The Coming of Post-Industrial Society

by Daniel Bell

  But this is to define the future in nineteenth-century terms which, it was hoped, would be realizable in the twentieth or twenty-first century. The overcoming of scarcity, as it was conceived in the nineteenth century, was the problem of meshing machinery and resources, technics and nature, for the production of goods. But the post-industrial society, because it is not a design between man and fabricated nature but a game between persons, brings in scarcities of a kind scarcely envisaged by any social thinker before the present day. It is the new kind of scarcities which poses such vastly different problems for human society.

  THE NEW SCARCITIES

  The difficulty with the nineteenth-century conception of scarcity, which has carried over to the twentieth, is its definition of scarcity in physical terms; it was for this reason that abundance became counterposed to scarcity. But scarcity is not a “zero-sum” term of have or have-not. It is a measure of relative differences of preference at relative costs. In this sense the postulate of scarcity as an analytical concept underlies all of contemporary social science. It states axiomatically that all values (esteem, power, wealth) are scarce relative to desire; that all resources are scarce relative to wants. Economics deals with the allocation of scarce goods, political sociology with the regulation of competition among men for scarce values. To economize is to make the “best” use of limited resources among competing ends: the specification of the best mix of factors of production (at relative costs) with the most productive techniques (highest utilization) within the most efficient scheduling (programming) of the flow of items; the outcome is the largest output at the least cost. For this reason, the axial principle of economics is functional rationality. Political sociology is the study of the rules that regulate competition among men for wealth, power, and esteem. Bur men have to accept these rules as fair and right if this competition is to proceed; men seek just authority. For this reason, the axial principle of political life is legitimacy.

  Central to all this is the postulate that any good has a cost, that there are few, if any, free goods. For this reason, the measure of scarcity is the estimate of relative costs.

  We have had rising pollution because the polluters treat the abundant air and water as a free good; it costs them nothing to discharge their wastes into these places. But with the rising costs of cleaning up these elements, clean air and water are scarcer now than ever before. Relative scarcity is the measure of cheapness and dearness. Abundance does not necessarily mean that goods are more plentiful in physical terms, but that they are cheaper, because they cost less to make, or the yield at fixed costs is higher. (Land was always abundant, but the yields were far less than they are today; it is the greater output at less cost that constitutes abundance.) To achieve one good means offsetting different (though not always measurable) costs in the price of other goods or values. There are no costless remedies. The reduction of unemployment may be at a cost in lowered productivity because of the employment of marginal resources or skills, or there may be a trade-off in the cost of inflation, or there may be a cost in the restriction of individual freedom. In a technical sense, the elimination of scarcity means a situation of zero cost, and this is impossible. In sum, the concept of the abolition of scarcity is an empirical absurdity.

  If we think of scarcity in terms of cost, the post-industrial society-brings with it a whole new set of scarcities for the society. Schematically, these are: the costs of information; the costs of coordination; and the costs of time.

  Information. The post-industrial society is an information society, as industrial society is a goods-producing society. But the centrality of information creates some new, and different, problems for the society to manage. These are:

  1. The sheer amount of information that one has to absorb because of the expansion of the different arenas—economic, political, and social—of men’s attention and involvement. Classical utility theory assumed that the individual, as homo economicus, had complete information about the different goods available to him, estimated the costs, and made his choice to maximize his preferences. But more information is not complete information; if anything, it makes information more and more incomplete. In the political world one must keep up with the changing fortunes of several dozen countries and pay consistent attention to political situations in a half-dozen areas of the world simultaneously. And the cost of gathering relevant information necessarily goes up.127

  2. The information becomes more technical. Today the discussion of international affairs involves a knowledge of balance of payments, of first- and second-strike nuclear capabilities, and the like; to judge economic policy oh unemployment and inflation, one has to understand the intersects of the Phillips curve, the relation of monetary to fiscal policy, and the like. Information thus becomes more arcane, and one must study a subject more intensively than ever before.

  3. There is a greater need for mediation, or journalistic translation: News is no longer reported but interpreted. There is the question of selection from the vast flow of information; there is the question of explaining because of the technical nature of the information. Not only do journalists have to become more specialized but the journals themselves become more differentiated—including the rise of a large number of “mediating” journals (from sophisticated analysis to vulgar simplification) that explain the new theories to intermediate and mass audiences.128 The differentiation of journalism inevitably becomes a rising “cost” to the society.

  4. The sheer limits of the amount of information one can absorb. In an essay I have referred to, George Miller showed that the “magical number 7 ± 2” is the outer limit to the span of control of the “bits” of information an individual can “process” at one time. There is equally an outer limit to the amount of information about events one can absorb (or the fields or interests one can pursue), and with the “exponential” growth of knowledge and the multiplication of fields and interests, the knowledge that any single individual can retain about the variety of events or the span of knowledge inevitably diminishes. More and more we know less and less.129

  Coordination. The post-industrial society, as I have said, is a “game between persons,” but a game between persons requires increasing amounts of coordination, especially when that game is carried on in a visible political arena rather than through the “invisible hand” of the economic marketplace. The costs of coordination can be deduced from this change in the locus of decision-making.

