by Daniel Bell
TABLE 3-25
Scientists and Engineers Employed in Research and Development,
By Sector, 1954, 1958, 1961, and 1965
SOURCE: National Science Foundation.
a Numbers of civilian and uniformed military personnel; uniformed scientists and engineers (Department of Defense) were estimated at 7,000 in 1954, 8,400 in 1958, 9,200 in 1961, and 12,000 in 1065.
b Estimate.
c Numbers of full-time employees plus the full-time equivalent of part-time employees. Includes professional R&D personnel employed at federal contract research centers administered by organizations in the sector.
TABLE 3-26
Federal Obligations for Total Research by
Field of Science (Millions of dollars)
SOURCE: National Science Foundation.
NOTE: Detail may not add to totals because of rounding.
If one examines the distribution between fields, it is seen that of the federal research total of $5.6 billion in 1967, approximately 68 percent, or $3.8 billion, went to the support of the physical sciences; 25 percent, or $1.4 billion, to the support of the life sciences; and 7 percent, or $0.4 billion, to support of the psychological, social, and other sciences (Table 3-26).
In the 1955-1965 decade, there were large increases in money outlays for research. The greatest absolute growth was in the physical sciences, followed by that of the life sciences. However, the social and psychological sciences, starting from smaller bases, showed faster relative gains. From 1956 to 1967 their combined average annual growth rate was 26 percent. These figures contrast with the other sciences whose average annual growth rates have been 20 percent in the decade. In the next decade it is expected that the major research emphases will be in the atmospheric sciences, marine science and technology, space, biomedical research, and, in the social sciences, in education and urban affairs.
The distribution of applied research funds among the major science fields is not very different from that for basic research. Funds for applied research were largely concentrated in the physical sciences because this was the area of prime interest to the Department of Defense and NASA. Physical sciences accounted for 69 percent of total obligations in 1967, life sciences 23 percent, and the behavioral sciences 8 percent. In basic research, the physical sciences received 65 percent of funds, the life sciences 29 percent and the behavioral sciences 6 percent.
It is in subdisciplines that important differences exist. Within physical sciences, 46 percent of the applied research funds were channeled to the engineering sciences in 1967, as compared to only 10 percent of basic research funds. Within the life sciences, biology accounted for only 2 percent of the applied research effort; in basic research it represents 16 percent. The relative distribution of applied research funds by fields of science and discipline remained stable since 1956: more than 45 percent of the funding has been for engineering disciplines and approximately 20 percent for medicine. In the basic research area, significantly higher growth rates are expected for the behavioral and the life sciences (Table 3-27).
TABLE 3-27
Federal Obligations for Basic Research
by Field of Science, 1969
SOURCE: Federal Funds for R&D and Other Scientific Activities, NSF 70-30, Vol. XIX.
a Less than $500,000.
b Less than 0.5 percent.
Much of the basic research, of course, is done in universities. In 1966, universities and federal contract centers attached to them spent almost $2 billion dollars for research and development. (The universities spent $1.3 billion; the federal contract centers $640 million.) More than half (55 percent) went for basic research, two-fifths (39 percent) for applied research, and only 6 percent for development.
Five agencies—Health, Education, and Welfare, Defense, the National Science Foundation, NASA, and the Atomic Energy Commission—provide almost all the funds to universities and colleges. The single largest sum comes from HEW—more than 40 percent, primarily from the National Institutes of Health—and accounts for most of the medical, life sciences, and behavioral sciences programs.
This, then, is the picture of R & D in its golden years. During the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, R&D increased by an average of 15 to 16 percent a year. Under President Johnson the increases began at a 3 to 4 percent annual increase but during the tenure of President Nixon an actual decline set in. From 1960 to 1967, federal R & D obligations grew steadily, the expansion of the space program being the single largest element in the expansion. The 1967 high point of $16.5 billion marked the end of the long-term growth cycle.
Between 1967 and 1970, the R & D total fell steadily, declining in obligated dollars by 2 percent. When constant dollars are used, to account for the inflation, the average annual decline is actually 7 percent, and research shows a decline instead of an increase. (See Figure 3-5 and Table 3-28.)
TABLE 3-28
Average Annual Growth Rate of R & D
in Percentages, 1960-1972
SOURCE: National Science Foundation, Federal Funds for R& D and Other Scientific Activities, Vol. XX.
a Less than 0.5 percent.
b Not available.
* Based on the GNP implicit price deflator.
