The Scientist as Politician
IN chapter 10, I described my activities in the politics of social science, especially as an adviser to the Ford Foundation and a member of the board of directors of the Social Science Research Council. Beginning in the mid-1960s, my focus of political activity moved from New York to Washington and from the social sciences to science in general, and in particular, to the National Academy of Sciences.
For some members of the National Academy of Sciences, the principal activity of that organization is to elect new members. Debates on the membership quota to be allotted to each discipline (the academy is divided into classes and the classes into sections) are carried on with deadly seriousness, and an elaborate nominating and election procedure, working upward from sections to classes to the entire academy, maintains careful checks and balances in the filling of these quotas.
In its choice of members, the NAS is as fallible as any university. While almost all of the 1,600 scientists who belong to NAS have distinguished records of research, of course not all scientists with equally distinguished records have been elected. Whether or not the election process is fallible, few scientists in the United States, when chosen, do not feel a warm glow of pride in this recognition from their peers. Resignations and refusals to accept membership are so rare as to be quirky.
But the NAS is more than a mutual admiration society. Its charter requires it to provide advice, on request, to the national government. To perform this duty, it operates (in collaboration with the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine) an organization called the National Research Council (NRC), a vast labyrinth of commissions and committees.
The NRC has a full-time technical staff of about 3,000 persons, I believe, but the members of the advisory commissions and committees are all unpaid volunteers drawn from the scientific, technical, and professional communities of our country. In its activities, the NAS and the NRC have access to the whole of whatever expertise and wisdom is to be found in the United States; few persons refuse to serve when called, unless prevented by other commitments.
There is every evidence that the advice provided by the NAS and its affiliates to the president, federal agencies, and the Congress is listened to carefully—which is not to say that it is always accepted. In national policy making in domains where science and technology are relevant—and nowadays that means most domains—NAS plays an important role. Moreover, its role is not entirely that of passively providing answers upon request. The NAS can usually put questions on the agenda when it thinks them important and when other players do not seem to be attending to them. It can generally arrange to be asked for advice when it thinks advice needs giving.
THE SOCIAL SCIENCES IN THE NATIONAL ACADEMY
Until the late 1960s, membership in the NAS was limited mainly to physical and biological scientists. I say mainly because some members were anthropologists (principally physical anthropologists and archaeologists) and some psychologists (principally physiologically oriented experimental psychologists). A few, but very few, among these regarded themselves as social or behavioral scientists. Neal Miller and George A. Miller were such exceptions among the psychologists, and George Peter Murdock among the anthropologists. The National Research Council was correspondingly narrow.
Unfortunately, problems of public policy do not divide along disciplinary lines. The problem of air quality, for example, involves meteorology, air physics and chemistry, physiology and medicine, automotive and power engineering, and economics and urban sociology. AIDS calls for medical and biological research, and equally for research on sexual behavior, sociology, medical economics, and other topics. National security and disarmament questions extend all the way from particle physics to political science, leaving few disciplines between untouched.
Membership on advice-giving committees of the NRC was not limited to academy members, nor to natural scientists. Nevertheless, the controlling decisions about committees and their members were in the hands of the physical and biological scientists. It was their recognition that social science expertise might be relevant that determined whether social scientists would be brought into the process. This relevance was often not recognized when it should have been. Natural scientists simply were not sufficiently aware of the social science aspects of policy questions to respond appropriately to them.
To some of us observing the role of the NAS in national policy making, it seemed very important that the social sciences should participate more fully in the advice-giving process. We were wary of the technological fix, and equally wary of amateur psychology, economics, sociology, and political science provided by physicists, chemists, and biologists. To improve the situation, two roads seemed open: to create a parallel social science academy, or to bring the social and behavioral sciences more fully into the existing NAS/NRC structure.*1 It was my own belief, and that of many others, that the second road was the more promising.
We preferred union to separation for two reasons. First, the social sciences were politically vulnerable. That had been shown when they were struck from the original enabling legislation for the National Science Foundation; and their gaining a foothold in NSF had subsequently been a slow, painstaking process. They were (and are) still far from being full partners in research funding. The social sciences had some friends in Congress, but they also had some virulent enemies. A united front with their hard-science colleagues seemed the politically wise approach.
