Public Affairs; Paul Ylvisakar

Four more years and I don't want to scatter remembered for all the soccer and I have. Been one way or the other in association in academic and public affairs better than any man I know. He represents what Dick NuStar call the inner now order of government. The person able to move from intellectual life intellectual contribution to practical affective street level action in bringing about successful conclusions of common concerns. A native of Minnesota graduate from Swarthmore and Harvard Paul Alva soccer first undertook to blend in

thought and action in that extraordinary run of sons of Philadelphia urban government in the 1950s and the mayors Clark and Del worth. When Philadelphia began to complete this year the turnabout of a great American city and a demonstration of its continuing vitality. From there to services on campus. From there to advice to two presidents in the direction of their urban affairs the author of books that and publications that range from explaining how a county in a soldier deals with the federal government to counseling the federal government and the national strategy of dealing with its presumed and continuing problem of racism

Misael the Sachar has left his mark. Shown. His contribution in every role that he has played. Perhaps the most effective role that he played at the most critical time in terms of urban affairs was an Aug. 19 67. In the beginning in the continuation of the New York disorders which started a month that was to become the domestic Pearl Harbor of this nation. At that time director of the state agency for community services the first genuine Urban Affairs Department in state government. Paw labored as mediator. As a strategist as tactician but most of all as

friend of a beleaguered city and of a deeply troubled people. I grew to know and mark him in that capacity probably better in a few weeks than I'd ever known him in the years that preceded and from there we were able to begin together a reconstruction of at least part of that city and part. OF IT development appropriately to this conference and peculiarly it dealt with technology it dealt with medicine it dealt with a capacity of blending academic and urban life together in a way for the benefit of the people. And this and this day so that in the saga. Of the New Jersey Medical College in the effective completion of that project

Dr. Hale The Sachar wrote a major state contribution paralleling is local and his federal it is with great pleasure that I introduced as a keynote speaker of this conference the Honorable Paul L. The Sachar of New Jersey. Thank you. Yeah thank you. Bob in his usually gracious way did not tell the truth entirely. He said that I was one of those who was capable of moving and recently I had moved out. Actually the truth be told I was moved out as politics go you know new governors come in and I didn't survive the transition. But I don't think a man in public life has really made it until he's been kicked out of office. I'd like to say going in a couple of things in an inductor a

fashion one is I think we all now as members of the human race realize that we have come to the sheer precipice in which we feel the exultation of what we have where we have climbed and looking out over the abyss of our ignorance. Recognize how close we are. To perhaps an end I suppose human beings before have felt that nature might shrug and human being the human species might terminate its existence. But certainly we are faced right now with a very chasm of our ignorance that has been built for us by the precipice of our accomplishments. And that brings one philosophically into that mood I think of the Hebrews in telling the story of the tower of Abel which was build up until God and until God really said sorry no farther. I suppose the moral of that story is that man does instinctively compulsively

build and elaborate and hopefully to improve and to rise but he builds of extraordinarily complex edifice which becomes complex in geometric proportions as he proceeds. And interestingly enough the end of that fable is that God demolished the structure and that man was put back into the division of tongues which one can say is chaos and yet one I suppose really ought to say is return to simplicity to manageable proportions of life or pieces of life that could be contained by yes different languages but each man with his own language could comprehend that sector. And that leads you to the example to the legend in the fable in the Greek tradition says of us who as you know is compelled by fate and the gods to keep pushing that rock up the hill till it reaches such a weight. At a certain point it rolled back upon him and he had to start all over again. It's interesting too that the Hebrews who attributed man's fateful

destiny to his the evil in him or to his failings. The Greeks attributed those fateful destinies to man's virtues and I suppose we go puzzling on in our time wondering whether indeed it is our weaknesses that are killing us. Or it's our virtues that are putting us in this kind of position and when we are uncertain about whether it is our strengths or our weaknesses our virtues or our vices it puts us in a very confused moral position. It puts us in one of those swimming seas of uncertainty into which I suppose man naturally must fall if he lives out his life and his generation. I find this basically an exhilarating experience as I suppose the man who falls off a precipice does. It doesn't hurt you know land. But I do find it exhilarating for reasons I'm going to mention. However it is OUR

want as speakers as academic scholars and activists always to talk about challenges as though they were problems and more than once I have given talks which I thought were basically optimistic only to be met with people afterwards who said you really are gloomy guys. I don't intend this to be gloomy at all but I will talk through the perception of our times about the perceptions of our times through what I suppose our problems but which I'll wind up by saying in the usual perhaps hackneyed way present the challenges and the opportunities. I am basically an optimist not so much any longer on the pretensions which I brought to life. As either out of Lutheran theology Scandinavian heartiness or Harvard Ph.D.. I'm not sure life is going to survive a man is going to survive any more on my premises. But when Bob referred to the days when we lived in the dark depths of American despair in the 1967

