Public Policy: The Ordeal of Choices

The nation has the inescapable task of establishing its priorities, but is it morally prepared to do what must be done?

I envy the inspiration of the midwest college president who entitled his academic address, "On a Clear Day You Can See Practically Nothing." He is a very honest man.

We share his predicament. Cultural shock kicks dust in our eyes. And if the citadels of inquiry and scholarship were among the first to take the impact, this is not so strange or so irreverent. We have always thought that inquiry and scholarship should lead us through the stages of change and to a surer sense of values and policy choices. The real question, I suppose, is whether contemporary scholarship is bent upon obscurity or light. When Gertrude Stein was dying she looked up at her friend and asked, "What is the answer?" Her friend could give none. A little later Miss Stein stirred again, and said, "Then what is the question?" Perhaps this is the dilemma of scholarship.

We are hung up on the uses of responsibility. That is the ethical issue. I can't say I am scandalized by the news that there are divisions in the society. There always were, but it took cultural shock to make us face them. There is not too much danger in it, provided we stop shaking our fists and begin using our minds.

Not much intelligence is needed to aim a brick, and even less to call someone a punk or pig. It was only last week that I learned from a young black girl in a Bronx slum that reason and outrage make as potent partners as violence and outrage; and in that steaming room I could take the hostility because there was thought.

Our uses of responsibility are very much on the minds of our neighbors overseas. They cannot hide it, and they saw our ethical crisis coming before we did. For a long time they have worried, and wondered if we really had the remotest comprehension of our strength and our responsibility. They watch our economy streaking ahead at the rate of $5O billion a year, touching the trillion-dollar level without changing stride. They see us, with a fraction of the world's population, and wonder if we have the reason and restraint and compassion to govern all this for good.

It is upbeat to say that the university is an anachronism, out of touch with the human condition. But I think that if we look beyond the drills and calisthenics that sometimes pass as higher education, and view it as a journey through science, economics, philos- ophy, history, and literature, we can follow the tracks of western man through the light and the dark, and through uncertainty, and come to grasp the power that is knowledge. And that knowledge, in the end, can civilize outrage.

To be sure, the university is not our only window on knowledge. One sees this in London at Westminster and St. Paul's where England honors her poets, philosophers, soldiers, and kings. It's all there—the signs of the long march from barbarism to a high stage of power and productivity. And what is so striking is that all the people flock there: the poor; the old, sitting in the slanting sunshine; the mothers pushing strollers in the aisles; the swingers, the beards, the long hair; little boys touching the tomb of Nelson and imagining they hear the sound of cannon; new grass fringing the bomb craters, reminding one that the barbarians have not all departed. The people come, because all this is the common treasure. They come back to the builders, for perspective and understanding, and to the knowledge that after a thousand years begins another thousand, and that the greatness is not in the guns and the ships and the crowns but in, the meanings.

What are the constructive uses of responsibility? We are not well organized for the question. Although most of my life was in government, I am not prepared to leave it to government. The problem is one that must engage the centers of thought, and governments are not always thoughtful. Even a very good man in an irrational structure has severe limitations on his effectiveness. When Mac Bundy says that "gray is the color of truth" he is saying something about the paradox of a world choked on knowledge but stumped on values. The great questions, if I may say so, are philosophical—as they always have been when great changes have struck at the accepted order. It is here that the opportunity exists for the university community to engage the issues of responsibility.

We do not take science for granted. We would have a poor opinion of freezing physics or microbiology in the present state of the art. We would not think of stabilizing medical knowledge at its 1970 frontier, or of settling for communications technology in its present shape. But we are quite indifferent to the formulation and growth of philosophy, and so it was possible for the head of the philosophy department in a western institution to announce that philosophy has nothing to offer for the solution of contemporary problems. Then what is the outlook for a trilliondollar political economy, not yet at the crest of its influence, if it does not match the massing of power with comprehension of its uses and limits? If we were really wise, government would invest in the pursuit of philosophy with as much zeal as it shows for business expansion, highway building, and defense technology. But if we were that wise, we would all be philosophers.

