The Coming of Post-Industrial Society

by Daniel Bell

  105 For Tocqueville’s discussion of this phenomenon, see The Old Regime and the French Revolution (New York, 1955), part III, chaps. 4 and 5, esp. pp. 176-181, 186-187.

  106 Rawls writes: “One is not allowed to justify differences in income or organizational powers on the ground that the disadvantages of those in one position are outweighed by the greater advantages of those in another. Much less can infringements of liberty be counterbalanced in this way” (op.cit., pp. 64-65).

  His argument is puzzling. In any interdependent society one forgoes certain liberties—in traffic and zoning regulations—to enhance others. Nor is it clear why one has to redress inequalities in every sphere rather than allow individuals to choose which sphere represents the most nagging inequality to them.

  As a political principle, it is unlikely that any single rule can dominate a polity without disruption. Aristotle distinguished between two kinds of justice, numerical equality (equality of result) and equality based on merit. As he concluded: “To lay it down that equality shall be exclusively of one kind or another is a bad thing, as is shown by what happens in practice; no constitution lasts long that is constructed on such a basis.” Aristotle’s Politics, trans. T. A. Sinclair (London, 1966), pp. 191–192.

  107 For a discussion of the context of this anti-intellectualism, see Lionel Trilling, Mind in the Modern World, The 1972 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities (New York, 1973).

  108 W. G. Runciman, “‘Social’ Equality,” Philosophical Quarterly, XVII (1967), reprinted in his Sociology In Its Place (London, 1970).

  109The Second Discourse, pp. 174-175. In his economic lottery, Rawls would be forced to rule out the envious man. As Lester Thurow puts it: “Suppose the worst-off man were envious. In this case anything that lowers the income of better-off people faster than it lowers the income of the worst-off man maximizes the minimum prize. If envy were not ruled out, maximizing the minimum prize could lead to zero incomes for everyone.”

  Pareto, in his discussion of utility, argued that when income disparities are reduced, individuals seek to increase the inequalities in status and power (The Mind and Society [New York, 1935], vol. IV, sect. 2128-2145). For a further discussion of this question in relation to scarcity and abundance, see the next section, particularly the argument in footnote 126.

  110 “ ‘Social’ Equality,” p. 211.

  111 This essay has concentrated principally on the United States, but the question of meritocracy and equality is, quite clearly, central to all advanced industrial societies. It is no accident, perhaps, that the fable of the meritocracy was written in England, where the social disparities (reflected in such things as language, accent, and dress) have been most acute, and where equality of opportunity was a revolutionary thrust of the technicians emerging from the middle class. But England, with its strong Labour Party (which has been acutely strained by the dilemma of either favoring a meritocracy, to increase technical progress and growth, or favoring policies that reduce inequality), will in all likelihood move toward increasing redress. In Sweden, Rawls’s philosophy of “fairness” is likely to become the quasi-official philosophy. In the United States, the influence of the meritocracy has been exaggerated. Politics remains the major mode of popular control, and there are few codified systems of esteem to give any meritocracy an elite position in the society.

  The country where the “meritocracy” will be the greatest problem is the Soviet Union. In its initial ideology, all social strata and social groups were declared to be equal in social status. But over the past two decades there has been a systematic effort to reward the elite, both political and scientific; and it is the scientific elite which has the greatest security of tenure. The political and scientific elites live in special sections, have special shops for foods, and even have special hospitals reserved for them. (Under Stalin, there were even specially privileged concentration camps for the scientists, a situation described in Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle) Those elites are now passing on their privileges directly to their children, and one even finds, mirabile dictu, that official ideology keeps pace. Thus, in the authoritative Academy Journal Voprosy Filosofi, no. 2 (1972), two philosophers write that the hereditary tendencies of the Soviet System are a positive feature of the “period of highly developed socialism,” as this aids the general and continuous rise in the welfare of all social groups. The sociological question for the Soviet Union is whether it will have a just or unjust meritocracy, alongside its unjust power. (This citation, as well as detailed data on the transmission of privileges in the Soviet Union, is in the study of Zev Katz, “Patterns of Social Mobility in the USSR” (mimeographed), Center for International Studies, MIT (April 1972).