I think he so aptly put it the American Pearl Harbor the domestic Pearl Harbor. I had a deep deep sense of pessimism that we were shortly to see in the United States the final total solution. Nazi Germany had come to to liquidate its problem. I was wrong I was wrong for a lot of reasons all of which have given me the silent sense of continued buoyancy that the survival line in the survival logic of man is extraordinarily powerful and often what sometimes we perceive early as that survival line and trace it out at it out in our own. When our own dimensions maybe the actuality doesn't follow that precisely and we could go crazy I think and get nervous breakdowns and Elsa's if indeed we watch the survival line of the general public moving slightly off center of the map that we have drawn. But there's been a lot of ways in which the human beings

survive these last two most critical years in the United States ways which as I say keep me with a genuine sense of buoyancy and optimism. But I'd like to trace out in front of you now where I see some of our problems in the next 10 years in terms which are relevant to the topics of this conference. Let me indicate kind of generally where I'd like to go when is I do think that we are going to see more and more the divorcing of science and technology for the simple reason that technology has been so associated with hardware in this country. And when the Western tradition and the science will be have to be extracted and abstracted from that perception of hardware. I'm not saying that there aren't technological fixes that often take us out of moral and philosophical dilemmas. I can mention a few of the very some

of them a very obvious one we worked out with the Harvard group in management. We were having trouble with our bureaucrats taking weeks and trying to figure out the parameters and the mixes of subsidized housing and by actually simple telephone computer arrangements worked out without really much fanfare and without much advanced science of backing to it. The state of New Jersey now can almost instantaneously make decisions about the feasibility of projects and to clear up some of the usual criticisms of bureaucracy. You can save two years in legislative processes for example a legislative subcommittee. No reason now why instead of telling its bureaucrats to come back next year and their procreation with working out these details can't to sit down at the at the computer with you and get these returns as I say almost instantaneously. Another technological fix which I admire came the other day I was talking to

a person in New York. Two people actually. One of them is in control of the aerosol techniques of the bomb. And the question came up about all those slovenly dogs in New York and what it's like to go take your morning walk along the East River any place like that. One has to step high and gingerly as you know. Now what do you do about the leavings of the dogs and their metropolitan areas. Well some of us politicians have tried the suicidal route of trying to get rid of dogs. And if you want to take on a tough fight in our time it's the dog licensing or anything like that. Those are much rougher than race or survival or ecology because you're dealing with with owners of dogs. I'd rather deal with the dogs frankly in most cases. So the technological fix was quite simple I think it's now being worked on which is you just have a spray can you know every dog owner is required to have one as he goes out.

And so as a dog you spray it it either becomes hard you can pick it up you know without being gingerly about it or it just disappears altogether. Now this kind of technological fix would solve more politicians problems and you could shake fist it really. And I expect that we're going to see a succession of these technological fixes coming through and ingenious one has been worked out by Jim Rouse the developer of Columbia Maryland who recognizes there is something basic about the instinct of a man to have a house of 50000 next to another man of the house of 50000. But why do you put the houses next to each other and say that kind of a psychological instinct is no reason why you can't put another called a sack right in back of him with other size houses in which the kids then can overcome the prejudices of their parents and play in the same schools in the same swimming pools in the same backyards and so forth. When you back to back physically these instincts and in that juxtaposition you do have a technologic really a technical resolution of a very difficult social problem. I'm optimistic that we're going to have almost a mad and

dizzying succession of these technological fixes of social predicament. But the kind of science I think that we are going to have to abstract from the conception of hardware. Is the scientific process the scientific mind the capacity to be dispassionate or see things large and whole. And it has been interesting for me as a social scientists I think not with just a sense of demeaning the opposition that is those hardware guys of the hard sciences that seem to have gotten the play for so long. It is in a sense of satisfaction to see that the medicine men of hard science now discover after 20 years of running fast and hard and almost free at the same abyss of ignorance faces their precipice of achievement as it does everybody else. And the we don't really know the humility of an Einstein in his latter years the humility of a Ben Franklin is wonderful to watch I think it's a chastening thing it's a very good thing for us all. But there

was something there is something in that hard sciences tradition that can be equally applied in the soft sciences. And I would take the capital S away from both and say that it is a process a process of dispassion of reason of perception that all of us are going to have to acquire in what is constantly decentralizing and diffusing in an individual izing society. We're going to have to put those gyroscopic elements at once religion instilled through the group into the individual those gyroscopes are going to have to be self-built in each of the individuals in our society and those gyroscopes are not simply going to be received behavior but they're going to be the capacity to aggregate facts to assemble these facts in the Linnean tradition also to parse them out classify and then be able to act on large perceptions the society that we have grown through uncontrolled population growth through licking the mouth of the Xeon syndrome at least in the short run this society