Yet, in the disorder and crowd noises there is a welling demand for national purposes and goals. There probably has never been a time when so much abundance and compulsive consumption was accompanied by so much dissatisfaction. In the absence of a framework of long-term directions, the litany of riots, campus crises, crimes of violence, drug addiction, teacher strikes, pollution scares, Medicare abuses, and assassinations comprise a one-sided and terrifying vision of a society that has lost its balance and its collective mind. Such a society hunts for scapegoats, and retreats from liberalism. Reason itself is distrusted from one end of the society to the other. Such people do not build; they burrow. They go through "the rituals of living. And their institutions follow their mood. And so science, social experimentation, and humanism—the corridors to breaking out of the trap—become targets for punishment. And a nation with incredible power in its hands drifts across the face of history, through sunshine and cloud on an aimless trip to nowhere.

But to decide on goals we must first face an ordeal of choices. Corning to priorities is one of the hardest exercises known to man. The more complex the society the more difficult it becomes. A multitude of interests intrude on one another. A contest of values shapes and influences outcomes. People and institutions want to hang on to what they have, and spoon up more. The politics of pressure, whether from the right or left or center, are arrayed against rationality. If most Americans are indifferent and even bored by the SST, we will probably get the SST because one coalition of power groups is stronger than others. Yet the President knew what the right question was—though he had no answer for it—when he said last January: "In the next ten years we shall increase our wealth by 50 percent. The profound question is—does this mean we will be 50 percent richer in a real sense, 50 percent better off, 50 percent happier? Or does it mean that in the year 1980 the President standing in this place will look back on a decade in which 70 percent of our people lived in metropolitan areas choked by traffic, suffocated by smog, poisoned by water, deafened by noise, and terrorized by crime?" It is the kind of question that ought to be put twice each day—on the 8 a.m. and 11 o'clock news—to remind a distracted and endlessly hurrying people that they must think.

What is it that we really want to do with our wealth and our power"? Relative to other choices, shall we put education first? Or medical knowledge and health care? Or great cities? Or recreation? Or literature and the arts? Or compassion for the hopeless in other lands and cultures? Or the world's best antimissile defense? Or the elimination of social injustice? Shall we tax ourselves more or less? Shall we play more or work more? Shall we police the world, or mind our own business? Shall we give a damn?

Let me reduce the question to something specific, by way of reminding you that public policy priorities, under our system, are not decided through these cosmic tradeoffs but by incrementalism and bargaining. A recent Washington Post editorial started off this way: "On the Senate floor one day last month, Senator Randolph tossed off a piece of information that each member of the Congress and each taxpayer ought to ponder for a while. 'State highway officials, through their nationwide organization,' he said, 'estimate that the national highway needs for the next 15 years will cost $320 billion.'... Slowly but surely, and rather quietly, Congress is moving toward a decision that will set the country's transportation policy for the next decade."

And the editorial continued: "Before voting to renew the trust fund... members of Congress ought to think about what it is doing to the country. One out of every eight dollars that state and local governments spend goes into highways. These governments spend more on highways than on colleges and universities; twice as much on highways as on hospitals; four times as much on highways as on crime prevention; ten times as much on highways as on parks and recreation.... All this happens while the cities become increasingly jammed with cars, while the air thickens with exhaust fumes, while seashores become polluted with oil. Does it make sense in this situation—which did not exist when the trust fund was set up in 1956—for Congress to lead the way, to egg the states on, towards a time when more than $2O billion a year is spent on highways?"

My point is that lacking any framework of relative value judgments and national goals, decisions like this are going to be taken one at a time, foreclosing the consideration and advocacy of other options. Our capacity to intervene and affect future outcomes is appallingly defective. A good part of the 50 percent economic growth to which the President referred is tied to this same pursuit of the automobilehighway culture, and if you think it is going to change any time soon, you are wrong. Yet the political mechanism to alter that decision is open to us, and if we pass it up we are parties to creating our own predicament. We can sit here today in the full knowledge that the consequences for 1980 are predictable and controllable—and probably disastrous—and that the social costs of cleaning up these consequences constitute a second mortgage on a large share of that 50 percent increase in wealth over the decade ahead.