FIGURE 3-5
Trends in Federal R&D Obligations
If looked at as a proportion of the federal budget, in 1940 R&D expenditures were less than one percent of total U.S. budget outlays. By 1956 it had risen to almost 5 percent, by 1963 to more than 10 percent, and a peak was reached in 1965 when R&D accounted for 12.6 percent of total budget outlays. Since then, while the dollars figures have been relatively constant, the proportion by 1971 had fallen to an estimated 8 percent. (See Table 3-29.)
But the major point remains. During the large-scale expansion of R & D in the United States, the chief areas of federal funding have been defense, space, and atomic energy. In 1960, these three agencies spent 91 percent of all federal R&D money. By 1970, however, even though the monies for these three agencies had increased, the proportions as a whole had shifted; yet in 1970, the three agencies still accounted for 82 percent of federal R&D monies. Health, which in 1960 spent 4 percent of the total, by 1970 had doubled in percentage terms and accounted for 8 percent of the monies. (See Table 3-30.)
If one looks at product field, in 1969 over 70 percent of industrial R&D spending went into five fields: guided missiles and spacecraft, electrical equipment, aircraft, machinery, and chemicals. In effect, the research and development pattern in the United States was badly skewed. The effects showed up in two ways: from an economic growth and productivity point of view—as a series of NSF studies in February 1971 showed—the United States was under-investing in the civilian sector; in terms of the evident social needs and social concerns, such as housing, pollution, environmental deterioration, and the like, there was almost no R & D effort to deal with these questions. By 1966, Europeans already had 30 percent more scientists and engineers engaged in civilian oriented R & D or industrial and environmental fields than did the United States.
TABLE 3-29
Three Decades of the US. Science and Technology Budget
(Millions of dollars)
SOURCE: National Science Foundation.
TABLE 3-30
Federal Obligations for Research and Development by Federal Agency
(Dollars in Millions)
SOURCE: National Science Foundation: An Analysis of Federal R&D Funding by Budget Function, NSF 71-25.
NOTE: Detail may not add to total because of rounding.
One can make a telling comparison by contrasting housing with defense. In 1968, for example, according to estimates of the National Planning Association, the total private and public outlays for urban facilities, including housing, were greater than the expenditures for national defense, $92 billion as compared with $81 billion. Yet while the Defense Department will have spent between $7 and $8 billion for research and development in 1970 and 1971, the Department of Housing and Urban Development
will have spent a total of $22 million for R & D in 1970, increasing to $35 million in 1971. The projected 1971 spending, as Leonard Lecht of the National Planning Association points out, would amount to one-fourth of one percent of the overall federal expenditures for development.
These two basic changes—the leveling off and even decline of federal R&D, and the small and even hesitant changeovers to areas of health, housing, transportation—pose the clearest challenges. Will the allocative process simply be one of immediate responses to urgent definitions, either of defense or even of social needs, because of the “discovery” of pollution, poverty, urban chaos, and other social ills, or will there be an effort to spell out a coordinated set of policies based on some considerations of national goals defined in long-range terms? Is the present system of “administrative pluralism,” in which the individual agencies hold power, to be maintained or will there be some unified science and educational agencies? Can science and research be funded largely on a project basis, or will there be a consideration of long-run institution building, either as a federal in-house capacity, or in independent institutes and agencies, or in conjunction with the universities themselves? If the research and development effort, in short, has been motivated largely by “external challenge” and the need to expand quickly the science complex of the country to help the defense posture, will there be a similar effort for sustained support of domestic social needs and the long-range interests of science and universities in a post-industrial society?
Conclusion
This chapter has undertaken three tasks: to delineate the fundamental structural trends in the society as they affect knowledge and technology; to analyze some problems in the measurement of knowledge and technology; and to put forth the present and future dimensions of the educated and technical class of the country. These tasks have been large ones, and necessarily many questions have been slighted. Moreover, a number of major questions have been ignored for reasons of space. Yet, in any full discussion of knowledge and technology they would have to be included: the changing organizational contexts of knowledge (e.g. the compatibility of hierarchical and bureaucratic work organization with collegial and associational modes of status); the norms of science (e.g. the compatibility of the idea of the autonomy of science with the call for service to national goals); communication patterns within knowledge structures (e.g. the problems of information retrieval, formal and informal networks of communication, etc.); the revolutionary nature of the new “intellectual technology” (e.g. the role of simulation, systems engineering, and the like linked to the computer).