cannot be managed anymore by the medieval conceptions that have applied to governmental policy even the liberal New Deal syndromes which have always assumed a bureaucracy somehow following upon good legislation is going to order the society. There is an anarchic element to our society but there's benign anarchy as well as there's malignant anarchy. And I see in the anarchy the kind of individual ization of our society. I see tremendous power and potential in my mind to use an analogy which I'm sure is imperfect. I've seen the urbanization process produce an effect with human beings what it is produced in the atomic energy that atomic pile the nuclear reactor where you bombarded the atom and it released the particles and accelerated the particles found within them with tremendous energy potential and release. What we have done in our society is to put the groups through that atom smasher of the city or of the urbanization process and by bombarding the family the

church the labor union the village a small town the feudalistic tradition all those things which gave a person security sometimes have to mean we release the individual. He's now accelerated. He's on the loose. And I suppose continue that analogy the danger is that the energy is dissipated because we've not known how to control that pile as well as we should. But it is a process of release of the individual that we're now contending with. It is chaotic. It is anarchic in many of its respect but there is a survival logic to it because there is no group of human beings that I have known not even myself included running I thought was one of the best state bureaucracies in the country who really can comprehend and master and govern the former principals. We must begin relying on the individual and his own inner directions his own inner sense his own inner capacities to be a scientist as well as any of us sciences that we

will be needing those that scientific process a scientific state of mind the capacity to disassociate to see larger trends. Also is going to have to contend with values. The trouble is I think that we are dealing now with a garbage can full of obsolescent verbiage. I had one hell of a time with this topic because technology science society urbanisation are such unmanageable terms in our times and we can create our own realities by our own conception of what those words really mean. Values What are they. All I know is a part of the perverse nature of human animal sometimes to think differently than you. And by confronting you with his difference to raise the philosophical question of maybe there are two points of view two ways to lifestyles. The value set that I think we're talking about at this conference is a set that has been frozen into our society in the form of our constitutional bodies known as states. We're talking too easily these days. I think really in kind of a shill terms

about extending science and technology into the dark continents of state and local government. It's very much like the missionary complex that sent my Christian forebears to Africa to Hawaii to China which says I got the gospel and I'm going to extend it to you. I can tell you right now that those are dark continents. I worked in one of the darkest of all continents and I'm named New Jersey. It is the state government a process is a dark continent. It is a shame an abomination on the American scene. That is principle an element in the federal system in the Constitutional way in which we do business is in the abysmal state that it really is. There are a few exceptions or a few leaders but that process generically and actually is really a bad process in our times. Why. Because it has not been out of the mainstream for so long and being a middle level government has been able to avoid the urgencies that keep the national government and the local governments at it. A mayor has to

face an irate taxpayer every morning about the garbage collection he can't go off in the 19th century and play farmer. The states have been able to do that. The federal government is caught with insurgencies and even when it wants to retire as it tried to do it in the 1950s. Sooner or later you know we catch the top of the federal government and bring it back down to our earth. But that middle level has been able to escape a lot of these urgencies and compulsions and in instant action has built has really allowed to persist on the American scene 100 and more years after their times. The value sets of an earlier society. Now if you're going to bring science and technology to the States it is no means by no means as superficially simple as to create another federal program with grants and aid in a central office that's going to give states money to do certain things and then to examine every proposal every piece of legislation that comes by and every bureaucrat and say Have you got your newest science today. That is an extraordinarily superficial and

simple approach. It's the old bureaucratic syndrome which is itself obsolescence the old missionary syndrome which is itself obsolescence. First of all be prepared to look at the states as a frozen set of obsolete values with tremendous inertial power running against you. On the other hand I think you ought also to have the perception that a good part of the technology that we want to apply is really a kind of a false or spiri is technology as applied to the value set that I've described. When they meet with spiri a set the two obsolescent sets a complete kind of nothingness occurs. It's what we all go to Sunday school with. We write reports about the need for it but literally you'll not find governors extraordinary excited about it and I don't find scientists running out there very much either. Let me give you the perception I have of where a scientific attitude is going to take a look at the states and what they represent and the institutions which they preside

over. And then the next 10 years we're going to see the battleground of this of the society in the survival of species shifting to the turf that has been up till now occupied by state and local governments. Part of the struggle is going to be legitimately and Neal mystic struggle. There's something in our kids these days which is neolithic and not simply because of the gain of syndrome again of the Father and the son not simply because we have probably raised a generation of kids out of our affluence who don't have a place and who are looking for a place not simply because they've been suffused with a McLuhan kind of culture which early makes them is just about as cynical as an older person if not as sophisticated. Not just because of those things but these kids coming on. Are we going to see I think a few other things that we do have institutions and values that are going to have to be destroyed. There is a system bred actually what they do not see is how

complicated so the system that really is the fact that it's not in the control that nobody really has a complete mastery over it and it's one of its problems. It's a system and largely that's running on inertial guidance and is out of control. But they do see that this system in some respects must be destroyed and I'll give you a very exact answer example right away. We've got to destroy the American Central City. I think there's no question but the American Central City is a complete anachronism and more than that it's a deadly trap. It isn't just because we've seen some mayors weary of it and pull out knowing that you can't get there from here. We're beginning to see black mayors taking on that prize hoping that this is going to give the black man what he has been wishing for is a piece of the action. It does in one sense psychologically it's a victory it's a good thing I applaud that I'd rather have a black mayor of Newark than I would a white mayor any time. But basically they will be taking over a piece of dangerous obsolescence. We can destroy that in many ways an unsophisticated way of destroying it is to go throw some bombs in Manhattan.

