The Problem of Social Planning

...Its virtues are scientific ob jectivity, thoroughness and fairness as well as devotion to the values of democracy...

...A House is Not a Home'—Liberals in the Democratic Party byJerry Phillips...

...Their economic models, so long shielded from the rough winds of reality, were put to a decisive test during the tenure of the British Labour Government and found to be about as realistic as the systems of their academic colleagues working in the neo-classic tradition...

...That is precisely what is advocated in this book under the term "incrementalism...

...Again the endeavor toproject correctly the contours of a newsocial order from the possibilities inherent in the old order has imposed impossible demands on the human imagination...

...In other words, it is assumed that ours is a pluralistic society in which power, though not exactly evenly distributed among various groups, is sufficiently fragmented to assure a general tendency toward a more equitable balance and democratic choices...

...This brings up the entire problem of planning to which I shall recur at a later stage...

...There are four of these basic pro cesses: the price system, hierarchy (meaning leadership from above, whether found in government, business, unions or even in a household), polyarchy (meaning control of leaders by non-leaders, for example voting and consumers' sovereignty) and bargaining among leaders (of unions, government agencies, etc...

...Sartre: Politics vs...

...Just imagine the difficulty of measuring the merits of a concrete situation, say a tax bill, by applying to it the seven criteria of freedom, rationality, democracy, subjective equality, security, progress and appropriate inclusion...

...All one can do is to prepare and to wait for the unexpected to happen...

...But where the regimen is altered abruptly and things change rapidly, no planning is possible...

...These tools are intrinsically neither bad nor good...

...New York, $3.50...

...In particular, the failure of nationalization of industry to work its expected miracles has left a void which is as much emotional as intellectual...

...To state it this baldly is, of course, to 186 reduce it ad absurdum: a means without an end is a self-contradiction, but it illustrates what I consider a fatal flaw in the method...

...SUMMING UP, WE CAN SAY that this book stands almost as a paradigm of the pragmatic approach to the social sciences...

...557 pp...

...Social scientists forget all too easily that behind the cobwebs of their graphs and charts, behind marginal utility and indifference curves there hide real human beings...

...Lindblom and Dahl are extremely vigorous in the application of their thesis and the reader, who at first might find it strange to follow a discussion as to whether in a specific situation the economics of the price system or the politics of voting is the more rational process, will find that these are indeed "live choices...

...I believe that this is an excessively static view which underestimates the necessary and vital interconnection between means and ends...

...Anti-Americanism in the British Labor Party by Alan Ross...

...The book advances the theory that any fairly complex society—capitalist, socialist, totalitarian or what have you —must be ordered by a variety of political and economic processes...

...All we can do here is to pay tribute to the assiduity and the thoroughness with which anything even remotely pertinent has been taken under scrutiny...

...36 East 10 Street New York City 25c 189...

...Planning is feasible only where mores and institutions endure, where the future can be viewed as a fairly uncomplicated projection of the past and where sufficient uniformity through time and space can be assumed to permit reliance on the laws of probability...

...Are we moving closer to these ideals or away from them...

...A capitalist society finds itself dependent on government owned enterprises and agencies (at the very least: the army), a socialist society will find it advantageous to make use of the price system in certain sectors of the economy...

...Since these are questions raised in the review and not in the book, an swers must be culled by inference...

...The spring-summer issue includes: Asia, Africa and Hope by Fenner Brockway, M.P...

...The authors, by emphasizing the moral nature of social goals, have rendered us a great service...

...I believe this theory is invalid because it assumes a congruence between theory and application which, in fact, does not exist...

...An interesting novel set in Poland, 1944, by the author of The Captive Mind...

...A moment's reflection will yield a few questions which are more easily raised than answered: 1. These seven goals of social action are arbitrary in number, relative in derivation and contingent in application...

...acting constantly in the context of the society as a whole...

...Criterion Books...

...Some of these processes, like the price system, have been associated exclusively with the idea of capitalism, others, like goverr ment ownership of industry, with socialism...

...THE BULK OF THE BOOK IS devoted to the detailed description of these various processes...

