COMMENT ⊗   VALID 00002 PAGES
C REC  PAGE   DESCRIPTION
C00001 00001
C00002 00002	SHORT REMARKS IN SUPPORT OF SLOGANS
C00026 ENDMK
C⊗;
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.