Second, participation in the NAS would strengthen social sciences’ hard wing, which in belief and practice was most like natural science. This has also turned out to be correct—perhaps too correct, for in the election of social scientists to the academy in subsequent years, there has been an excessive tendency to restrict candidacy to those anthropologists and psychologists who are most “biological,” and those economists, political scientists, and sociologists who are most mathematical. The membership, particularly in psychology and economics, is far from showing a balanced picture of social science.
The campaign for union was led by the small band of social scientists already in the academy. There was a considerable favorable sentiment among younger members of the academy for recognizing the social sciences as genuine scientific disciplines, although there were more than a few diehards (and still are) who were vocal in their opposition. Philip Handler, president of the academy, being generally sympathetic to our demands, was of great help in bringing about the change.
The process began in the NRC, when the initiative was taken by Neal Miller, George Murdock, Carl Pfaffman, Ernest Hilgard, and others who were active in the division of the NRC that handled activities in anthropology and psychology. A large part of the work of this division consisted in advising the military agencies on scientific questions relating to vision and hearing and on methods for training military personnel.
In the mid-1960s the Division of Anthropology and Psychology of the NRC began to elect to its governing board social scientists who would not qualify, under the existing limits, for membership in the academy. Several of these new members, beginning with the demographer Kingsley Davis and I, were asked to join this board with the prospect of later chairing it. Demography, after all, was almost a “science,” as it used quantitative data. I was well known to have interests in applied mathematics and computer science; and, partly as a result of my RAND connection, I had many acquaintances among natural scientists and mathematicians.
The next move in the game plan was to propose these prospective chairs for membership in the academy. The problem of their disciplinary classification could be avoided by using a special procedure (the voluntary nominating group), authorized by the by-laws, which bypassed the disciplinary sections of the academy.
The strategy was successful. Kingsley Davis was elected in 1966 and I in 1967. (On the list of publications presented to the members to document my qualifications, the first item was my paper on the axioms of mechanics, published in Phil Mag, a respected physics journal. Whether it was this mild misrepresentation of my identity that swung the vote or something else, I do not know.)
In the next three years, and without depending on the division chair as a subterfuge, we were able to use the voluntary nominating groups to bring Kenneth Arrow, Robert Merton, Tjailing Koopmans, and Paul Samuelson into the academy. Meanwhile, we were using both persuasion and the threat of a separate academy to get acceptance for a comprehensive Social and Behavioral Sciences Class within the NAS. Aided by the fact that the academy was besieged by similar demands from the engineering and medical professions, the necessary changes in the NAS structure were brought about in time for the 1972 academy elections.
The annual election quotas of the various classes were temporarily increased to allow the new sections to be brought up to reasonable strength over a period of a few years. I was heavily engaged in the nominating and election processes during these years, playing a major, although not always decisive, role in shaping the new social science membership. It was neither difficult nor terribly controversial, for there was a substantial backlog of “obvious” candidates.
We made the decision at the outset to bring in younger members, even at the expense of postponing the nominations of such senior, and outstanding, candidates as Ted Newcomb and Paul Lazarsfeld. We did elect those two during their lifetimes, but I always felt a little badly about the injustice of the delay in their elections, however justified it was from a strategic standpoint. Talcott Parsons was also passed over, but in his case it was because some of us thought him too “soft” to qualify.
This political activity, starting even before my election to the academy, gave me considerable visibility in the science community. Almost as soon as I had become a member of NAS, I was invited to join its prestigious Committee on Science and Public Policy (COSPUP), chaired by Harvey Brooks, who took over that function from the committee’s founder, George Kistiakowsky.
During my tenure on COSPUP (1968–71), some of its main activities were to supervise and review a survey of the biological sciences, conducted under the chairmanship of Phil Handler, and to advise Congress, at the request of a committee headed by Representative Emilio Daddario, on what public processes were needed to weigh the benefits and dangers of new technology. The Congressional Office of Technology Assessment was one of the ultimate products of the latter activity.
COSPUP was a demanding committee, as were most of my other activities in the academy. But it was also an exceedingly rewarding one. The public policy issues we examined had real importance, and sometimes we perhaps had some influence on the outcomes. Members, whatever our own expertise, received a broad education in every part of science with outstanding experts as our teachers. Most important of all was the sheer pleasure of associating with bright, wide-ranging minds and sharp wits. Even taking into account the unavoidable airplane travel, the hours I spent with COSPUP have been among my most pleasant and stimulating.
