect lasting improvement in reading skills...
...As in the Middle Ages, property is converted into a grant conditioned upon loyalty to the sovereign...
...As economists know, effective demand soon evokes supply of appropriate quality and quantity...
...In carrying forward the themes of his law-review essays, Reich has recorded his own rebirth as a child of the new consciousness...
...If this is social reality, wise men design programs that come to terms with social possibility...
...The problem-solvers have a contribution to make in the handling of small, technical issues...
...Problems" e The accounts by OEO veterans, though inevitably biased, are revealing...
...We must create a new property...
...For them the overwhelming majority of the poor are too young, too old, too disabled, too little trained, too illiterate, or too engrossed by child care, to support themselves...
...Shall equal benefits to different individuals in the population be weighted equally...
...Everything then becomes possible...
...Finally, even if benefits of different programs can be identified and measured and weighted, they cannot always be measured in the same units...
...These are the casualties of personal limitation, heedless nurture, racial and sexual discrimination, and neglectful public policy...
...Blue-collar parents rail at racial mixing, sex education, and excessive permissiveness...
...Although some families could have drifted along on higher than poverty incomes without lifting a finger, most chose to work...
...Few schools now exist that match the tastes of their prospective customers...
...3 Problem-solvers and ideologues have a particularly good war on overeducation: liberal, integrationist doctrine continues to support public education even though liberal parents often enroll their own youngsters in private schools...
...For them they substitute joy, love, friendship, openness to experience and sensation, immediate communication, and warm community, As Reich would say, oh, wow...
...Technical comparisons of negative income taxes and family allowances, discussions of cost-benefit measurement, and inquiries into market mechanisms for the control of pollution exemplify the urge to judge existing social mechanisms and design better ones...
...John Mitchell's civil-rights experts interpret the relevant statutes quite differently from the experts who served Ramsay Clark...
...The engineers, accountants, lawyers, scientists, and administrators who populate Galbraith's technostructure are the real masters of their organizations because they alone can solve the endless stream of technical conundrums presented by science and technology...
...Crime legislation emanates from a definition of party and generational interest...
...As usual, the problemsolving approach works splendidly if one allows the problem-solver to define the problem...
...But in the Agnew era, this precariousness of tenure impresses timid television executives as sufficient reason to tone down news comment...
...In the more affluent suburbs everywhere, public schools flourish that consciously model themselves on elite English institutions...
...The Supreme Court has recently determined that welfare beneficiaries must trade for public largesse the citizen's constitutionally guaranteed rights to the undisturbed enjoyment of his home...
...I "know," because my students have told me so, that marijuana is a harmless euphoric drug which I am foolish to deny myself...
...They (and the rest of us) get instead police repressions, conservative yearning for law and order, plausible justification for new restrictions on civil liberty, and the menace of nativist fascism...
...The problem-solvers' favorite forum is the Public Interest, the quarterly founded by Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell in the wake of the copious arguments over "the future of ideology" stimulated by Bell's famous essay on "the end of ideology...
...At the moment of liberation, Consciousness III will transform the institutions that now oppress us all and liberate even the bureaucrats...
...If greed stimulates teaching ingenuity and the children learn more rapidly and more thoroughly, then educational contracting deserves to flower...
...Should the clients dislike what their children receive, the market will inform the school proprietors that they should either redesign the product or make way for more alert operators...
...The explanation is structural, not personal...
...According to his custom, the problemsolver defines the issues technically and empirically...
...In entrancing contrast, Consciousness III's converts dismiss with contempt both the alleged inevitabilities and the rewards of hierarchical organization...
...A A FTER RHETORIC SO WARM and spirits so high, it is something of a relief to visit the problem-solver's workshop, a place of comfort for technocrats, economists, costbenefit analysts, and assorted corporate technicians...
...After harkening to Gorham, it is hard not to conclude that costbenefit analysis is as inescapably imprecise as the openly unscientific program choices made by untutored congressmen and overweening presidents...
...I should not be astonished if on the campuses Reich, a generous but infirm thinker, will en ROBERT LEKACHMAN joy a vogue like that of Hermann Hesse, a sentimental and second-rate novelist...
...Perhaps one day the more rational aspirations of Consciousness III will also be approximated...
...A little public money might remedy many of the parochial system's weaknesses...
...In the pursuit of these objectives, ideology was said to be an obstacle: It is not, however, merely a matter of knowl edge or the lack thereof...
...the new culture of joy...
...But it is the essential peculiarity of ideologies that they do not simply prescribe ends, but also insistently propose prefabricated interpretations of existing social realities—interpretations that bitterly resist all sensible revision...
...Their successor appears to be Charles Reich whose The Greening of America, an impassioned celebration of youthful virtue, amounts to a prophecy of revolution through a transformation of consciousness...
...Of course sensible people will estimate program costs by whatever social accounting techniques are plausible...
...Liberals and most social scientists perceive welfare differently...
...Of course there might be other alternatives...
...William Gorham, in better days an assistant secretary of HEW, has BETWEEN APOSTLES AND TECHNICIANS spoken in the following terms of the technique which he himself supervised: 5 The problems of benefits measurement, however, are not just technical...
...Unfortunately Reich's powers falter on the threshold of remedy, and rhetoric is made to substitute for programs...
...III P P ROBLEM-SOLVING HAS HELD my attention so long because its prestige remains high and also because even in this constricted form, rationality has more appeal to me every day...
Vol. 18 • April 1971 • No. 2