Trouble is with that that was the blacks found they rioted more people throw bombs get killed by their own bombs and those who they throw them at. There's another of the more sophisticated way of going at it which has been represented by attempts to get metropolitan government to begin to break down the territorial lines that contain what we sense to be an anachronism. But that's an end acronym stick to because it goes back to African Genesis in the terms concept and a measure of man which is inappropriate in our times certainly to the complications of our times and it says you can draw a territorial line around a social problem if you draw it larger. You have a better chance of handling that problem. That is a fallacy to which I've been a party for about 10 or 15 years. That's one of some places probably you can do that. Maybe a Denver can pull off a metropolitan government that makes some territorial sense and some functional sense I don't think New York can and New York if anything with Los Angeles is the prototype of what we're going to come to in the kind of fluid society

architecturally as well as functionally. There are other ways of destroying the central city and I've been watching now the ingenuity of man as evidenced in the Republican ministration rather than the Democratic administration. Again that this is now I don't get discouraged sometimes when the survival line doesn't follow my map. Being a liberal Democrat I was kind of hoping my boys would do it but it just takes taken Pat Moynihan and the Nixon administration to think through one way of destroying the central city as it has become a problem and that destruction takes place by a process for example of income maintenance age and that's a specific example of a generic movement which is to say to American citizens that they can no longer be captured by feudal states known as central cities that they are American citizens first foremost and always no matter where born no matter where they may move. They will have basic guarantees express their income flows in fields particularly of health welfare and also of education. What

we've tried to do is to make a dependency of the American population the serfs the feudal service of a feudal system known as a central city. And since the barons who live outside the central city suddenly recognize this was to their advantage that is the suburbanites they let this obsolescent feudal order continue. But we will functionally begin to break out the citizenry in particular the dependence of this new United States from those lines by taking on federally and perhaps through the state. Some of the financial obligations that are attached to them and once released from the servitude of living in the central city. You also release the mayor who has had disproportionately to take on the cost of the dependent population in the United States. The dependency which is a national phenomenon a national responsibility and not a local responsibility. And gradually I would expect to see a kind of functionalism erode those territorial lines that have drawn the central city. There's another way thing we have to

do is to break up what suburbia represents suburbia is known as is a case of maximization where like an individual firm in the Adam Smith economy and individual suburb tries to reduce its costs and to increase its benefits and it plays a maximizing game I've noticed that Jay Forrester if I would be critical about anything in that analysis would be that he is taken into the same kind of Adam Smith variation version of the game that is going on and he really tells a city don't expect to be part of a larger benign system that's going to help you. You take care of yourself and he puts the central city in the same accusation basis as he puts the suburbs. I don't believe that that's going to answer either problem. The suburbs however are going to have to be destroyed our kids are right there is something about a suburb. Which is waving an obsolescent hand of the president and that that is the maximisation principle in that of atavistic of atomistic society. I was going to be destroyed

not by I think frontal assaults of brave young kids who are going to hit the bastions. It's going to be taken by some other devices one is going to be the perception that constitutionally the suburb is unconstitutional. It is the use of governmental monies to perpetuate de facto if not de jury segregation and it stops the economic mobility of man. Adam Smith said we had to have mobility of capital and labor. We have put constitutional legal obstructions in the way of that mobility. But that mobility if we as an individual individual society are going to survive must be preserved. And I can watch that mobility being preserved not so much by as I say the final assault on the system as by the growing recognition industrialists who need labor supplies in the suburban areas by the national government the Nixon administration being one gradually recognizing that housing cannot be solved until you get access to the land which is held so constant so defensively

by the suburban establishment. There is a needle a stick a destructive part that's legitimate in our present time and I think we as scientists are going to have to recognize that there is a negative role and anti-matter role to be played as well as matter. And we're going to have to give rationality to it and Avenue and access to it. We're going to have to find ways in which these larger principles can be worked out sometimes without the violence of unsophisticated action. Let me give you a different perception which I think is extraordinary import for the 1970s. Our society has perfected the mass production distribution and consumption of physical goods. Our economics this order of the industrial order manufacturing order has really done remarkably well in accomplishing the industrial revolution. However these services remain in the medieval period under monopolistic control. They follow pretty Adam Smith thinking and services in our