The primary issue is not whether growth, in the abstract, is good or bad, but how we can influence its balance to produce the ends we set for ourselves. If you think the sheer accumulation of another 50 percent of national wealth is going to enable things to work out so that everybody gets his share, let me put you right. Sitting across from the President's office in Washington is a small group of men who are the President's Council of Economic Advisers. Their job is to run a tracking station for the nation's economy, to see how it is performing, what is wrong with it, and where it is headed.

Last January, the economic advisers told us that the potential U. S. gross national product is going to rise from the level of $932 billion in 1969 to $1.2 trillion in 1975, a gain of about $270 billion in 1969 prices. It would be lovely to think that this means we will have $270 billion of discretionary wealth sitting on the stump to dispose of as we see fit when 1975 arrives. Naturally, we won't. By the Council's arithmetic, 99 percent of the available GNP in 1975 has already been preempted by claims that are now on the books or in sight. Where is it going? Well, personal consumption will chew up 63 percent of it, or about $770 billions. Gross private investment will take another 16 percent, and state, federal, and local governments will see to the rest of it. If we are 99 percent committed to this pattern of disposing of our 1975 wealth—which we haven't even earned yet—you begin to see how prodigious a task it is to get hold of the problems of priorities. The President's economic advisers sum it up by saying, "The basic lesson is that the country is already at a point where, despite prospective rapid growth of output, a decision to satisfy an existing claim on a larger scale or to satisfy a new claim will require giving up something on which people are already counting." How right they are.

If we must give up something in order to adopt new goals, what are we going to give up, and whose ox is to be gored? Do we think we can get agreement to suspend military modernization? Can we get a consensus for becoming a second-rate nation in aviation? Are we prepared to cut our level of consumer satisfaction by perhaps ten percent? Are we willing to trade highspeed cars for better schools? Shall we decide to increase government's regulation of business by setting and enforcing standards of quality and performance and longer service in consumer products brought onto the market?

The truth is that we aren't going to get anywhere by declaring generalized, categorical national goals and priorities. It won't wash. The problem is one of choices—a literal ordeal of choices. Everything has its price, and it hurts to meet the price. We are learning that in medical research and education these days, as dollars are shifted to applied science, Medicare and Medicaid, and the delivery of services. The aerospace industry is learning the same hard lesson as the Federal Government shifts budget dollars from national security to human resources programs. It takes tough character to pull back from an unbelievably successful space exploration program, mothball our capability, and redirect resources to other ends. But this is just what we have to do if we mean to revise our priorities and order our goals. There is no anaesthetic.

The next question is whether we have the institutions through which we can reason out the problem of goals and priorities and make a beginning. The evidence is mixed. On the one hand, public opinion seems more prepared for the task than it used to be, and institutions are affected by how they read public opinion. We see the administration in Washington inventing a White House unit to shape domestic strategies and do research on national goals. We also see changes in the mix of the federal budget, reversing the ratio of defense to nondefense spending from what it was in the Sixties. We observe the growing use of cost-benefit and risk-benefit analysis in evaluating expenditure alternatives. We see the Congress fighting foreign military involvement and compulsive technological gambles, though with marginal success. We find the government providing us early warning of the demands on the economy in the years ahead. But we see no lessening in the determination of specific interest groups all across the social spectrum to work their will and yield no ground without a fight. And the behavior of the Congress shows a marked preference for impulsive, incremental, and random initiatives instead of broad and integrating strategies.