THE PRESIDENT’S SCIENCE ADVISORY COMMITTEE
I had hardly begun my work with COSPUP when I was invited to join the U.S. President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC). The nomination of a social scientist to this committee was even more surprising than one’s being elected to the academy. From its beginning, PSAC had been dominated by physicists. If we can talk of an Econometric Mafia, which mathematized economics in the two decades after World War II, it is even clearer that since the war there has been a Physics Mafia, which has dominated the whole domain of science policy. The areas in which the need to advise the president on science policy was first perceived were electronics and the atom. The position of President’s Science Advisor has been reserved for physicists, or physical chemists or electrical engineers nearly indistinguishable from physicists. The majority of the fifteen or so members of PSAC were physicists, with a small sprinkling of mathematicians, chemists, engineers, and biologists.
I was appointed to PSAC by President Lyndon Johnson, and joined the committee in January 1968, remaining on it until its demise at the end of the first Nixon administration. The chemist Donald Hornig was the President’s Science Advisor when I joined the committee. Twenty years after the fact, I learned from Don that I was appointed to PSAC not as a social scientist (there was, in fact, at that time still strong opposition to such an appointment) but as an expert in artificial intelligence and computer science. I was personally acquainted, at the time of my appointment, with a number of the members of PSAC, and they thought they could communicate with me about the policy questions being raised by these new disciplines.
The scientific world (including myself), however, perceived the event differently—specifically as the enlargement of PSAC to include social science. And apparently my service on PSAC took the curse off social scientists, because James Coleman and Pat Moynihan were subsequently appointed to it.
PSAC did much of its work through panels, whose members were not all, or even mostly, PSAC members. Some years earlier, I had served on such a panel under the chairmanship of Walter Rosenblith of M.I.T. In about 1960, the USSR had created a research organization for cybernetics, directly controlled by the presidium of its Academy of Science. It was very hush-hush, and presided over by an Admiral Berg. Some staff members of our CIA, assigned to keep watch on this development, blew it up into a great Soviet plot to conquer the world with cybernetics. A thick report they drafted came to the attention of President Kennedy, who asked his Science Advisor, Jerry Wiesner, to evaluate it.
The report was full of idiocies. One that I remember was the claim that a key player in the Russian effort was “the well-known Russian economist Wassily Leontiev.” At that time, Wassily Leontiev (future Nobelist in economics) was a full professor at Harvard, his family having emigrated from Russia in the 1920s.
Alas, our panel was too honest. If we had reported back to Wiesner that the Soviet cybernetics project was genuinely dangerous, American research in artificial intelligence would have had all the funding it could possibly use for years to come. Putting temptation behind us, we reported that the CIA document was a fairy story—as events proved it to be. This was my one experience with PSAC prior to my membership on it.
The invitation to join PSAC posed a problem for me. The committee had always been deeply involved in advising on military, and especially nuclear, matters. By 1967, I favored American withdrawal from Vietnam. Could I in good conscience serve on a committee that would be active in proposing technological solutions to the military’s problems in that country?
I decided that I could serve. First, if there were a way to win the war quickly, it was important that it be found, although I doubted that I could make any contribution to finding it. I was at that time not against our preventing a Communist victory in Vietnam if it could be done. I favored withdrawal because I did not think we knew how to win the war. Second, PSAC had other concerns besides the war. I could focus upon them as my main committee activity.
Appointed to PSAC, I found that it was indeed deeply engaged in trying to make technical contributions to an American victory in Vietnam, especially to finding ways to block the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The ingenuity of PSAC physicists turned out to be no match for the ingenuity and desperation of North Vietnamese peasants and soldiers, however. As we now know, no effective ways to cut the trail were found. Some groups in the Pentagon welcomed these efforts from talented physicists; others resented the interference of outsiders, Monday-morning quarterbacks.
Within the White House, Henry Kissinger and his deputy, Colonel Alexander Haig, were especially skeptical of the interference, and did everything in their power, including giving meaningless “briefings,” to keep PSAC from learning anything it did not already know. I walked out in the middle of one of Haig’s briefings, ostensibly to make sure I would not miss my plane.