day are both the growth sector of the economy the potential to absorb the growing employment problem that we have. And second there are the big the are the pathway to the good life the quality existence which we're emerging from a quantitative concern. Now how are we going to learn to mass produce in a hurry. Distribute and consume the critical services such as health education and the rest. First one must expect a decade and at present accelerating rate of change I expect that to be collapsed into a half decade and probably in the three years. You have to expect take a very rugged decade on the campuses in the society professional societies in the guilds and I include the trade unions in that they are monopolistic Lee and medieval Iorio. They do not think about the mass production of their services or the mass distribution and consumption they think of the elitist production distribution and consumption. They organize and guilds and the regulatory agencies of our states are all in the hands

of the service guilds the lawyers regulate the lawyers the doctors the doctors engineers the engineers a good Titian's of beauticians and as a matter of fact as I talk to the young demonstrators sometimes encouraging them on a bit. I kind of asked him you know where to go to start even attending the meetings of these regulatory bodies at the state level. They don't and I don't. I have never attended one because they've never been publicized where they meet. Now what they do basically is tend to control and we're coming into a pluralistic quarter where the consumer is demanding a kind of service in a competitive society and he's looking for competitive ways in which his needs can be satisfied. This is why the universities are in trouble because there's a new populism abroad. The kids are the consumers of education. Sometimes well sometimes mistakenly have sense that they are in the hands of largely medieval monopolistic institution and education is now being suffused to our society one of the critical fights it's going to emerge in

next weeks is over Sesame Street which has been shown in a poll still to be announced to be probably one of the most effective teaching devices in the ghetto that has ever come across finally the foundations have made it an educational television. Now it turns out that when you go to teachers conventions Sesame Street is more the object now most Scarne defensive attitudes in attack because somehow on the tube on that idiot two is emerging a competitive form of education which the consumers are going to take to 85 to 90 percent of the ghetto residents of New York Bedford-Stuyvesant and Washington are tuned in regularly to that program and the rates of acceleration of learning are already evident. Now the same thing goes in the medical field the medical establishment and I don't to a point of this in the usual kind of hostile let's take on the guy's business. The medical establishment has not adapted self to the rising market. The mass market as a result of which we're going to

go through a decade at least of an engineered shortage which is going to be tragic. It will produce violence on a number of campuses. It will produce violence in a number of streets as the consumer begins moving the service establishment in that field and says we want service tomorrow. I have however talked to some of those who have engaged in disturbances and discover how frustrated they are when they when they take on for example the guys who ride in Newark threw stones through the television windows always could pick up a television or a bottle of liquor because the Industrial Society had pretty well satisfied their hardware needs. But if they wanted to ride against the doctors and break the windows they wouldn't find a doctor there to get service. He's just not there. Which is a tremendous frustration. And when that frustration builds up I do expect real trouble. Each of the services the critical services in our society is now going to be under attack and we're going to get a kind of pluralistic order. The knowledge industry that Peter Drucker talks about is diffusing suffusing itself so the professors are now

forming knowledge industries and a profit making basis and competing with their own universities. The kids are beginning to take off to work in some of these establishments nonprofit and profit alike. But this is what I see to be a long run trend and states coming back to the theme states are represent a frozen set of ideas and values that the mere application of technology to is not going to solve are not going to resolve or dissolve. We're going to have to have confrontations no question. But more than that I would hope the capacity of people who are a young young mind young in heart to move in and in a constructive way as well as the rate Ralph Nader approach in a constructive way to begin to move those services the production of services into the industrial era. There's another kind of thing that we're running into. And that is that we're dealing as we all know with extraordinarily complicated systems. The Meadowlands which

is a classic case I think of public intervention in a very deep problem where the state of New Jersey after 200 years decided to do something about the stinking swamps across from the Hudson. Those Meadowlands really were engaged in by Governor Hughes myself and others not so much as a the best big planning effort that's going on in the country. It was a symbolic gesture to say that the human being is capable of moving in on an extraordinary complex system and being able to factor out the complexities the interfaces and be able to react to dissolve by reason and the scientific method. Things would seem to almost completely refractory and unmanageable. I'm happy to report even under the guy who took my place that the Meadowlands project is continuing to show that science of the scientific attitude that cat capacity of dispassion in the rest is dissolved. This almost incredible complexities of that piece of territory

that piece of territory has everything from the mafia to the most elaborate questions transportation technology. It has the most elaborate and complicated questions in our government relations one by one using the capacity to reason and to think it through and to factor out that utter complexity is being repeated that utter chaos is being reduced to simple complexity. And very shortly I think you will see a plan for the meadows which in itself is a piece of science because one must engage the public's mind if one is going to succeed with a project of this guy. I would guess that dramatically within the next three or four to six months a plan will be emerging from the Middletons commission which will make us feel that we can master these extraordinary complex systems not masters in the point that ultimately you know we're philosophically man is going. But so that man feels that the chaos of the abyss in front of him is traversable.