Much or this chapter has been concerned with facts, data, measurement. David Hume, that skeptical Scotsman, once asked of knowledge: “If we take in our hand any volume of divinity or school metaphysics let us ask: Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity and number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it contains nothing but sophistry and illusion.”
We can observe the skeptic’s caution, yet reserve a realm of knowledge for that which cannot be weighed and measured, the realm of values and choice. The central point about the last third of the twentieth century, call it the post-industrial society, the knowledgeable society, the technetronic age, or the active society, is that it will require more societal guidance, more expertise.96 To some extent, this is an old technocratic dream. But an earlier technocratic visionary like Saint-Simon felt that in such a technocratic society politics would disappear since all problems would be decided by the expert. One would obey the competence of a superior just as one obeys the instructions of a doctor or an orchestra conductor or a ship’s captain.97 It is more likely, however, that the post-industrial society will involve more politics than ever before, for the very reason that choice becomes conscious and the decision-centers more visible.98 The nature of a market society is to disperse responsibility and to have “production” decisions guided by the multiple demands of the scattered consumer. But a decision to allocate money to one scientific project rather than another is made by a political center as against a market decision. Since politics is a compound of interests and values, and these are often diverse, an increased degree of conflict and tension is probably unavoidable in the post-industrial society.
Inasmuch as knowledge and technology have become the central resource of the society, certain political decisions are inescapable. Insofar as the institutions of knowledge lay claim to public resources, some public claim on these institutions is unavoidable.
We are, then, at a number of turning points, and both society and the knowledge community will have to confront a number of crucial decisions about its intertwined future.
The financing of higher education. It is clear that the balance in higher education is shifting from the private school to the public college, but even the private school can no longer continue without substantial public aid; and in both cases the degree of aid requires a centralized federal effort.99 The obvious question, then, is: for whom and how? Is every type of institution, large and small, public and private, religious and secular, undergraduate, graduate, and professional, to be helped regardless of quality? If not, who is to make the decision? And if new schools are to be created, are the decisions to be left largely to the states, with no consideration of regional or national needs? If there is to be public funding, what is to be the public voice?
The evaluation of knowledge. If public resources are employed, in what ways are the results of research to be evaluated as the basis for future expenditures, and by whom? If there is a choice, because of the limitation of resources, between expenditures of manpower and money on space and, say, on particle accelerators (whose total costs may run to more than a billion dollars), how are these decisions to be made?
The conditions of creativity. Is knowledge more and more a product of “social cooperation,” a collaborative effort whose setting is the laboratory and the team, or is it the fruit of the individual cogitator working from his own genius? And if this is too rigid or even false an antinomy, what are the conditions and settings for creativity and productivity?
The transfer of technology. What are the processes whereby discoveries in the laboratory may be transferred more readily into prototypes and production? In part this is an information problem, and it raises the question, for example, of the responsibility of the federal government in establishing a comprehensive technology “infusion” program which goes beyond the mere publication of technological findings to an active encouragement of its use by industry; in part, if one sees this as a piece of the larger problem of spreading the findings of technology to the underdeveloped world, it is a cultural and technical aid program.
The pace of knowledge. If knowledge and new disciplines are diferentiating at a more rapid rate, how can the teaching of these subjects keep up with these developments? Is there not a need to assess the nature of curriculum in terms of “structures of knowledge,” to use Jerome Bruner’s phrase, or “conceptual innovation,” along the lines I have argued before.100
The strains of change. Insofar as this society, like every other, is undergoing multiple revolutions of a diverse yet simultaneous character—the inclusion of disadvantaged groups into the society; the growth of interdependence and the creation of national societies; the increasing substitution of political for market decision-making; the creation of fully urbanized societies and the erosion of an agricultural population; the multiple introductions of technological items, and so on—do we not need more conscious means of “monitoring” social change and the creation of mechanisms for anticipating the future? 101
Let us return to our parable. The tower of Babel was foretold in Genesis at the dawn of human experience. “And the Lord said: ’Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is what they begin to do; and now nothing will be withholden from them, which they purpose to do. Come, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not
understand one another’s speech.’”
Cast out from the Eden of understanding, the human quest has been for a common tongue and a unity of knowledge, for a set of “first principles” which, in the epistemology of learning, would underlie the modes of experience and the categories of reason and so shape a set of invariant truths. The library of Babel mocks this hubris: like endless space, it is all there and is not all there; and, like Gödel’s theorem, knowing that it is a contradiction makes it not a contradiction. In the end, said the poet, is the beginning. This is the curvilinear paradox, and the necessary humility, in the effort to measure knowledge.