...Social processes are not mere tools, but have an inner dynamic, a dialectic if you will, which does not permit their being turned this way or that at the discretion of those who want to use them...

...The final result is a broad, though eclectic, survey of the means available for the rational organization of modern society...

...The bundle of values proposed in this book seems particularly unwieldy for this purpose, since the values are vague and often mutually contradictory...

...As a 188 It is grounded on the expectation that our society will endure on an even keel and that the institutions which currently order our lives will not have to undergo any significant changes to meet the threats of communism, colonial nationalism, unemployment and atomic energy...

...whatever novelties there are, are minor and of interest only to the professional economist...

...And yet the virtue of this method carries with it a fatal organic weakness...

...Having dealt with the means of social action with such pragmatic assurance, the two professors are less certain when they approach the ends toward which these means are directed...

...Today'sLiberals and Civil Liberty by Michael Harrington...

...In this particular case the scientist's devotion to the "hard facts" and his revulsion from the larger view is strengthened by the social planner's knowledge that he can operate successfully only as long as he does not tinker too much with present institutions...

...This in turn implies that political and economic processes are simply means which can be evaluated with detachment and used in the light of their virtues and limitations...

...will arrive at a fairly equitable allocation of resources and incomes and preserve freedom and democracy...

...Medieval men could not plan the Industrial Revolution, nor could the French bourgeoisie predict the course of the French Revolution, and Marx proved himself a proverbially bad prophet concerning the communist revolution...

...Dahl and Lindblom, have salvaged what they thought salvageable from the "ruins" of left-wing economic thought and, having done likewise with neo-classic theory, have put together an academic patchwork which, though neither particularly neat nor inspiring, carries with itself the solid virtue of down-to-earth pragmatism and an almost obsessive sense of its own limitations...

...All of these processes are both political and economic in nature, and the authors' insistence that they deal with the political economy as an organic entity stresses not only the political aspects of economics and the economic 185 basis of politics, but above all the fact that political and economic measures and processes can be considered as alternatives in specific situations...

...Even the welfare economists, more humanely oriented than most, have put forward as the ultimate criterion of economic policy the maximization of welfare, a concept which, though somewhat fuzzy, is ultimately measurable in economic quantities...

...The past ten years have not been easy for democratic socialist theoreticians...

...The first derives from the fact that the proposed values are not Platonic ideas residing in a realm of their own, but function as concrete criteria of action in specific situations...

...Gandhi and New Asian Socialism by Brijen K. Gupta...

...Men who have tried, have found themselves in the role of the sorcerer's apprentice...

...Highly praised by anti-Stalinist intellectuals in Europe, it was awarded the Prix Litteraire Europeen...

...Any policy which would stay obediently within the narrow ambience projected by the theory of incrementalism would as187 sume an amount of control that could not be mustered by any government...

...Because planning is, despite its usual association with revolutionary ideology, basically a conservative function...

...The argument runs somewhat as follows: Economic theory has shown that social changes can be analyzed and predicted only when they are very small, at the margin, as economic jargon has it...

...the way they inter act and substitute for each other...

...One need only compare the unwieldiness of this method with the simplicity of the economic criteria guiding economic activities in Abba P. Lerner's "Controlled Economy" to come to the conclusion that economic activities might best be guided by purely economic criteria, and that moral values cannot be applied with the immediacy which would seem desirable to all of us...

...This sort of faith is, at best, a hazardous Pascalian wager...

...ANVIL is a youth and student magazine, radical, anti-Stalinist, anti-war, civil libertarian in emphasis...

...Their answer is that these values have been commonly accepted in the Western world and more particularly in the United States...

...Thus the authors' advocacy of planning is in itself a declaration of faith in the continuation of the status quo.* * This holds equally for socialist planning, which could become operative only when sufficient continuity of the new regimen had been established...

...And, perhaps most important, who will be in charge of planning and executing the mar ginal changes anticipated by marginal incrementalism...

...It was Koestler, I believe, who made the point that history and the mystic life both move in quantum jumps and that one level could not understand, much less plan, the next higher one...