And he knows I suppose that one ought not to traverse a an abyss in one in two jumps. It's probably going to take a much more laborious process than that. But certainly it is diverse of all the medical school complex city that Bob Wood referred to. Let me cite very quickly as this. Instead of seeing it as an urban renewal project in its simplistic forms and applying a gimmickry of new housing techniques or whatever to it it was seen to be an interface of about 10 different complex systems like system by which we migrate surplus labor off the land through mechanization of Agriculture. The system by which we housed them in the worst parts of the city the system by which we tried to get the service industries into the central city and the system by which we try in our day with individual zation to negotiate consents and marking the card it was signed in Newark. Where we agreed

with those countries systems seemingly opposed to us including blacks who were riding where we agreed rationally to sweat our way through to see the logic of survival. It was done. The medical schools being constructed without any violence in the black community is now in control of the disposition of that land. You will find blacks who are completely ready to do violence now engaged in the exercise that all human beings have to exercise which is a struggle with that incredibly complex. Let me conclude with what I would like to leave with you as the most important thing to say and that is there is something about technology besides gadgetry that I'd like to pull away from. Technology is in the way and extension of the medieval or the bureaucratic kind of thinking which says I want something impersonal as my lever. I want to engineer something and have something in between me and the thing to be done. The

person to be influenced. Something which is impersonal. So we used to structure bureaucracies which the king could command and presence no longer can. Kids won't go to work in bureaucracies anymore in the public bureaucracy because it is regarded as an impersonal thing. We haven't moved into the public sector what we owed Rothlisberger brought in the private sector and the state bureaucracies are failing and the public bureaucracies are failing for that reason because they are conceived as impersonal mechanisms to accomplish a social objective. Now we move to the scientific technological gibberish in which we say we're going to get a gadget which is impersonal which I can command fully and has named personality which is going to move and engineer the system and resolve its problems. I've got news for you the human being that we now deal with that individual is willing to move but he wants to move on his own with reciprocal controls effect in effects of Robbi of deal makers deal in infinite negotiations of consent. But the means by which social action is going to be accomplished. The means by which social problems

in our time are going to be resolved are going to be through people and not in personal gadgets. And the ones who understand this the best and I do not make mean to make a demagogic appeal to the kids. The energy potential of our society. We in New Jersey went to the through internships through getting our people that felt it was right in the middle and just 26 years old and said in effect here is a job to be done in a complex system where you cannot have the help of gadgetry or bureaucracy. It is the kind of negotiated consent all the way through. They understood it very well. They began to feel fulfillment. And we produced an environment which is I suppose an eye bureaucratic but was once one of the most efficient and productive that Ive ever worked with. We got into their heads that they were people but they were engaged in a cause which made intellectual sense. And when they had that gyroscope internal gyroscope inside them that made sense that they had been part of the logic

you could trust those kids to go out without any kind of supervision and do things because they could then extemporize the immediate answer or the negotiation because the bearings were set and they were bearings which they had help set themselves. I do feel. That is to resolve these problems. We're going to have to bring along that a fantastic energy potential which we've created by the process of urbanisation by unfettered birth in this country by television by all the devices by which kids precociously now become adults. We're going to have to think in those extraordinarily human terms in order to reach to accomplish these social objectives. Thank you very much. T. Paul by employers you have the measure of the

effectiveness and the impact in which you opened deliberations. I guaranteed to the planning committee when I suggested we seek out Paul that he was always eloquent and sometimes logical. And today you have seen him and the best of his combination survival logic and the atom smasher of the city the medieval bureaucracy the garbage can verbiage. Are all I think phrases will find thematic expression and the logic of the Constitution of this state and the liberation of the individual I think will be for food for reflection. But some time to come at this time. We thought it was appropriate to have a student that

referred to make his contribution in history. My name is John Reese and undergraduate at MIT a member of the science section Coordinating Committee which is a group that's been around for about two years now was formed last year to organize the March 4th research stoppage in protest over the war research being done at MIT. Our basic interests are the use and misuse of science. We're not all experts. A lot of us are science students and engineers. People are moving into these fields. People are seriously questioning the values and judgments that have gone into science and technology in the past. The first thing that I'd like to do is something that I find a little hard to do and that is criticize the whole basic nature of this conference. As I looked around today I saw one black man here a few women dressed men people from government no community groups.