If I am less than sanguine as to the capacity of our governing institutions to seize the time and put things right, it is because there has never been much disposition in this country for straight line policy-making. Group conflict was built into the whole system, from checks and balances to the federal-state duality and on into the two-year limit on terms in the House of Representatives. We have a congenital aversion to giving governments very much rope, and of course we can't have it both ways. It will take strong government and a strong political process to hammer out goals and repel boarders, and that kind of government collides squarely with the built-in diversity on which we thrive. If we had wanted governments to govern, we would have arranged things differently. What we really want is for government to listen to everyone and hand out the breaks evenly. This is good for democracy, but it presents a difficulty for rationality.

Nevertheless, we have quite a lot of government in this country, and we use it to get things done. If, for example, it should cross our minds that there is a sublime stupidity in pouring 63 percent of the 1975 GNP into personal consumption, with almost nothing left for additions to social capital, we might do something about increasing tax rates. If it drives us out of our minds to contemplate $3O billion of our tax dollars evaporating into higher prices and government salary raises between now and 1975, we might let the Administration know that controls on prices really aren't unAmerican. If we are weary of having our priorities and goals settled by sales and advertising pressure, we can call for regulation of huckstering, even if it means shaving half a point from our quantitative standard of living and a few percentage points from GNP. In all these ways we are beginning to get at the questions of choice in rearranging priorities.

With this goes the urgent need for substituting some measure of the quality of life for the sacrosanct Gross National Product. Gross is the word for it. I cannot believe it is beyond the capacity of the social sciences to assemble frameworks of accounting which can estimate potential social product and measure actual output. The data from the 1970 census can provide baseline information, and we certainly have enough experience with survey techniques and sampling to get on with the job. Social accounting can chart our progress, or the lack of it, over the spectrum of housing, nutrition, unemployment and underemployment, health care, recreation, environmental quality, transportation, crime, and poverty. And so we begin to assess not just our economic product but our social product, and thus illuminate both our values and the qualitative yields of our investments. While nothing is certain in the affairs of men, I have a notion that over time an index of our social product would exert a strong leverage on the arrangement of priorities and the uses of responsibility. Surely here is an opportunity for our centers of education, thought, and reason to create a new tool of national policy, and beyond this to apply analysis to the meanings of our social balance sheet. And from this process, I suspect, we shall find that philosophy has more than a little to offer to the solution of contemporary problems.

You may be encouraged to know that some of the most diligent social science research under way today is homing in on these problems. I have just seen a monograph by the National Planning Association reporting on the work of its Center for Priority Analysis on methods to measure the possibilities of social change. The NPA has gone at it by constructing categories of national concerns along with quantitative indicators which attempt to reflect their importance, taking a ten-year perspective 1970-1980. Let's see how they set up the classification. There are six broad output groupings: Health and Safety; Education, Skills and Income; Human Habitat; Finer Things; Freedom, Justice and Harmony; and Leisure and GNP.

To illustrate the NPA's analysis, here are a few suggested maximum potentials for social change, and the probable costs:

• To increase average life expectancy from 71 years to 80 years will cost $l90 billion.

• To reduce from 21 million to zero the number of persons in poverty will cost $45 billion.

• To enable everyone to live in a satisfactory neighborhood will cost $430 billion.

• To reduce the number of violent crimes per 100,000 persons from 620 to 188 per year will cost $145 billion.

• To significantly improve the index of performance in education will cost $405 billion.

• To increase the number of basic scientists from 120,000 to 150,000 would cost $550 million.

The total cost of all the feasible outputs listed by the NPA comes to more than $4 trillion in ten years. If you are an optimist, you can make yourself believe that we can actually allocate one-third of the GNP of the 1970s to achieving all these social potentials. If you are more disposed to hedge, you will recognize that some tradeoffs have to be made among the feasible goals and that, even so, something we are doing now will have to be given up. But the point is that these analytic approaches are beginning to home in on defining and quantifying goals that are technically feasible, and expressing their costs over ten-year periods. If this country is indeed capable of generating $l4 trillion in disposable resources between now and 1980, it is not too much to expect of a rational people that they put their minds and institutions to work on the question of where the priorities lie.