I made essentially no personal contribution to the Vietnam activity. My technical knowledge did not qualify me to contribute in any significant way. Often, I could recognize foolish ideas for what they were, but so could the others. I had to decide what my positive contribution to PSAC would be. My first decision was that I would not be the token social scientist, although I would certainly bring social science knowledge into the conversation when it was relevant. I would find some role in which I could operate as a full committee member, indistinguishable from the others.
PSAC operated both as a committee of the whole, during its monthly meetings, and in panels (they were never called committees). There was a sentiment to revive a panel on the environment, a previous one chaired by John Tukey having produced a valuable report in 1967 laying out the whole range of environmental problems. I gladly agreed to head the new panel. While others would be more knowledgeable than I in almost any specific area, no one would be expert over more than a few areas, so I would be at no disadvantage.
Besides, as a result of my youthful forays into entomology and ecology, I could at least drop a few names at appropriate moments. I had never lost the concern for environmental problems that was first stirred by a pamphlet I found in my father’s library, “Timber, Mine or Crop?” And I was familiar with such classics as Needham’s The Life of Inland Waters and the ecology textbooks of Clements and Weaver, which I had studied carefully during the days of Rockmarsh (see chapter 2).
There was no reason for the new panel to produce another public report. Instead, we decided to focus on specific problems of high priority and carry analysis to the point where we could recommend the next steps to take. We recruited experts for subpanels on air quality problems, water problems, chemistry (detergents were a big issue then), environmental economics, and so on.
Only two other PSAC members showed a strong interest in my panel: the physicist Murray Gell-Mann, and the vice president for research of Ford Motor Company, Mike Ference. It turned out that Murray and I were quite competitive. But he was more interested in wildlife conservation and related matters than in other environmental issues. So our paths soon diverged, and he created another PSAC panel closer to his interests.
During the last year of the Johnson administration, our panel was most active on the detergent question. Proposals were being put forth in Congress and elsewhere to ban the phosphate detergents then being used without much attention being given to alternatives. When we investigated, we found problems with the alternatives—the cure might be as bad as the disease. We put out some “go slow” recommendations, and no precipitous actions were in fact taken.
PSAC met with President Johnson only once during this year, a meeting that was somewhat unnerving. The president had a single thing on his mind: the unreasonableness of Ho Chi Minh. Why was Ho so stubborn? Why would he not accept the reasonable compromises that had been offered him? Whatever the agenda, it always came back to that. We saw a man who had been destroyed by his adversary, and we came away saddened and concerned.
After the 1968 presidential election, we submitted our pro forma resignations, but it appeared that President Nixon would continue with the committee, only replacing those whose terms had ended. Lee DuBridge, former president of Cal Tech, became the new Science Advisor. The rather chaotic meetings that had characterized PSAC under its former chairman now became quieter and more orderly.
I continued to go forward with the agenda of the panel on the environment, still retaining that as my main activity. My excellent Office of Science and Technology staff man, John Buckley, a field biologist and ecologist, pushed our activity at a good pace, providing excellent staff support.
One of the first issues that President Nixon had to face was how the federal government should organize to deal with environmental problems. Congress was pushing for a Council on Environmental Quality, and it was not then good politics to be anti-environment. As a countermeasure, Nixon created a Cabinet Committee on the Environment, asserting that the environment was so important, and the issues so interdepartmental, that it could be dealt with only at the Cabinet level.
Of course, no one knew how a Cabinet committee should operate—it was an unprecedented structure. Since it had no staff, who would prepare its agenda? President Nixon turned to his Science Advisor, and Lee DuBridge turned to his environmental panel, which accepted the responsibility for the Cabinet committee’s agenda, at least until other arrangements could be made.
High on the list of pressing problems was the regulation of auto emissions of oxides of nitrogen, which had not been regulated in the initial Clean Air Act because of doubts of its being technologically feasible. Meanwhile, in briefings by people from the automobile industry, President Nixon had been told that the auto pollution problem was well in hand, and that no new regulation was needed. The charts they showed to the president, of course, had to do with the reductions in emissions of sulfur oxides and carbon monoxide, not with oxides of nitrogen. We were quick to put the latter at the head of the Cabinet Committee’s agenda and to prepare a memorandum about the seriousness of the problem and the feasibility of doing something about it.