And this to me doesn't just doesn't set right it seems to be that a conference where you're going to be talking about the potential uses of technology to solve public problems shouldn't be a conference where you just have people coming in from government coming in from business to talk it over in private sessions and come out with some sort of conclusions that are going to get approved by the governor's council. It just does not seem to me to be a very. Fair. Democratic way to approach these sort of problems. But aside from that the conference exists and you know what is going to happen here and to this I'd like to address a few in expert remarks perhaps showing some of the her perceptions perhaps not that we talked about before. I'd like to express my pleasure in a sense of the speech that just happened. Well with this one more than I expected. But just a few things I don't think that express the entire nature of this

conference. I think it was a good at least in some senses good warning note an opening speech but it doesn't exactly hit home to the basic things that deal with why this conference is taking place its stated purpose. I think that can be best seen by what was stated and talked about prior to this conference as to why it was happening. And for that I just like to read a few paragraphs and some of the press releases that went out about why this conference was occurring. The first was dated March 2nd. Modern technology in the systems analysis approach to problem solving can land men on the moon and create the most sophisticated defense system in history. Can they not be used to help state and local governments solve such problems as mass transportation delivery of health care housing education or crime and control of air and water pollution. On March 12 the press release members of the scientific community and state and municipal officials must discover ways to identify those areas and state and local domestic programs where applications of science and technology will

have the same order of payoffs and quotes that space and defense technology have delivered for the federal government. Then a statement of purpose from the same press release suggests constructive roles for the participating governments federal state and local in formulating science policy for economic and social development and to aid in setting up institutional arrangements to insure full application of modern technology to such problems as same problems. Then also from that news release quote from Dr. WOOD Well we must try to do during the conference Dr Wood said is to find ripe for high technology programmes not just spin off from space and death defense technology and apply them to the political process in states and cities right. I'm not quite sure what that means. Putting that in the context of what has happened in the past what is meant by the applications of technology and science and private motivation to solving these problems scares me. I'd like to

talk about that a little bit. First of all who are the advocates of this conference. Who are the people delivering papers who are the people trying to convince you. Are they dispassionate intellectuals who have no interest in what they're talking about. I contend that isn't true. Are you going to be talked to by people from Bell Telephone trying to sell educational devices going to be talked to from people in universities universes that can only be supported if these sort of programs are pushed. If the type of research is no longer going to be available on defense is available in these new fields these are places in which they have a basic interest stake and they should be remembered in their statements that they're not coming in here to give you dispassionate advice. That's pretty obvious. What is the nature of the technological solutions that have happened in the past. Well I don't think I really have to go too much into depth about the way in which the defense establishment managed to systems analysis and costly overruns and mismanagement of the war in Vietnam which I consider immoral to begin with. But no matter mismanagement of that war mismanagement of many of the fears that this country now

are going to apply this esteem systems analysis without question the basic assumptions that go into making public policy basic assumptions of government. I think this is beginning to be done by a few officials but it is not the process that is basic to the manner of making public policy in this nation. And I think this is got to such to be done. You have got to start to go to communities. That this conference occurs without representatives of the Black Panthers the Welfare Rights Organization Roxburgh across the river to me is absurd. To me there are technical solutions to only some sorts of problems and those are problems with you define the nature of the solution you're searching for. Technology is a tool. It is something that is good for cleaning up the Meadowlands. I grew up in New Jersey and I remember driving by those Meadowlands once about three years old and I can distinctly remember the smell at the time. But it's much more. The solutions are political solutions the solutions that come out of the fact that rocketry has some ideas

that Cambridge has some ideas those are people out there. As individuals they have some sense of the way in which their lives should be ordered. The way in which they want to receive health care the way in which they want to receive education. These questions aren't being asked. You find MIT and Harvard about to institute a joint health school to study health and technology. But the basic questions of what is the nature of public health needed in this country. What does Cambridge want gone those back streets and find out what are the people there want in the way of health care. What are they lacking and why are they lacking it. I think you'll find that the answer isn't that there isn't the technology we don't need a computer aided EKG. You just don't need the technology to provide the basics. Basic health care. What groups are attempting to do this sort of thing. Unfortunately we find it isn't the government of the United States is engaged in this sort of endeavor as groups that are regarded by most of the country as being on the criminal side. The Black Panthers Black Panthers are currently engaged in community health programs trying to

establish local health clinics. Now whether you agree with the Panthers or not they're responding to what they perceive as a very real need of the community in a way they found it because they come from that community and they know the people there. Who's doing the the crime control in the streets. Again the Panthers may not accept it but the Panthers came out with a manifesto quite a while ago really down on dope pushers. They used the only means that at their command which is the same means that the command of the state nets force they said if we find anybody pushing dope on our blocks we're going to get him off of our blocks and left it at that. They don't want anybody exploiting their communities whether the businessmen whether it be crooks. I think that this is the research that has to be tapped in this nation this is the place where the answers are and that it's just not going to come down from above this expertise these people have been working in these areas for a long time. Sometimes you become isolated from the real needs real questions that are being asked by the community.

