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SOCIAL VIEWS


	A book on technology that advocates its use for human welfare must
be based on views, however fragmentary, as to what constitutes welfare.  In
this chapter, I will state my views.  They are rather definite and are based
on considerable thought, but I cannot give for them the same kind of fairly
conclusive arguments that I can give for my technological views.

	Thus, on technological issues, I hope to be convincing, and if I am
not;, I will try to put it better, or if I have made a mistake, to change
my views.  In most technological issues, it is usually possible to reach an
agreed position with technologically trained and capable people.

	In the case of social views, I am not so hopeful.  I hope that my views
will appeal to others; at least they will tell them where I stand.  If you
disagree, I may only be able to shrug my shoulders.  This is not because social
matters are intrinsically incapable of objective and convincing scientific
treatment.  It is merely that the social science problem is very difficult,
the difficulties are compounded by emotion and commitment to the views of
one's social peers, and so not much progress has been made.  I should further
confess poor acquaintance with the work that has been done.

	I recognize that the statement in the last paragraph that social
science and engineering are possible is controversial.  I have rejected the
alternative of saying nothing about mu social views, because I wish to advance
them in spite of their incompleteness, and also I fear having attributed to
me views that I don't hold.

	Of course, a reader with different social views might still agree with
some of the book's recommendations for reasons of his own.

	1. In the main, I shall identify human welfare with the satisfaction
of human desires.  This has certain problems, because people don't always
desire what "enlightened" people thing they ought to, and this failure to
want the good is often attributed to improper influence.  In my opinion,
improper influence exists, but affects desires only slightly, e.g. they
really want those big cars.  Moreover, happiness does not necessarily come
from getting what one wants.

	Two centuries ago, the authors of the U.S. got around this problem
by proposing a right to the pursuit of happiness rather than a right to
happiness itself.  Two centuries later, this still seems to be the best we
can do.

	A corollary of this, it that we shall consider that societies and
roles that people migrate towards are better than those they migrate away
from.  More precisely, when a person migrates from role A in society B to
role C in society D, we shall assume that he knows what he is doing unless
there is explicit evidence to the contrary.

	2. Both capitalism as practiced in the United States, Western Europe
and Japan, and socialism as practiced in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe,
and China, and neither is likely to collapse for internal reasons.  They will
be changed only when the people of the countries concerned through the political
or revolutionary mechanism decide to change them.  At present, I think that
capitalism works better, but there is no guarantee that this will always be
the case.  I am inclined to the view that some form of socialism will be
found to work better once social science is understood well enough so that
the bugs in present socialist mechanisms can be fixed, but I don't think
this is likely to happen soon.  The evidence that capitalism works better now
is that socialist countries require emigration restrictions, and capitalist
countries do not.

	3. Equality is desirable, but there are two limiting considerations.
First, a society that accepted equality as its primary social goal and
sacrificed other considerations to achieve it, might end up inferior to
one that adopted other goals in that the uniform standard of life of
the equalitarian society might end up at a low percentile of the other
society.  Second, at some point of equalization, some members of the society
might consider it to their advantage to secede and form their own society
without the people they regard as less productive.  Whether people should be
allowed to secede with their property may be questioned, but I regard the
right to secede with the clothes on one's back and one's immediate dependents
as a fundamental human right.  Therefore, a society should not be so equalitarian
as to be unstable with respect to secession.  The most important reason for
developing manned space travel in the near future is to make this right
effectively available.

	4. Many of the developments proposed in this book will first become
available to the more well-off members of the society.  In the main, I regard
this as OK and subject only to slight modification by social policy.  I think
that measures for equalizing society should concentrate on equalizing money
incomes and that people should spend their money as they please.  Free goods
are desirable only when demand is not much affected by price and there is
a substantial saving in not accounting for the item.  Some of the systems
proposed, however, require universality for effectiveness, and achieving
the universality may require a subsidy, and giving the subsidy may be
in the interest of those taxed to give it.  

	If a way of achieving a benefit requires a social decision and uniform
adoption of new practices, I regard this as a blemish.  Such a way of achieving
the benefit is to be regarded as inferior, other things being equal, to one
that requires only the marketing of a product with the benefit given to the
people who buy the product.  The product has the advantage over the system
that each person make his own decision on whether this benefit is worth more
than another.  Of course, many benefits can only be achieved by systems,
but in important areas there are choices.

	5. The reader of the book will note that many of the proposals are
intended to solve problems that are presently regarded as moral.  I am not
against improved ethics in dividing pies, but my talents run more to thinking
of ways of giving everyone all the pie he wants.

	6. The social benefits obtainable from the products and systems advocated
here include increased prosperity, comfort, and safety.  However, the goal that
is closest to my heart is increased individuality - to increase what can be
accomplished by a single individual or a small group.