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C00002 00002	SHORT REMARKS IN SUPPORT OF SLOGANS
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SHORT REMARKS IN SUPPORT OF SLOGANS


1. America is an underdeveloped country. 

	A country is underdeveloped if it doesn't have the production
to  provide  its  population with  everything  it  needs for  health,
freedom, opportunity,  and  such  chances at  happiness  as  material
wealth can provide. 

	Judged  by this  criterion, America  is underdeveloped.   Its
children   would  benefit  by  more   competent  attention  to  their
education, and its elderly would benefit by  more competent attention
to their health, its handicapped would benefit from more attention to
their rehabilitation.  Many of its workers voluntarily work very long
hours, because at their rates of pay, they value the additional goods
they could  purchase more than they value the  leisure.  All of these
goodies require more production and more efficiency in  the provision
of services. 

	Of course, these goals could not be reached if there were not
the renewable  material resources or if pollution was about to set an
upper limit  on the  material production, but  for reasons  discussed
elsewhere, neither of these ills is really likely. 


2. What have we done for them lately? 

	The  literary culture  has always  carped at  technology.   I
don't know whether this is inevitable or just tradition reinforced by
self-interest (for example, in the case of  the English professor who
promotes  his subject in  competition to science  and technology that
tell about the world and help earn a living by saying that  the study
of liberal  arts will make  a better man of  you.) In any  case, this
carping  is  counter-acted  by the  obvious  benefits  of technology.
However, the benefits were more striking and obvious  fifty years ago
when  electric  lights,   cars,  refrigeration,  movies,  radio,  and
telephones all entered daily life in a short time.  Recent inventions
haven't been so striking in  their effect on daily lives.   We need a
new  wave of  directly useful  invention,  not merely  invention that
makes people richer by increasing productivity although we  need that
too. 


3. No-one is grateful merely for prosperity and health. 

	We are on  the average much wealthier and  healthier than our
immediate  ancestors,  but this  does  not make  people automatically
regard the technology that made it possible as  a precious resource. 
Almost everyone knows of  someone wealthier and healthier even of the
previous generation.  It is natural to identify with the lucky of the
previous generation, and  literature encourages this tendency.   Even
the person  whose ancestors were servants  is projected by nineteenth
century literature into  a world where  people had  servants.  It  is
hard to remember that most people's ancestors were the servants. 


4. Alas, there are only one and a half cultures. 

	C.P. Snow  put forth the idea  that there are two  cultures -
the scientific  culture and the literary culture.  The former had the
virtues of objectivity  and a problem  solving attitude.  The  latter
has the vices  of pessimism, passivity, and paranoia.   This view was
more plausible  in connection  with the  events of  World War  II  in
connection with which it was formulated than it  is today.  It seemed
true then, because both groups shared a goal. 

	Now  it is  clear that  a scientific  culture does  not exist
separate from the literary culture  even among scientists.  When  the
literary   culture   suffers   from   diseases   of   pessimism   and
irrationalism,  scientists, especially  young ones,  suffer from them
too.   There ought  to be  a  scientific culture,  especially if  the
literary culture can't be cured. 


5. In the short run, people are neither created nor destroyed. 

	Many  of  the   proposals  for  the  improvement  of  various
institutions like education and government suggest that better people
be obtained and worse ones be got rid of.  As long as the institution
is considered  in isolation, it is possible to  think this way.  From
an  economists point  of  view,  one  might  hope  to  summarize  the
competing demands  for people in a  price.  However, when  we look at
society  as  a  whole,  we  have  to  consider  that  the  people  we
contemplate excluding from  one occupation will  have to get jobs  in
another, and the good people we contemplate attracting must come from
somewhere else. 


6. The most neglected science is arithmetic. 

	This is just a grumble that  people who say the country  will
soon be  covered  by used  cars neglect  to  divide the  area of  the
country by  the area taken by a car to see  if they are right.  Those
who advocate wind power often neglect to measure how much there is. 


7. Obstructionists should be bribed. 

	When an  innovation  is  planned certain  interests  will  be
adversely affected even  if the innovation is  beneficial for society
as  a whole.  Present law and  practice calls for the compensation of
some of  these interests.   Thus  if one's  property is  taken for  a
public purpose, the public must pay the market value of the property.
Other injured  parties, such  as tenants  of property  taken over  or
officials  of  the  railway firemen's  union  are  not  traditionally
compensated.   Naturally,  they will  find it  in their  interests to
fight the innovation. 