There's also things like besides the questions of just what do they want. The questions of the applications of this technology under the guise of profit motivation of profit making are to me deeply and in question that how can you say we're going to now use educational devices like mechanized educational devices to aid our educational system when the people who are advocating this are people have a very stake interest in having these types of education come across refer to a book called run computer run from this the Harvard Technology Society program you'll find a very in-depth analysis of you know the completely wrong motivations the complete inability to really community and community to go into a community and convince them that the educational devices are needed mainly because that isn't the things that are wrong with education ask any high school student why they don't like high school. You find it isn't because there aren't machines. It's because they don't know what the goals are. You don't know

where they're going they're going to find what education is for in the society having to find you being trained. Are you being made a good cognisant and we'll are you being made a person think these are the questions that have to be asked and solved. Work towards before and during the application of technology. And these are the basic questions that have to be applied before you have a conference to talk about the ways in which technology and science can be applied to public programs. So just finishing statement I get personally very frightened when I think of the possibility of the privatization of the running of this country. I like to read a statement from the HL Newberg from his book in the name of science. And that's popular faith in the mystique of innovation. Almost an end in itself has provided a cover for the emergence of an industrial R&D and systems engineering called was on par with paralleled private economic and public decision making power. The statement is the result of

a long developed argument about the nature of systems the nature and nature of private control in which decisions programmes are advocated from above and the people who actually give the OK really do not have any means of influencing the nature of the premises of these decisions. You can see that our defense system today. The fact that ABM is being advocated and pushed. The fact that the Merv is being advocated and pushed by people in the face of the SALT talks. All of these things that are the result of people who have vested interests in the devices that they're pushing for Public Policy. I think this has to be fought against. I think this could be one of the most dangerous influences American society. Most of you are aware of the problems. I mean I assume that you deal with them every day. And I think that within your knowledge you can see that there are ways of approaching these problems of. There are things that should be done first before you contemplate buying a new system. Spending this good new money that's coming out because defense is growing and has a growing disrepute. Spending in a new program is the question that should be asked perhaps you

should give a million dollars to the Black Panthers and let them prove present you with a manifesto of the things that their community needs. Perhaps you should give a million dollars to National Welfare Rights and find out what they think should be done with the welfare system. All of these things could be done. All of these things I think take a priority over getting together and talking nicely about the things that can be done. I have no more desire to end up living in an America controlled by the men downs as if the Opals as the technological mandarins who has a who have an expertise to make decisions for us. And I didn't live in Russia with the same mandarins controlling decisions. That I think what is needed is a new conception of democracy and a return to the ideal democracy. Now you know the community really does have a final say. But the community does have the knowledge in their way of making it to be able to make decisions. Finally I'd just like to say that they're going to be individuals from Sac not too many because we're on

vacation and not too many people around MIT at the moment but they're going to be certain individuals attending sessions. Very few of us are experts in the sense that we've got doctorates of spent long times in fields but we've done a lot of thinking and talking about the nature of these problems. We're going to be entering into discussion. We don't know if it'll prove worthwhile we have grave doubts about it proving worthwhile. We had grave doubts about even attending this conference by having having had anything to do with it. A more useful thing to do might have been to call the Black Panthers call National Welfare Rights call rocks for community organizations say hey look what's going on come on over here and picket. Perhaps if there is you know no alternative that's what has to be done. We decided to try this. But I'd like to invite you to engage in this discussion to seek us out tomorrow we hope to talk about and try to organize a session in which we'll be talking about these issues. We haven't had a chance to so far and also to invite you to to procure this issue of our newsletter. This is the science section

Coordinating Committee newsletter was put out partly for this conference. We rushed the deadline so we get out in time. It deals with the issues of health care it the issues of the use of science and the application of science to social problems. Thank you. Thank you. It was ladies and gentlemen. I think that the theme and the context of this conference are extraordinarily well set by the presentations that have opened our gathering. I am reminded as John Reed spoke of a similar conference the same purpose this one in Harlem.

That's one at a time when some of us and the Department of Housing and Urban Development who are undertaking somewhat desperately need to define community define citizen participation to thread a line between the bosses of Tammany Hall and the barricades of Paris and the subject of that. In which and those at that conference and for those purposes the predominant participation was black and neighborhood and community dealt with in one panel. The fact that infant mortality in. Harlem was 11 to 1 for the rest of the city of New York and one of the few technologists from HUD got up and said well gee if you look at the differences in rates here why don't we try systems analysis

in a black neighborhood leader got up and said that it's what we've been trying to tell you all the time. Put away the systems analysis give us the power let us run those health care. Parts of that neighborhood and let us take chart. Technician scratching his head for a minute and said Well now what would happen five years from now if the ratio is still having a one on mortality rates and then said the neighborhood guy we try systems analysis within that measure. Of power and knowledge within and that sense of duty and general. Revisions a poet of a sack identified going on with increasing repetitive. We have met far breaking into the circle with at least one

convocation and at least the beginning of one set of participants. I think you'll find the meat and flavor and and rewards in the workshop sessions. I know that we are predictably slightly over scared you. I urge hits you go to the workshops now. I look forward to seeing you would like. To. See.

You.