On this matter Mike Ference was very active on the PSAC panel, and by virtue of his company position, he could claim some expertise on auto emissions. He argued (against my amateur memorandum) that our chemistry was all wrong and our recommendation correspondingly incorrect. Unfortunately, he had been away from science for some years, busy with administrative concerns, and in that time he had forgotten a lot of chemistry. Besides, he was a physicist by training, not a chemist. I went home, pulled my old Schlesinger General Chemistry textbook off the shelf, and wrote a brief essay on nitrogen fixation in the atmosphere at high temperatures which supported the panel’s memorandum. The panel bought my story, and we did not have to retreat.
I have always imagined that our action had something to do with the Nixon administration’s supporting the regulation of nitrogen oxides and with the new controls that were soon in place. One reason for believing that we had some influence is that, shortly afterward, I was invited to join the Scientific Advisory Committee at General Motors, with a not inconsiderable annual stipend. I declined, mainly because I thought there was an obvious conflict of interest as long as I was PSAC’s man on the environment. By today’s standards, both Ference and GM were rather insensitive to conflict of interest issues, but twenty years ago such insensitivity was more common, or at least more acceptable, than it is now.
During my PSAC years, there was much nationwide concern for education. In particular, the New Left was proposing drastic changes in the existing “bourgeois” educational system. Head Start was one of the significant (and less revolutionary) initiatives of that period. The Harvard chemist Frank Westheimer, a fellow member of PSAC, formed a panel on education, which I joined. The panel focused its attention, as appropriate to PSAC, on how research might contribute to the improvement of education and how the federal government could organize to accomplish the research.
As a member of this panel, I prepared two memoranda, one on R&D in reading, the other reflecting on a series of visits the panel made to some of the principal laboratories in the country that were then engaged in educational research. My reading memorandum took up the topics of the need to know, citizenship and the “rich life,” evaluation, high-level reading skills, and motivation and cognition. On the first topic, I commented:
There is much folklore and little data on who needs to know how to read how well in our society. Probably a large fraction of jobs do not require one to read at all; others may require mainly the reading of instructions; others (e.g., secretarial) the transcribing of written material, and so on. If we had a better set of facts about reading skill requirements for jobs, we could point improvement in the teaching of those skills at the places where improvement might mean the most.
On citizenship and the “rich life,” I was similarly iconoclastic:
Most persons who are problem readers in school are unlikely, by means of any program we would know how to design in the next decade, to be brought to a level of literacy where reading could make a major contribution either to their leisure or to their performance as citizens. There is no evidence that I know that the trash that supplies the mass reading market is a more desirable anodyne than is TV fare. Even so-called “serious” reading material, on average, probably misinforms as much as it informs—at least, I can hardly think of a tract on contemporary problems that has reached bestseller status that refutes this allegation.
The site visits (in 1968) revealed few really exciting or promising educational research projects. In my memo, I divided them into New World projects and Better World projects—revolutionary and incremental, respectively. What little excitement we found was in the New World projects:
[O]ur initial sample included only two representatives of New Worlds—one of them ludicrously incompetent, but the other very impressive. If we extend our briefings to include blacks, city school superintendents, and radical students, we will be hearing a great deal more about New Worlds.
. . . I did not come away from our meeting with Herb Kohl prepared to join his Revolution, or even liking it. I did come away from it thinking that he had succeeded in making it somewhat plausible to me—as none of the other New Lefters I have encountered did—that it just might come about. Given a little time, I think all of us could write several alternative plausible scenarios: (1) no revolution—it’s just a fad that will be followed by some equivalent of panty raids or goldfish swallowing; (2) the revolution will spread, will weld the alliance between disadvantaged youth and pampered, educated youth . . . and will succeed in some form in ten years; (3) wait till the GIs get back to the campuses—there’ll be lively head-bashing; (4) the New Left minority will produce a major backlash and a massive shift of society to the right.