	Suppose we  accept  the  idea that  all  interests  adversely
affected by an innovation will be  compensated to an extent that will
make  the innovation a benefit to them.   If the innovation is really
of benefit to society as a whole, there will be  enough benefit to do
this,  and  still leave  the  innovation of  benefit  to the  primary
beneficiaries. 

	Well fine, but this is not as  easy as it looks.  We are  all
familiar with  the holdout property  owner.  It  is not  always clear
whether he would  really be so injured by taking his property that he
requires a large  compensation to leave  him whole  or whether he  is
merely taking  advantage of his  position to bargain for  a windfall.
The  situation  is sometimes  further  complicated by  the  fact that
property values have gone up  in anticipation of the public  need and
that  the  windfall has  already  been  reaped  by previous  property
owners, and the present owners would be genuinely injured by any  but
very high prices. 

	Nevertheless, we can state some general principles and settle
some easy cases.  The first principle is that everything is easier of
the holdouts can  be treated individually.   Thus if  we can buy  the
locomotive fireman jobs  individually and leave those  whose price is
too  high, the railroad will eventually be  able to afford to buy all
the jobs.  The hard problem is when nothing can proceed until all the
property owners are bought out. 

	Nevertheless, even  though there will be  difficult cases, if
society decides to compensate fairly  all who lose by an  innovation,
the obstacles to valuable innovations will be reduced.  Also marginal
innovations will be killed. 


8. The world isn't doomed even if it doesn't heed my advice. 

	Most of my  ideas are good, I think, and the sooner the world
heeds them the better.  However, they will be come even  more obvious
with time.   Especially the ideas for  avoiding disasters will become
more obvious as the disasters approach.  On the other hand, ideas for
doing positive  good can  go a  very long  time without  recognition,
because we don't know what  we are missing.  This suggests that it is
more important  to present  ideas for  positive actions  in the  most
effective  way.    Especially  bad  is  a  presentation  sufficiently
complete to allow the  proposer to claim credit for the idea if it is
realized but not good enough to induce people to realize it.   Maybe,
it is not  too strong to say,  "If you are not prepared  to push your
invention,  keep your mouth shut.  It  will be realized sooner if  the
guy prepared to push it also has the pleasure of having invented it."
Perhaps this applies to the ideas in this book. 


9. Almost all complaints are legitimate. 

	The conservative  is worried that people  will take advantage
of the social measures designed to help the unfortunate.  He can cite
plenty of  examples.  The  liberal is worried  that the poor  will be
exploited, and he can cite plenty of examples also. 
	

10. The most important price is the current price of a human life. 

	Many  activities  are  undertaken  to  save  life,  and  many
activities are undertaken in the knowledge that they will  cost life.
Many of the  activities intended to save life are  suboptimal in that
the  same money would save more lives  spent some other way.  Suppose
there were  a publicly known  "value of  a human  life".  Anyone  who
could show  that his proposed  life saving activity  would save lives
cheaper than  the standard  would have  a prima  facie case  for  his
proposal.  Someone proposing  an activity that cost lives  would have
them charged to his project at the standard rate. 

	What about the  humanitarian argument that it is wrong to put
a price on human life?  Well,  he who refuses to put a price on  life
will kill more people  than he who knows the price.   The former will
decide  to back  a life-saving  activity if  you come  to him  with a
sufficiently harrowing tale, but  if the life-saving activity  has no
glamour, he will find some way of ignoring or minimizing the risk. 


11. Much  of the protest against over-population  is really a protest
against equality of opportunity. 

	For  example,  the  increase   in  size  of  the   university
population of  the United States  which has  led to protests  against
bigness  is  not  much  due  to  the  increase  in population.    The
population has doubled since 1900, but the university  population has
gone up  by a factor  of 10 in  the same period.   When I  planned to
organize a  summer research group on artificial intelligence in 1956,
it was possible to invite  everyone who had done any serious  work in
the field and some who  were only interested.  Now there must be more
than 1000  people working  in  the field.    When the  Chinese  start
producing as many papers per capita in artificial intelligence as the
U.S., it will be time to look for another field. 