  1. Participation. The expansion of the political arena and the involvement of a greater number of persons simply means that it takes more time, and more cost, to reach a decision and to get anything done. More claimants are involved, interests multiply, caucuses have to meet, demands have to be bargained over, differences have to be mediated—and time and costs mount up as each person or interest wants to have his or its say. Often one hears the statement that individuals or groups feel “powerless” to affect affairs. But there is probably more participation today than ever before in political life, at all levels of government, and that very increase in participation leads to the multiplication of groups that “check” each other, and thus to the sense of impasse. Thus increased participation paradoxically leads, more often than not, to increased frustration.130

  2. Interaction. In the expansion of the world sensorium, we exchange more telephone calls, travel more often, go to more conferences, meet more people. But with what result? Emile Durkheim, who first plotted the consequences of more interaction among persons, thought this would lead to a greater “moral density” in society, that individuals would become more free and independent and that “a greater development of psychic life comes from his greater sociability.” 131 But at what cost? Either one accepts the fleeting nature of such encounters, or one encounters an “upper bound” which limits the degree of personal interaction. As Martin Shubik has observed:

  In spite of growth in communications, has there been any considerable change in the number of individuals that a person can get to know well? Sinc
e spatial distribution has changed, the individual may select his friends from a larger set. Yet regardless of the growth of modern science and the speeds of transportation, an evening with a friend, except for the transportation factor, will still call for the same amount of time to be expended in the twenty-first century as in the nineteenth. ...

  Taking a few crude calculations we observe that if half a day a year is needed to maintain contact with a relatively good friend, then there is an upper bound of seven hundred people with whom we could have much personal interaction. How many cases can the judge handle? How many patients can the psychiatrist treat? Is personal interaction becoming a luxury that the modern mass society cannot afford, or are there new social forms and institutions that will foster and preserve it?132

  On this basis—720 persons, each with a span of seven—5,040 citizens would be the optimum size for the city-state of phila-delphia. What happens, of course, is that the number of contacts and interactions often increases at the expense of one’s relatively good friendships. Increasingly, one goes through “cycles” of friendship while at a particular job or place, and then these end or become attenuated as one moves on to a different job or place. Thus, the increase of mobility, spatial and social, itself has its costs in the multiplication of interactions and networks that one has experienced.

  3. Transaction. In our definition of freedom, we attach a high value to easy mobility and freedom from schedules. We seek to have rapid and easy access from our homes to any other point along the radius of the roads. Living further apart, we need to ship more goods—and to ship ourselves—across larger distances. As a result, we incur an increasing amount of what one might call transaction costs, especially in the form of goods and space devoted to communication and transportation.133 Two cars per family no longer represent an increase in the standard of living. These are part of the rising transaction costs of the newer affluent life-styles—and they give rise to larger social costs in the congestion on the roads, the need for more parking space, air pollution, and the like. The costs of freedom and mobility in the end become quite high and must be regulated, or the life-style becomes self-defeating.

  4. Planning. Inevitably a complex society, like the large, complex organizations within it, becomes a planning society. The large corporations engage in five-year and even longer-range planning in order to identify new products, estimate capital needs, replace obsolescent plants, train labor, and so on. Necessarily, government begins to plan—in dealing with such questions as renewal of cities, building of housing, planning of medical care, etc. The costs of planning, involving as they do research and consultation, inevitably become more expensive as more and more factors—and claimants—enter into the planning process. In the building of government-sponsored housing, for example (and almost all housing for low-income families in America today is government housing), the processes of planning— site selection, consultation, government approval—are so expensive that the overhead cost of starting a small housing project is almost as great as building a large one, which is why the government tends to foster massive housing projects rather than small scatter-site projects. The paradox is that the economies of scale become the diseconomies of space.

  5. Regulation. The more income and the greater the abundance in a society, the greater becomes the need for regulation, and for an increase in the costs of regulation. It may well be, as Herman Kahn has predicted, that private income in the year 2000 will be $10,000 a person, as against $3,550 in 1965, but that person will not be three times better off, just as a person today, whose income is twice as high as it was twenty years ago, is not twice as well off as then. As incomes rise there is a greater demand for goods or amenities which are by their nature limited: access to parks, to beaches, to vacation homes, to travel. Forty years ago, the French Riviera was relatively un-crowded; today almost every French worker gets a month’s vacation—usually in August—and the coastline is a jagged silhouette of high-rise hotels and apartment houses; the interstices are filled in with campsites. Unless vacations are staggered, or access to the area regulated, the amenities diminish. Yet this involves more planning, scheduling, and regulation.