. . . The relevance of this for our committee, I think, is somewhat independent of which scenario we write. For any plausible scenario, there is an important segment of our educational system—including the ghetto schools . . . where the motivational problem is not going to be solved by “If you just work hard at school, you’ll live comfortably forever after.” Many children—however they will feel at age thirty—cannot get excited about the goal of living comfortably, probably because they have never lived uncomfortably. Many others believe that they will live comfortably whether they work hard or not. Many of the disadvantaged believe that they will live uncomfortably whether they work hard or not. We can dislike these attitudes; we can regard them as unrealistic; the fact that they exist puts them right in the center of all education R&D activities that pretend to deal with important issues.
The Westheimer Panel made no significant impact on American education (thereby sharing the fate of innumerable committees that have addressed these topics in recent decades). It devoted itself mainly to supporting the newly formed National Institute of Education in its efforts to strengthen educational research, with perhaps some temporary success. But in the long run, the educational establishment took over. The thoughts of our panel, stripped of their special concern for the revolutionary rhetoric of that time, could still provide a useful manifesto for educational reform, and a useful list of fundamentals to which the reform should attend.
There were at least two other occasions when I put on my social science hat for PSAC. At the time the Club of Rome*2 report was about to be issued, predicting the occurrence of Doomsday early in the next century, Jay Forrester, seeking publicity for the report’s findings, gained permission to present it at a PSAC meeting. My reaction was one of annoyance at this brash engineer who thought he knew how to predict social phenomena. In the discussion, I pointed out a number of the naïve features of the Club of Rome model, but the matter ended, more or less, with that.
On another occasion, we learned that someone had called Alvin Toffler’s book Future Shock to President Nixon’s attention. He, or someone on his staff, wanted an evaluation by social scientists of Toffler’s thesis. I wrote a memorandum pointing out that social change had surely been more rapid in my grandmother’s time (from agrarian to urban society, with the advent of rapid transportation and communication) than in my own, and that she and her contemporaries showed no great signs of psychological trauma—no more than any other generation. I could not understand, therefore, why our generation should be subject to any special “shock.”
Toward the latter part of Nixon’s first term, Lee DuBridge resigned as Science Advisor and was replaced by Edward David, from Bell Labs. David tried to obtain a bigger role for his office in the budget process for science, but succeeded only in having his nose bloodied by the Office of Management and Budget. During this period, a great deal of PSAC’s attention was focused on two issues: federal investment in supersonic aircraft, and the construction of anti-missile defenses for missile silos. Both of these programs were strongly supported by the president but viewed with great skepticism by the scientists on PSAC.
With respect to the SST, there was concern about environmental effects (damage to the ozone layer), a concern that was then plausible but was some years later shown to be unfounded. The other objections were economic. A civilian SST would clearly not pay for itself. Why not let the British and French be the pioneers if they were willing to foot the bill? This argument clearly offended national pride. (In almost all of these policy decisions the technical issues, both engineering and economic, were inextricably interwoven with value questions.)
With respect to missile site defense, the opposition argued for technical infeasibility, high cost, and undesirable consequences for deterrence and the nuclear arms race. The administration, when pushed with these arguments, used the “bargaining chip” reply: the site defense program would be a valuable trade-off in bargaining with the USSR about arms control.
These were not the only issues on which PSAC members disagreed with an administration policy. A board of advisers would be ineffective indeed if its advice always coincided with the propositions before it. But in this case, one of the advisers, Dick Garwin, a clever and persuasive physicist but with perhaps less than a full understanding of political processes, saw no reason why he should not testify on Capitol Hill against the administration proposals, which he did.
Within a few months, President Nixon decided that he really didn’t need a science adviser or a PSAC. Toward the end of the first term, the Committee was essentially allowed to die on the vine, to be formally abolished after the election. I guess I was officially a member to the very end, although I was not active beyond the end of 1972.
MORE ACADEMY COMMITTEES
My involvement with the National Academy of Sciences was not limited to helping build its new Social and Behavioral Science Class, and serving on COSPUP. During the 1970s, I also chaired several committees that were appointed to deal with specific policy issues. One was charged with examining the social and behavioral science programs within the National Science Foundation. We found the programs for support of basic research of generally high quality but underfunded.
At the same time, the NSF, with congressional urging, had established a RANN (Research and National Needs) program of applied research, much of it squarely in the social sciences. Unfortunately, the administrative arrangements for RANN were quite unsatisfactory; there was too much masterminding from the top and too little initiative left with the investigators. Our committee’s generally unfavorable evaluation of RANN was a factor in the program’s demise soon afterward.
