American Experiment (384 page)

Others raised the same question about technology that Morgenthau had about science: servant or master? Granted that machines could not master anything except at the command of the human beings running them, whose interests did the new technology serve? Presumably the owners and managers of the technology. Possibly the great mass of technical people operating the machines, who tended, David F. Noble wrote, to “internalize and even consciously adopt the outlook of their patrons, an outlook translated into professional habit through such mechanisms as education, funding, reward-structures, and peer pressure.” Labor? Some argued that the skilled monitoring and constant adjustments required by the new cybernetic systems were making factory jobs more interesting and remunerative for skilled labor; others noted that, for the mass of workers, making or running information systems would continue to be boring and alienating. Women? Their relationship to technology had differed sharply from men’s all along, in Ruth S. Cowan’s view—as evidenced even in the writing of the history of technology.

“Women menstruate, parturate, and lactate; men do not,” Cowan wrote. Technologies relating to these processes had long been developed: pessaries, sanitary napkins, tampons, intrauterine devices, childbirth anesthesia, artificial nipples, bottle sterilizers, pasteurized and condensed milks. Where, Cowan asked, were the histories of these female technologies? They had yet to be written. Even more, she wrote, women had been culturally discouraged from playing a major role in general technological change. They had experienced technology and science as consumers, not producers. Hence it was not surprising that an upsurge of “antitechnology” attitudes among women during the 1970s was correlated closely with the upsurge in women’s political consciousness, or that women might carry an unspoken hostility to science and technology into the political arena.

Technology as a whole had long been deeply enmeshed with politics and government, though often in complex, mysterious, and unseen ways. The
design of bridges—as against the awarding of contracts for the building of bridges—would have seemed a virtually nonpolitical act, at least until the days of Robert Moses, the builder of New York highways, parks, and bridges. Moses, his biographer Robert Caro reported, built the bridges over Long Island parkways with very low clearances in order to discourage buses that would allow hordes of New York’s poor—especially blacks—to invade his beloved Jones Beach. The clearances admitted middle-class people with private cars. This politically shrewd, if morally reprehensible, decision was taken without undue publicity and fuss. Many of Moses’s “monumental structures of concrete and steel embody a systematic social inequality,” according to Langdon Winner, “a way of engineering relationships among people that, after a time, become just another part of the landscape.”

By the late 1980s the information revolution was still shrouding the play of technological politics. With their emphasis on interaction, the processes of linkage, feedback, equilibrium, cybernetics, and information systems put a premium on harmony and stability, whereas politics thrived on conflict. The massive information and other technological systems fit their operators into the internal consensus and equilibrium of the systems, thus presenting unified ranks to the often hostile outside world. But internal conflicts broke out—between employers and employees, among doctors and administrators and nurses, railroads and bus companies and air carriers, army, marine, and naval officers. And the systems were not wholly benign; some posed threats to the whole society, as in the case of arms building, environmental pollution, traffic in illegal drugs, nuclear power plants.

These conflicts and threats were catapulted into the political process, as technologists transformed themselves into pressure groups competing with rival interests. Compromises were arranged, regulations imposed or withdrawn or changed, judgments made and unmade by government. Scientists manifested a growing concern as to whether the American political process could resolve not only routine, day-to-day interest-group conflicts but the far more complex task of helping science and technology fortify, rather than threaten, core American values. If, as an MIT professor of electrical engineering feared, the American culture had “a weak value system,” would it therefore be “disastrously vulnerable to technology”? If, as other scientists contended, they needed a wide measure of freedom in the early development of technologies, at what point should government step in to constrain their freedom to extend technology into such dangerous areas as genetic experimentation? If, as an MIT political scientist observed, whatever claims might be made for liberty, justice, or equality
could be quickly neutralized by the answer, “ ‘Fine, but that’s no way to run a railroad’ (or steel mill, or airline, or communications system, and so on),” did such counterclaims of practical necessity eclipse the need for “moral and political reasoning”?