  112Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Michael Oakeshott (Oxford, n.d.), p. 81.

  113Rousseau, Second Discourse, p. 175.

  114For the discussion of Sartre’s views I have followed George Lichtheim’s “Sartre, Marxism and History,” in The Concept of Ideology (New York, 1067), esp. pp. 301-306.

  115Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (Moscow, n.d.), p. 101.

  116Critique of the Gotha Programme, in Karl Marx, Selected Works, vol. II (Moscow, 1935), pp. 564-566 (emphasis in the original).

  117Selected Works, vol. I, pp. 208, 210.

  118Frederick Engels, Anti-Dühring (Chicago, 1935), p. 295, Marx, always more complicated and subtle than Engels, never went this far. In a parallel passage, in vol. 3 of Capital, Marx stated that the realm of freedom does not simply replace that of necessity—even the most rational organization of the economy can never wholly abolish labor—but retains it as in ineluctable fact to be shaped by men in that realm where “human energy is ... an end in itself.” (Moscow, 1965), pp. 799-800. For a discussion of these differences, see Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx (London, 1971), pp. 134-136.

  Yet there always was a romantic tinge to Marx, as one sees in the vision of Communism of The German Ideology (Moscow, 1964) written in 1845-46:

  ... as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity, but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic (pp. 44-45).

  119John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (1930), in Essays in Persuasion (New York, 1932). Quotations from pp. 359-364; emphasis in the original.

  120Economic Groupings in the Year 2000

  (The number in parenthesis refers to the income level in the text.)

  Visibly Post-Industrial (5) Early post-Industrial (5)

  United States, Japan, Canada, Scandinavia, Switzerland, France, West Germany, Benelux Mass Consumption (4) Spain, Portugal, Poland, Yugoslavia, Cyprus, Greece, Bulgaria, Hungary, Ireland, Argentina, Venezuela, Taiwan, North and South Korea, Hong Kong Malaysia, Singapore United Kingdom, Soviet Union, Italy, Austria, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Israel, Australia and New Zealand Industrial (3) Union of South Africa, Mexico, Uruguay, Chile, Cuba, Colombia, Peru, Panama, Jamaica, North and South Vietnam, Thailand, Philippines, Turkey, Libya, Lebanon, Iraq

  Early Industrialization (2) Pre-Industrial (1)

  Brazil, Pakistan, China, India, Indonesia, Egypt, Nigeria Rest of Africa, Arab World, Asia, Latin America

  The classifications in this section are taken from the first formulations by Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener, in “The Next Thirty-Three Years: A Framework for Speculation,” Toward the Year 2000: Work in Progress, Daedalus (Summer 1967), pp. 716-718. A later formulation, with more el
aborate justification, appears in Kahn and Wiener, The Year 2000 (New York, 1967). A somewhat different set of projections appears in Fremont Felix, World Markets of Tomorrow (London, 1972), which modifies the Kahn-Wiener extrapolations.

  121The initiating individual of the Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution was W. H. Ferry, at the time a vice-president of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at Santa Barbara, a Socratic Academy headed by Robert M. Hutchins. Much of the thinking behind the statement was shaped by Robert Theo-bold, an economist whose books (e.g. The Challenge of Abundance [New York, 1961]; The Guaranteed income [New York, 1966]) had proposed the severance of the link between jobs and income predicted on the technological revolution he saw in the post-scarcity society. Among the signers of the statement were Michael Harrington, Tom Hayden, Gerard Piel, H. Stuart Hughes, Linus Pauling, John William Ward, A. J. Muste, Robert Heilbroner, Irving Howe, Bayard Rustin, Dwight Mac-Donald, and Norman Thomas. The coloration, as is evident, came largely from the socialist circles of the time. Quotations above are from the pamphlet issued by the Committee in April 1964.

  122Keynes, op. cit., pp. 366-368.