A second committee I chaired was charged with advising Senator Edmund Muskie on the auto emission standards to be incorporated in the renewed Clean Air Act. The logic of the problem is quite straightforward. First evaluate the marginal cost of reducing various auto emissions. Then estimate the connection between levels of auto emissions and levels of air quality. Then estimate the connections between levels of air quality and levels of pollution-related illness and deaths. Then place a value on marginal reductions in these health effects. Finally compare the marginal cost of reducing emissions with the marginal value of the reductions and recommend optimal levels of control.
We constructed subcommittees of experts to deal with each of these phases of the problem: a subcommittee on costs of emission reduction in autos, one on the atmospheric chemistry and effects of emissions, one on the health effects of air pollution, and one on economic evaluation. Of course we had no illusion that data existed, or could be made to exist, that would produce the numbers needed to fill out our conceptual framework.
Costs of reducing emission could be estimated fairly well (at least within a factor of two or three). But atmospheric chemistry was mostly a collection of scientific mysteries—computer modeling could give only an exceedingly rough picture of what was going on. None of the available health data measured marginal effects; biostatistics were aimed only at assessing the lowest levels of substances that produced significant health effects. And the economic analysis depended on finding credible ways of placing a monetary value on health and life.
What does a committee do under such circumstances? It behaves like a group of reasonable people. It looks at whatever order-of-magnitude information exists and sets some upper and lower bounds to the possible. It then arrives at a conclusion about whether the existing standards could have been arrived at by reasonable persons (that is, whether they are not in egregious conflict with any evidence). If they fail this test, then it suggests that the standards should be adjusted either upward or downward.
Our committee came to the conclusion that the existing standards were generally reasonable, but could stand a bit of tightening here and there. Senator Muskie, wanting even more definite recommendations to take the political heat off his committee, complained a little to the press about twohanded scientists, who on the one hand say yes, and on the other hand, no, but I think our report pretty well met his needs.
Academy committee reports, before submission, are subjected to a thorough review by an independent internal committee. This always produces the problem that these reviewers, wise and intelligent people, will second-guess the committees, also wise and intelligent people; but the review is clearly essential if the academy is to produce credible reports.
The report of our air quality committee had a rough time with several reviewers, who thought that our economics experts had reached conclusions about the value of reducing pollution that were more definite than the available evidence justified. I rather agreed, but since even a sizable change in those conclusions would not have changed our recommendations, I was stubborn in resisting revisions that would have delayed the report for months and probably have made it useless to the Senate.
Participation in these kinds of committee activities soon disabuses one of any notion that the natural sciences are “exact” sciences. As soon as they have to cope with the messiness of real world problems, as contrasted with the sometimes neat and simple laboratory problems, they become at least as inexact as the social sciences (which only rarely can retreat to the laboratory). I no longer have any patience with natural scientists who imagine that they have some kind of patent on exactness which they have not licensed to their social science brethren.
If I ever believed in the myth of the “exact sciences” or “hard sciences,” my belief was wholly dissipated by encounters with such topics as air quality, eutrophication of lake waters, global warming, dietary standards, effects of low-level radiation, meteorology (for example, cloud seeding), and cold fusion. All of these topics contain uncertainties about the facts and their implications at least as serious as those we are accustomed to in the social sciences. The true line is not between “hard” natural science and “soft” social sciences, but between precise science limited to highly abstract and simple phenomena in the laboratory and inexact science and technology dealing with complex problems in the real world. The mythical image of hard science still prevails in some corners of the academy but seems to be slowly losing credence.
During the latter part of the 1970s, I found myself less active in the affairs of the academy and its committees, but returned to them again a few years later, as we shall see in the fourth panel. But before crossing into that part of my life, I must say something of the foreign travels that, after 1965, occupied me (and usually Dorothea) for about a month of each year.
Notes
*1. At the time of which I am speaking, there was no National Academy of Engineering or Institute of Medicine. I will leave aside the complications that arose when they were brought into the picture.
*2. The Club of Rome is a voluntary association of businesspersons and other individuals, mostly European, who concern themselves with the future of our world. The report mentioned here was based on a computer model of population, food, energy, and environment.