...They postulate seven basic ends: freedom, rationality, democracy, subjective equality, security, progress and appropriate inclusion...

...without mediation from the operation of the economic apparatus has also consequences of a more practical nature...

...It puts means and ends into the two different universes of economics and morals and thus attenuates the vital relationship between means and ends almost to the point of breaking the causal connection between them...

...Political and economic thought, however abstract it may become, must in the end return to man...

...Starting obviously from neo-classic economics, the authors have included Keynesian and postKeynesian thought as well as the so cialist teachings of the Lange-Lerner school...

...Philosophy byAbe Stein...

...It cannot be sufficiently stressed just how radical a departure this is from the usual practice of economists, who have, with a few exceptions, posited economic and quasi-psychological goals as ends for economic activity...

...At this point it might be profitable to inquire into the actual structure of the status quo, which is the Alpha and Omega of our authors' intellec tual compass...

...It will be cold comfort to these bereft souls (and I include myself) to know that two Yale professors, Messrs...

...How much freedom, democracy, etc., do we actually have...

...Consequently, if we want to be able to control social changes and plan for them, we must keep them small...

...This is a questionable assumption, as the Dixon-Yates affair is again demonstrating...

...But this very refined method cannot be carried over into reality, because the basic entities of social processes are human beings and human beings do not behave like discontinuous units (except of course as the rational egotists of classic economics or the atomized individuals of the totalitarian state...

...Regarding the question as to who will be in charge of possible changes, the answer is: society itself, on the silent assumption that ours is a society that consists of a number of more or less articulated, better or worse organized interest groups which, through the processes enumerated above (pricesystem, hierarchy, etc...

...On this assumption, the shifting of infinitesimal quantities at the margin can produce optimum arrangements...

...They are social animals, bound to society at large with a thousand different ties, imitating, competing...

...BOOKS RECEIVED THE SEIZURE OF PowER—by Czeslaw Milosz...

...THE ATTEMPT TO ATTAIN THE MORAL GOALS of democracy, freedom, etc...

...Its shortcomings result, in the main, from that ideological near sightedness which is congenital to pragmatism, from the refusal to see the larger, impalpable trends which cannot be observed under the micro scope of daily statistics...

...The second practical consequence of splitting the means-end continuum flows from the above mentioned technique of treating social processes as means which can be absolutely controlled...

...2. The basic goals of social activity, as posited, are moral, not economic...

...Modern socialists have evolved more elaborate models, but socialist parties actually in power have not, by and large, adopted them...

...Little concern is voiced that we might be drifting away from them and the in ference is clear that in this instance too we remain in status quo...

...actually all of them, as we are shown with overwhelming documentation, are indispensable for the functioning of a viable economy...

...These values may be relative and contingent, but they are the best— and the only ones—which a humanist tradition has bequeathed to us...

...It may not have been a fair test of socialist doctrine (some of the circumstances were distinctly inauspicious), but unfortunately it's the results that count, and the results were sufficiently disappointing to put socialists on the defensive for a long time to come...

...They cannot be reversed, as this theory must necessarily assume, nor can they be combined with each other at will...

...This line of thinking leads in easy stages to the defense of the status quo as the only possible base for rational social action...

...This has been achieved in the present book...

...Economic analysis deals with discontinuous entities, which ideally are infinitely divisible...

...even noxious ones can, like poisons in a doctor's prescription, be used to advantage...

...matter of fact, the older socialists did not concern themselves overly with planning for the socialist state, because theybelieved that the problems of production would have been solved for them by capitalism and they dismissed the problems of distribution by such rather simpleformulae as: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs...

...The last is not really an end in itself but a qualification, stating that only those societies that choose the other six goals can be included in our community of in terests...

...It considers the sum total of social institutions as just an arsenal of tools, aseptic and neutral, which can be used by society ad libi tum...

...However, the book makes it abun dantly clear that the authors believe that our society does substantially em body the seven basic values...

...Lindblom and Dahl are the first to realize this objection...

...Most of the material is well known...