  123See Technology and the American Economy (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1966), and Gilbert Burck, “There’ll Be Less Leisure Than You Think,” Fortune (March 1970).

  124D. H. Meadows et al.. The Limits to Growth (New York, 1972). The logic of the model was first laid out by Jay Forrester in his book World Dynamics (Cambridge, Mass., 1971).

  125See Carl Kaysen, “The Computer That Printed Out W*0*L*F,” Foreign Affairs (July 1972).

  For a general examination of the apocalyptic hysteria of the ecology movement, see John Maddox, The Doomsday Syndrome (London, 1972).

  126Yet, the fact that the problem is not primarily economic but sociological, as Keynes insisted, however, makes the resolution of scarcity that much more difficult. If we accept the arguments of thinkers as diverse as Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, and Georg Simmel, the fundamental impulse in human behavior is the desire to be different. And the urge to assert those differences in a visible way—the possibility of large discretionary income, the ability to fashion a standard of living to personal desire—all this leads to the pursuit of scarce and rare items as a means of emphasizing those differences invidiously.

  For Adam Smith, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, men’s primary motives are not economic, since most persons could live on a small amount, but sociological: the desire to be applauded and to be considered superior. Men crave social prestige and social rank, and by this “cunning of social nature,” civilization has been improved by the enterprises men have created to emphasize their distinction.

  For Thorstein Veblen, the impulse toward “conspicuous consumption,” which he describes in The Theory of the Leisure Class, is the expression of the desire for status differentiation which motivates all social behavior. In this quest, individuals seek “status-conferring goods,” and those who seek to share that status emulate their styles. This is the basis of fashion as a fundamental fact in social behavior.

  For Georg Simmel, human beings are impelled to seek what they do not have, as a way of gaining ego-satisfaction, and “the difficulty of attainment ... is thus the element that peculiarly constitutes value. Scarcity constitutes only the outer appearance of this element, only its objectification in the form of quantity.” Georg Simmel, “Exchange,” in Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald Levine (Chicago, 1971), P. 69.

  The dialectic of scarcity and abundance that we find in Marx and Sartre assumes that the economic needs of men are primary, and that social conflict, from individual strife to national wars, arises out of this scarcity. Yet the sociological argument emphasizes status differentiation as the primary motive, and here competition is largely unrestricted. As society expands its production of goods—and more means of differentiation are possible—the status race would be intensified.

  127As Martin Shubik points out:

  Rational economic man in the economists’ model is one who knows what he wants, what his choices are, what his resources are. His value system is assumed to be well defined; his cool, consistent mind quickly and costlessly scans the myriads of alternatives facing him. His flawless discernment enables him to spy subtle differences in quality. He even calculates the value differences between the giant economy size and the regular pack....

  [But] man lives in an environment about which his information is highly incomplete. Not only does he not know how to evaluate many of the alternatives facing him, he is not even aware of a considerable percentage of them. His perceptions are relatively limited; his powers of calculation and accuracy are less than those of a computer in many situations; his searching, data processing, and memory capacities are erratic. As the speed of transmission of stimuli and the volume of new stimuli increase, the limitations of the individual become more marked relative to society as a whole. “Information, Rationality and Free Choice,” Toward the Year 2000, p. 772.

  128One of the “structural” features of journalism in the past two decades has been the rise of such mediating journals—Scientific American, The Listener, Psychology Today, New Society, The Public Interest, Transaction/Society—and the decline and even demise of “general” magazines such as Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, Look, and Life. Increasingly Time and Newsweek devote sections to “Behavior,” the “Environment,” and the like, and such high-class literary magazines as the Times Literary Supplement and the New York Review of Books carry extensive hautes vulgarisations of the new work in linguistics, structural anthropology, and so on.

  129On Miller’s formulation, see “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or .Minus Two—Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information,” Psychological Review, vol. 63, no. 2 (1956), reprinted in his book The Psychology of Communication (New York, 1967).