  Thomas Schelling has outlined a variety of interesting cases in which each individual may be acting completely rationally, but the result, without coordination, is irrational collective decisions. Because it is rational for each of us to work from nine to five, free choice leads to everyone working in those hours, though everyone is worse off than they would be if the hours of work were staggered. The example illustrates the universal dilemma of individual decision and collective interest. As Schelling writes: “’Human nature’ is easily blamed; but accepting that most people are more concerned with their own affairs than with the affairs of others ... we may find human nature less pertinent than social organization. These problems often do have solutions. The solutions depend on some kind of social organization, whether that organization is contrived or spontaneous, permanent or ad hoc, voluntary or disciplined.”134

  The moral is clear: Without appropriate organization, the results are apt to be unsatisfactory. But organization, too, has its costs, not only in time, personnel, and money, but in the degree of coercion required. As Mancur Olson, in his pathbreaking book The Logic of Collective Action, pointed out several years ago, the nature of collective goods or benefits is such that they apply to all in the group, and it is impossible to exclude any member of the group from the benefits. But for this very reason, there is often an incentive for each individual not to make a payment of his own accord since he will receive the benefit once it is extended. This is why, for example, trade unions seek to impose a closed shop or obligatory union membership on all workers in a plant in order to bar a “free ride” for those who do not pay the union dues. For a collective action to be fair, everyone must be required to join the agreement.

  Again, greater abundance and more time for leisure create wider choice and more individual options, but also, and paradoxically, the greater need for collective regulation. If all people are to coexist in the world, there is a greater need for a social contract, but for that contract to work it must also be enforceable—which is also a greater cost.135

  Time. Benjamin Franklin, that practical Yankee, used to say that “time is money,” a remark that Max Weber regarded as the heart of the Protestant ethic of calculation. We usually think of time as a cost when applied to production. When a machine is idle—or “downtime”—costs mount up; an efficient manager seeks to get full use of the time of the machine. But the fact is, as Staffan Linder has pointed out in an intriguing work, consumption also requires time. In the modern economy, which is one of growing abundance, time paradoxically becomes the scarcest element of all.136 Unlike other economic resources, time cannot be accumulated. As Linder puts it: “We cannot build up a stock of time as we build up a stock of capital.” In economic terms, there is a limited “supply” of time. And like any limited supply, it has a cost.

  The poorest societies are those with most time on their hands. Productivity is so low that even a considerable amount of time on work yields little marginal increment. In such societies there is little need for punctuality or the measuring of time. There is always mafiana. In societies where productivity is high, the allocation of time becomes a pressing economic problem, and efficient rationing is necessary to get the best use of time. The principle, thus, is simple: When productivity is low, time is relatively cheap; when productivity is high, time becomes relatively expensive. In short, economic growth entails a general increase in the scarcity of time.

  In industrial society, the relation of time and work is analyzed in minutest detail. As I wrote many years ago in my essay “Work and Its Discontents,” scientific management goes far beyond the old rough computations of the division of labor, and instead divides time itself. Working time, highly fractionated (in many industrial plants workers are paid, after an initial call-in guarantee, on the basis of tenths of an hour worked), is subject to measureme
nt and allocation. Time, outside of work, is “free time” for play or leisure. But in the post-industrial society that “free time” also becomes subject to measurement and allocation, and the “yield on time” in those activities is brought into parity with the yield on working time.

  There are three areas in which this calculus begins to take hold:

  1. Services. Most of the consumption durables we buy—TV sets, autos, houses—have costs in the form of time required for maintenance. An individual can either take these costs out of his own time (e.g. paint the house himself) or engage a service man to do the work. When only a small proportion of people own many goods it is easy to farm out the maintenance cost. But as productivity rises and the high yield on time spreads throughout the whole society, the price of maintenance services rises too. Thus, as Max Ways points out, the consumer finds he needs more income to buy the maintenance time required for his consumer goods.

  2. Consumption. The pleasures of consumption take time: the time to read a book, to talk to a friend, to drink a cup of coffee, to travel abroad. In “backward countries” with fewer goods to enjoy, there is more time. But when a man has a sailing boat, a sports car, or a series of concert tickets he finds that his “free time” is his scarcest resource. If he wants to go to the concert, he may have to rush through his dinner, and since good cooking takes time he may buy frozen dinners which can be cooked quickly (microwave ovens halve cooking time). If he goes to a concert, and takes his dinner afterwards, he may have to stay up too late and thus lose sleep in order to get to work “on time.’ If he could cut down the “on time” requirements, he would have more time; but then he would have to be quite wealthy or retired. So he must ration and allocate his time.