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This is a serious, long-term trend, and we have been unaware of it, and it has led to a very serious long-term economic trend. In order to use synthetics, machinery which requires a great deal of capital and very little labor is used to substitute for the previous way of doing it.

For example, when you switch from producing a lady's handbag out of leather to producing it from synthetics, it takes more energy to make that handbag. It takes much more capital-I can give you the numbers later-and it takes a lot less labor.

The long-term trend, then, is for two things to become in short supply one is capital, and the other is jobs.

Although the business community has suddenly noticed that there is a shortage of capital, it is really a crisis issue which has arisen out of a long-term trend. Unless we understand these long-term trends, we do not know how to respond to the immediate crisis.

So my theme is that our problem here is not to sit and prognosticate about the future. Our problem is that we do not understand our past. For that reason, our present is full of unperceived crises, crises that are sprung on us: the environmental crisis, the energy crisis.

I will stop there.

Chairman GLENN. Thank you.

Mr. Richard Barnet, the Institute for Policy Studies.

TESTIMONY OF RICHARD BARNET, THE INSTITUTE FOR POLICY

STUDIES

Mr. BARNET. I think Government clearly does have a responsibility in setting goals, and in fact does set the goals in a haphazard and unclear way at present through the budget and other kinds of legislation.

The problem, I think, is that we have not sufficiently defined our overriding national goals or the way in which the issue of conflicting goals and conflicting priorities ought to be debated in a democratic society.

The overriding national goal, in my view, and the one that is given insufficient attention by Government, is the goal of national survival, physical survival of the United States in the nuclear age.

I believe that the danger of nuclear war is the most underrated crisis facing the United States in a time of multiple crises, and that we have assumed-again, I think, following the kind of thinking that Dr. Commoner referred to that we can plan for the future on the basis of an unexamined past. What we have failed to do is to examine the way in which the national security strategies which we have followed for the past 25 and 30 years have, in fact, undermined in very substantial ways, the national security of the country. We have done this because we have thought about the problem in compartmentalized ways although we have somehow seen that there was a tension between "the needs of the city" and national security, we have not seen that they are fundamentally a part of the same issue and that if, in fact, our security is threatened, and I believe in many ways it is, it is related to the inability of the

country to make the necessary investment to develop the economic strength and resources of the country to provide a secure existence for all Americans.

I think that is the single most-important national goal; there are others, of course, but we have not set up in our government machinery for arguing out what, in fact, are the ways in which we should allocate our necessarily limited resources.

We have assumed, up until very recently, that our resources were unlimited, and we could do just about anything we wanted in the field of military preparedness and domestic policy.

The facts, I think, are otherwise, and we must debate these interrelationships so that in the political arena we do not continue to make the same mistakes in the future that we have made in the past.

Finally, I would just add that there seems to be a notion developing in this country, and promoted by some politicians, that Government is bad, that Government really is unable to perform tasks for the improvement of life for citizens.

I think there are reasons why that so. Government has often failed. Government is inefficient, sometimes Government is corrupt, and it is difficult and unwieldy. But the fact is not that Government is bad; it is that we have formed a bad Government. We must find ways, both to make Government more responsive to citizens and also to develop procedures in which important decisions for the public sector are being made by publicly accountable and publicly responsible authorities. We must develop institutions for more democracy in this country or we will end up with much less than we have now.

Chairman GLENN. Thank you very much.

Mrs. Mary Bunting, former president of Radcliffe.

TESTIMONY OF MARY BUNTING, FORMER PRESIDENT, RADCLIFFE

Mrs. BUNTING. Thank you.

COLLEGE

It occurs to me as I listen that there are some inherent problems in trying to work effectively toward long-range goals in a democracy where short-range goals win votes.

I also wonder, when we begin to think about long-range goals, whether we don't have to focus first on what the problems are that need to be tackled, what the opportunities are that could be realized, and then try to think about the approaches that will be effective.

And when it comes to the approaches, it does seem to me that we need to be much more experimental as we work for social change than we have been in general. We face colossal ignorance of the forces involved and need much more data before we can trust comprehensive planning.

I think we have approached long-range planning like alchemists, looking for magic keys that will transmute our difficulties into precious metals, instead of realizing the importance of gaining more understanding of the factors that influence the phenomena that we are concerned with.

I know this struck me very clearly the year I worked here in Washington in 1964-65 on the Atomic Energy Commission. As an extracurricular activity I was in touch with Frank Keppel and other people in HEW, and I was impressed with the difference in the amount of information available, but also in the hard thinking and calculations, inadequate as they may have been, that went on at AEC as we were trying to decide whether to approve experiments in the plowshare program, as compared with the casual, uninformed, massive push to start Headstart.

There are many kinds of problems that we need to attack, not by setting up major programs, but by fostering multiple initiatives under competent people, evaluating them, making the results public, and letting the thing build until we understand the basic facts and can construct theories that lead us somewhere, predictions that work out, at which point we can move forward on a bigger scale.

I don't know whether that has been helpful or not.
Chairman GLENN. Thank you very much.