  On the multiplication of cultural fields, and their consequences for knowledge, see my essay, “Modernity and Mass Society: On the Varieties of Cultural Experience,” in Studies in Public Communication, no. 4 (Autumn 1962), reprinted, in part, in Arthur M. Schlesinger and Morton White (eds.), Paths of American Thought (Boston, 1963).

  130For an acute case study of the consequences of this state of affairs, see Daniel P. Moynihan, The Politics of a Guaranteed Income (New York, 1973).

  131The Division of Labor (New York, 1933), p. 347.

  132Shubik, op. cit., p. 773.

  133I am indebted for this term to Paul Hohenberg, from his talk on “Space, Economic Activity and Environment,” before the Columbia University seminar on Technology and Social Change, March 9, 1972.

  134Thomas C. Schelling, “On the Ecology of Micromotives,” The Public Interest, no. 25 (Fall 1971), p. 67.

  Schelling also cites the homely example of an accident on the southbound lane of a major highway. Some drivers on the northbound lane slow down for a look, backing up all the traffic behind them. If there were a by-pass, most of the drivers might speed by, but lacking one, they are forced to wait for those ahead of them.

  Everybody pays his ten minutes and gets his look. But he pays ten seconds for his own look and nine minutes, fifty seconds for the curiosity of the drivers ahead of him.

  It is a bad bargain. More correctly, it is a bad result because there is no bargain. As a collective body, the drivers might overwhelmingly vote to maintain speed, each foregoing a ten second look and each saving himself ten minutes on the freeway. Unorganized, they are at the mercy of a decentralized accounting system according to which no gawking driver suffers the losses that he imposes on the people behind him (ibid. pp. 65-66).

  135See Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge, Mass., 1965). For a discussion of this problem in the post-industrial society, see Francois Bourricaud, “Post-Industrial Society and the Paradoxes of Welfare,” Survey 16, no. I (London, Winter 1971).

  The problem of “collective action” applies particularly to the willingness of people to vote for “public goods,” i.e. government mea
sures which apply to all. For an important discussion of this problem, see Anthony Downs, “Why the Government Budget is Too Small in a Democracy,” World Politics (July 1960), and R. Joseph Monsen and Anthony Downs, “Public Goods and Private Status,” The Public Interest, no. 23 (Spring 1971).

  136See Staffan Burenstam Linder, The Harried Leisure Class (New York, 1970). The theory of the scarcity of time was first given rigorous analytical treatment by Gary Becker, in “A Theory of the Allocation of Time,” Economic Journal (September 1965).

  For a useful exposition of these ideas, see Max Ways, “Why Time Gets Scarcer,” Fortune (January 1970). Albert Hirschman, in his imaginatively titled Exit, Voice and Loyalty, has pointed out that when individuals confront overwhelming situations they can respond by leaving, speaking up for change, or remaining quiet. But each option has a calculus, and when the costs of one mount up it becomes a costly strategy. When too many people participate, others simply quit. As Hirschman puts it more formally: “As voice tends to be costly in comparison to exit, the consumer will become less able to afford voice as the number of goods and services over which he spreads his purchases increases—the cost of devoting even a modicum of time to correcting the faults of any one of the entities he is involved with is likely to exceed his estimate of the expected benefits for a large number of them.” Exit, Voice and Loyalty (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), p. 40.

  137Nicholas Georgesco-Roegen has devised a very different kind of theoretical argument against the idea that scarcity can ever be eliminated. This argument, generalized as the Entropy Law, states that energy is not revesible: If the energy of a piece of coal or of uranium could be used over and again, scarcity would then hardly exist. Even the re-use of scrap materials involves “a greater amount of low entropy than the difference between the entropy of the finished product” and that of the scrap. As Georgescu-Roegen points out, this illustrates the thesis that “thermodynamics is a blend of physics and economics.” Professor Georgescu-Roegen’s examples are in the context of an argument against the “equilibrium models” of economics, based on classical mechanics; he seeks to establish, analytically, an evolutionary model based on irrevocable qualitative change. And the “running down” process of energy—the idea of entropy—becomes an argument, too, against the idea that scarcity can be eliminated. See The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), chap. 10, esp. 277-282.