Faced with such bewildering intellectual and moral dilemmas, scientists, like other Americans, turned to education as the chief hope—perhaps the only one. The launching of Sputnik by the Soviet Union in 1957 had shocked Americans out of their complacent assumption of being in the scientific lead. High schools across the country intensified their science and language teaching. The National Science Foundation’s budget for curriculum development jumped from half a million dollars in 1957 to ten times that two years later. Programs were expanded in “STS”—science, technology, and society—with emphasis on ideas, technology, and social institutions and on ethical values in science. Federally funded teaching materials were widely distributed as alternatives to commercial textbooks.

But these were “quickie” programs and twenty-five years later assessments of the state of science education and literacy were still bleak. “By even the most elementary standards, instruction in the sciences in most schools for most Americans is minimal,” Stephen Graubard wrote. “Science is avoided—evaded—by the preponderant number of American schoolchildren. That evasion is permitted to continue in the universities.” Commercially produced texts still dominated the high school classrooms. An NSF report revealed that the number of American students enrolled for graduate study in chemistry, physics, and mathematics had remained almost stationary between 1979 and 1985, while the number of foreign nationals in these programs rose by half or more.

More and more people were using modern technology, observed the chancellor of the State University of New York, while understanding it less. “Instead, we are content to be served by cadres of technicians and specialists and, thereby, to cede to them an inordinate, even ominous amount of control over our lives.” He wondered whether the great mass of people, including many college graduates, were in danger of becoming what had been called “techno-peasants”—“modern-day serfs, nominally free but disenfranchised by ignorance—and fear—of prevailing technologies.”

The great mass of Americans were in far greater danger of becoming “econo-peasants.” Popular ignorance of economics surpassed that of science and technology. During the years when millions of Americans were becoming intimately familiar with their individual microeconomics—maintaining checking accounts, applying for mortgages, playing the market, itemizing tax returns, using desk calculators, buying foreign currency, monitoring their payroll deductions, taking out credit cards—their
understanding of the macroeconomics that dominated their collective economy remained low. Even more paradoxical was the disarray in the economic theory and practice of the nation’s intellectual and political leadership in the face of the refractory problems of the post-Vietnam years.

Camp David, Friday, August 13, 1971.
The limousines pulled in during the afternoon, disgorging presidential advisers. Although this summit meeting on top of the low Catoctin Mountain had been announced as a conference on defense spending, only civilians were present. Whisked away to their quarters, where they were offered food, drink, and a variety of recreations, they found themselves totally cut off from communication with the world below. The President wanted no leaks as he prepared to announce what he would describe as the “most comprehensive new economic policy” since Roosevelt’s New Deal.

A participant remembered the weekend more for its atmosphere than for its decision-making. The mountaintop retreat seemed to isolate the group from the realities of economic life. “They acquired the attitudes of a group of script-writers preparing a TV special to be broadcast on Sunday evening,” economic adviser Herbert Stein recalled. “The announcement—the performance—was everything.” It was not viewed, he noted wryly, as part of the regular process of government. After the TV special, regular programming would be resumed. The President and Haldeman concentrated on the mechanics of the television speech. At first Nixon balked at speaking Sunday night because he feared preempting
Bonanza,
an immensely popular program, but he was advised that he had to speak before the markets opened Monday. Manfully he bumped
Bonanza.

Nixon had inherited a booming but dangerously heated-up economy when he entered the White House two and a half years before. John Kennedy had proposed a tax cut, only to see it languish on Capitol Hill. Johnson drove it through Congress hardly three months after he took office. The biggest tax cut in American history, adopted even though the budget was running heavily into red ink, this reduction in both personal and corporate income-tax rates, along with the rising outlay for both welfare and war, helped fuel a huge expansion in both employment and the gross national product by the mid-sixties. Soon the economy showed signs of overheating, but LBJ, reluctant to change a winning game and eager to push his urban welfare programs in the face of rioting in Watts and elsewhere, fended off his economic advisers’ urgings that he now ask for a tax increase. Finally, in 1967, as inflation threatened, Johnson during
the height of the Vietnam effort urged a tax boost on Congress. In a classic example of institutional friction and delay, Congress failed to enact the revenue increase for another year and a half. That came too late to cool the broiling economy.

