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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 valure 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 not two 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.

	

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.