12. When architects get prizes, the people suffer. 

	Architects  get prizes  for spectacular  external appearance,
and they lie to their  clients about how much their proposed  designs
will cost compared to a more conventional design.  Besides this, they
often  have pretensions to socially engineer  the lives of the people
who live  in their buildings.   They  are not  competent to do  this,
because they don't  know enought about who will  live in the building
and  how  the  building  will  affect  their  lives,  and  even  more
important, the  architectural variables  rarely have  a really  large
effect. 

13. Works of art should be improved. 

	Before  the rise  of romanticism  and strong  copyright laws,
writers and artists built on  the works of their predecessors.   Now,
the desire to be different from  everything that has been done before
keeps getting stronger so that more and more far out things are being
done merely to be different.  This desire to be different is enhanced
by the propaganda against the idea that one work of art can be better
than another, because if one believes  in a notion of "better",  then
one  has incentive  to  use  the ideas  of  one's predecessors.    In
science,  there  is continual  improvement  in the  treatment  of old
topics, and no-one would teach calculus as it was taught by Newton or
Leibniz.  Perhaps,  the idea of improving works of  art should be put
forth  by offering a large  prize for the  improvement of a Beethoven
symphony or a da Vinci painting.  The donor of the prize would need a
very thick skin. 

14. Down with anti-earthman propaganda! 

	Imagine  a literary  opus to  be modified  by having  all the
characters given Italian names and superficial traits. (or Jewish  or
Negro).  If the work would then  be considered anti-Italian, we shall
say that the work in its original form is anti-Earthman.  The analogy
is superficial, because the motivation is generally different. 

15. The  steam shovel  was not  invented by  the  world's best  ditch
digger.  This  is my excuse for proposing innovations  in fields that
"belong" to other people. 

16.  Prizes are offered for completing  the following sentence in 250
words or less: "White-middle-class-baiting is OK while red-baiting or
Jew-baiting or nigger-baiting is not, because ...". 

	Just  because someone  says "we"  in an  article  deriding an
American middle class custom doesn't mean that the article isn't just
an expression of  irrational prejudice and snobbery.   Much left-wing
and ecological propaganda has this character. 

17. The  best way to solve a moral problem  is to make it a technical
problem. 

	The moral  problem of  chastity has  been  relieved by  birth
control.   The  moral  and political  problem  of assuring  access  to
newspapers for all points of view will be solved by the home terminal
system.  Since most moral  problems relate to the division  of scarce
resources,  elimination of  the scarcity  relieves the  problem.   Of
course, it is not always possible. 

18. Our descendants will be smarter than we are. 

	Some of  the  thoughts  about the  future  imagine  that  our
descendants will have less  technical capacity than we do.   There is
every  reason  to  believe  that  our  descendants  will be  as  much
scientifically, technologically, and  organizationally stronger  than
we are  as we  are compared to  the people of  an hundred  years ago.
They will be as little interested in the policies we have planned for
them as we  are in the  eternal principles of  an hundred years  ago.
From this  point of view, the  only way we can really  hurt them with
our present resources  is to get  involved in a  nuclear war  between
major powers. 

19. The main  source of human  unhappiness is the shortness  of life.
Something really ought to be done about it. 

	Suppose  people lived several hundred  years with full vigor.
In my opinion,  this would make life  substantially happier, i.e.  it
would be  really better and not  just more of  the same.  It  will be
interesting  to see how long the delay  will be between the time when
there  is a  scientific  basis  for applied  research  on  increasing
longevity  and the initiation  of a  program with really  large scale
support.  There is probably already a basis for doing much more  than
we now do.  In my opinion, progress has already become a sufficiently
basic  part of  our culture,  that society  could afford  longer life
without stagnating, i.e.  the hundred and fifty  year olds would  not
try to prevent progress. 

20. Each persons share of Spaceship  Earth is a trillion tons.  Thus,
the  share of each person  is larger than the  total amount of matter
that the whole of mankind has handled in history.  

	Those who use the  metaphor of "Spaceship Earth" in  order to
get people to think small should do their arithmetic. 

21. Space really is (or should be) a frontier. 

	The slogan of space as a frontier has been uttered by various
politicians and other  proponents of  the space program.   The  space
program  should  be  managed so  that  it  will  have  the  following
characteristics of a frontier:

	a.  The costs  should be  reduced to  the point  that private
space expeditions are possible. 

	b. It should be  possible for a  group that doesn't like  the
way things are run on earth, to go off into space and construct their
own society.  There is plenty of room in interplanetary space.