Scientific research, as a national priority, has lost much ground in the past five years. As a result, a protracted period of mourning is being observed in what is called the scientific community. What did we do wrong? Have we given offense? How can it be thought that science is in some way responsible for a decline in the quality of life, since we are for that too? If I were to try to assess the reasons for the present position of scientific research in the sweepstakes of public opinion, I would begin with the old-fashioned sin of pride. Science and its cousin, technology, thought they had it made. They joyously embraced the benefits of government support without appraising the risks. Governments are not benevolent institutions. There is no way to confer selective immortality upon those few individuals in political life who captained the cause of postwar and cold war science. The cohorts of science did not do their homework in comprehending the processes or dynamics of politics, and they turned a deaf ear to warnings that it couldn't last. They rejected pleas from worried men in government to formulate a national science policy based on goals, objectives, and criteria of choice. When the growth curve of support faltered, leveled off and dipped, they were not prepared. Science, the home of reason, had been unthinking.

I do not believe for a moment that public policy, confused though it may be, will abandon basic scientific research. It will continue to support it and even add modestly to current support levels. But government is not clear as to the case for heavy investment in basic science relative to other pressing claims on limited resources. And the case for basic science is inordinately hard to make; it is a deposit of faith, a belief in good men, a conviction that a civilized people should add to its capital of knowledge, and a hazy sense that some day the investment will pay off in breakthroughs. When government asks the men of science to differentiate among research needs and priorities, the answers are dusty and ambivalent. If the men in government who must ration resources suggest that we do not necessarily have to lead the world in every field of science at once, and point out that science is not confined to national boundaries, the response is that science is worthwhile only if it has excellence and that scientific mediocrity in any field is unacceptable. So it is a tie score, and the game will be replayed by the same rules another day.

But that is only the arena of basic science. Where applied and developmental research are concerned, the propositions are different. Public policy is disposed to invest risk capital where it can be shown that science is at the threshold of breakthrough to a deliverable social benefit. Here is where we stand today with what passes for a national science policy: to temporize in basic science and to put the scarce discretionary dollars on research that is close to a payoff. It is a policy of economic and social utility, and it is very hard to fault. We are in that kind of an age, and if this kind of public policy is less than congenial to the pursuit of science, I think it is past time for the men of science to come forward with a better science policy matched to the needs and concerns of the society in the Seventies. And there is a task into which inquiry and scholarship can bite.

The ordeal of choices is inescapable. We have brought it on ourselves, after all. If there is a meaning to what is taking place around us, I think it is not so much the general collapse of purpose and value as a transition to a different and as yet unclear dimension of potency for which we are morally and philosophically unprepared. In a sense, it is quite accurately "future shock." As Kenneth Boulding points out, "in the course of development there is a point of no return, after which the option of remaining merely civilized is no longer available. The society is caught up in a dynamic of change which no power can stop." Well, if we cannot stop it we can make it more benign than malignant, through reason.

Now, these are deep waters and I don't have the nerve to take the matter farther. But I wish I were only beginning the course instead of growing long in the tooth, because I should very much like a piece of the action. The struggle to find the ends of society, and to see with some clarity the uses of responsibility, will be long and the outcomes will be imperfect. When I am tempted to be exasperated with how we do things, I look back at Stephen Bailey's definition of the ethical postulate of a democracy: not that man is good, but that he is capable of good; not that he is free of corruption, but that he is desperately sick of it; not that he has made the good society, but that he has caught an unforgettable glimpse of it.

WILLIAM D. CAREY (Columbia '40), former Assistant Director of the Bureau of the Budget, is now with the Washington office of Arthur D. Little, Inc., management consultants. His article is based on the talk he gave at Dartmouth in October at the Medical School convocation on "Inquiry and Scholarship in the Society of the Seventies." Mr. Carey was a Curtis Fellow (M.A.) at Columbia in 1941 and a Littauer Fellow (M.P.A.) at Harvard the following year. He joined the Bureau of the Budget, Executive Office of the President, in 1942. After being Chief of the Labor and Welfare Division and Executive Assistant Director, he served as Assistant Director from 1966 to 1969.