It came too late for the new President as well. Inflation was running at about 5 percent a year when Nixon took office. In accord with sound Republican doctrine, the new Administration must throttle down the social spending and the budget deficits for which they had castigated Humphrey and his fellow Democrats in the 1968 election campaign. But Nixon was wary. He still felt the scars of his defeat by Kennedy in 1960, when he had been beaten in part by the Eisenhower recession, or so he believed. Herbert Stein had encountered Nixon’s ambivalence when he first met the President-elect on the day his appointment as economic adviser was announced. When his new boss asked Stein what he thought would be the nation’s main economic problem, Stein answered with the conventional wisdom: inflation. To his surprise Nixon showed equal concern about unemployment.

For over two years Nixon, teetering between his two fears, tried to fine-tune the economy with a mix of monetary and budgetary policies, along with exhortation from the White House. It was hard going every inch of the way. Fine-tuning would have been difficult even for a united government. The President had to share economic policy-making with the very independent Federal Reserve Board under its imperious chairman and with the Democratic-controlled Congress. By spring 1970 both prices and unemployment were rising sharply—a remarkable combination. The federal deficit was soaring, interest rates climbed, and then the stock market took its steepest plunge since depression days. In June 1970 came the collapse of the Penn Central Railroad, called by Leonard Silk the greatest business failure in history. For some Americans that failure sounded the tocsin for the slow death of passenger railroading, one of the ineradicable and glorious memories of countless older Americans.

By 1971the nation was beset by economic storms from abroad as well. The great edifice of Western monetary cooperation, founded during Lend-Lease days, dedicated at Bretton Woods, expanded during the era of the Marshall Plan, and buttressed by hundreds of international postwar agreements, appeared in peril. For years that edifice had stood on the firm base of the dependable, all-powerful dollar, which in turn had been stabilized by a fixed gold price. American financial dominance had been under growing threat for years as the nation spent billions abroad for foreign goods and military operations, until the mountain of foreign-held dollars had become far larger than the value of the United States gold stock. What if
foreign treasury ministers began to line up at the Washington “gold window” of the financial edifice and tried to draw out more of the bullion than was now available? Britain’s request, in early August 1971, for $3 billion in gold was merely the triggering device for powerful economic forces that had been building up for years, including a strong German mark and rising Japanese competition.

Now Nixon had to act, but he faced a painful dilemma. The American economy had become linked firmly with the Western and Japanese economies. He would have to move on both the domestic and the global front, in particular because ending convertibility of paper into gold and allowing the dollar to depreciate would stimulate price rises at home as the dollar price of imports mounted. Hence it would be necessary to establish mandatory price and wage controls. But if there was any man who had, year in and year out, vociferously denounced controls, it was Richard Nixon. His aversion was based in part on conventional Republican doctrine but even more on his brief working experience with price controls in the Office of Price Administration during World War II. This proved, said some, that a little experience was a dangerous thing.

But on the evening of August 15, 1971, at the culmination of the secret Camp David meeting, the President bit both bullets—indeed, several bullets. He imposed a ninety-day freeze on prices, wages, and rents, suspended the convertibility of dollars into gold, and placed a 10 percent surcharge on imports. He asked Congress to repeal the 7 percent excise tax on cars, to speed up personal income-tax exemptions, to put off welfare reform for a year, to postpone revenue-sharing programs with the states for three months, to pass a 10 percent “job development credit”—a tax credit to business for investment in new plants and equipment—that would drop to 5 percent after one year.