Mr. Alvin Toffler, author and student of some of the problems of the future, author of "Future Shock," "The Culture Consumers," his latest book, which I haven't had the pleasure of reading yet, Alvin, is "Eco-spasm," and we welcome you today.

TESTIMONY OF ALVIN TOFFLER, AUTHOR

Mr. TOFFLER. I find myself sharing some of the concerns of the other speakers, but seeing them from a sharply different perspective. I think the advice that we study the past and that we analyze the present is sensible. Nobody who thinks seriously about the future would argue with that.

My problem is that in the very nature of our political system, there are enormous incentives to think short range and to act short range and to ignore anything beyond the next election.

I believe that all of the basic problems that we have heard discussed-ranging from energy, foreign policy, to the economy to highlevel unemployment, to the eco-spastic condition of our economyall of these have a common element, and that common element is political.

What we are witnessing in the United States today is a fundamental breakdown of the political process. The mythologies on which our entire political system are based, ranging from our ideas of representation, our notions about the separation of power-indeed, the Constitution itself-are being called into question by absolutely basic shifts in technology and geopolitical relationships on the planet. I think that in order to confront the basic crises, the multiple crises, in which this country is caught, we have to look at the entire process of planning in a totally new way.

The assumption most people make is that if we plan, we have to produce a centralized master plan, that everything in it has got to be scientific.

I disagree with that. What is basic here is not science but the political process. Planning must be open to a variety of inputs, ideas, and data, not all of which will or should come from purely quantitative analysis.

I believe that what we need is a new process that I call anticipatory democracy. We have got to invent a new political process for dealing with long-term questions, and that political process cannot be left to technocrats, experts, engineers, system analysts, economists, and people like myself.

We need to invent a new approach to planning and indeed, the word itself is so heavily freighted with old connotations that I would welcome a new one-we need to design a new approach toward goal setting that involves not handfuls of experts, but literally millions of people. That may sound naive, but I believe that unless we do that, we are going to see such frustration welling up in the country that there will be anarchic outbreaks of violence. People already understand that our present political structures are inadequate for coping with the crises facing us, but that they do not hear anybody seriously talking about institutional restructuring in this country, and that that adds to the profound frustration that they feel. We need to open a national discussion about the political process itself, and the ways to achieve democratic planning.

There are, in fact, some models, some good ideas floating around that have received insufficient attention. There are experiments all over this country that involve getting citizens and governmental agencies together to grapple with very long-term questions.

Nobody, I think, has the answer for how this can be done, but I believe that some of these experiments are well worth our attention, and I would like to conclude my opening statement by describing a process which the State of Washington has been engaged in in the last 2 years, because it suggests to me a completely different way of looking at the issues of planning.

This is a program begun, initially as I understand it, by the State planning office. It is called alternatives for Washington.

State planners came to what I regard as a sensible conclusion that you can't plan for people. You can make plans for people, but, unless you are prepared to coerce people into accepting them, your plans are not going to be carried out. But, if you involve people from the start in shaping the goals toward which planning is directed, you have a much better chance of success.

Therefore, citizen participation is not a nice thing to have, it is the absolutely fundamental sine qua non, without which you cannot have effective planning.

In Washington, they approached the people with the slogan, "You don't have to be an expert to know what you want." We need expertise, we need highly qualified specialists, but they can help us determine how to achieve our goals, not what our goals should be.

The State planning officials approached every organization in the State-black organizations, women's groups, business organizations, and others and asked them: Whom would you like to have do some thinking about the future of the State of Washington for you?

They pulled together a list of approximately 5,000 names and from that chose random samples and created a group of citizens commissions on the future of the State of Washington.

They asked these people: What do you want the State to look like 15 years from now? And these people came forward with all sorts of goals. We want this in housing and that in transport and that in

jobs and that kind of ecological safeguard, and so forth. The citizens produced a long list of proposed goals for health, education, and many other fields.

Then they said to the citizens. "All of these things are interrelated, so we have got to study the interrelationships." And they did.

Together they concluded that goals without strategies are senseless, so they wrote scenarios about how to achieve various goals. Then they said, "Well now, if we achieved all of this, what new problems would that create?"-which is a question unfortunately nobody ever asks.

And finally they said, "Can we not put these in the form of coherent packages or policies that will be useful to the legislative process?" And one group of citizens said, "What we want to do is industrialize the State rapidly." And they replied, "Fine, tell us how you would do that-what does that mean for housing, for health, for transportation, for schools, and so on."

Another group of citizens said, "We don't want that at all. We want better agricultural development." OK, let's have your program. Another group said, "No, we don't want that, we want to develop the tourist and recreational facilities of the State." Yet another group said, "We want to turn Washington into a major port of entry for trade with Asia and China and Japan."

Each of these groups put forward an alternative vision of the future of the State of Washington, 11 alternator programs in all. These were then published in tabloid newspapers and distributed by the State through every newspaper in the State. They were presented on television programs. Citizens were given ballots with which they could respond to that.

Random sample surveys were made by telephone and by mail to reach population groups who would not ordinarily participate in an exercise like this. And at the end of the line came a set of goals, or rough proposals, rough general directions for policies in the State. With these, the planners were able to create a "legislative grid."

Across the top were listed the goals which were elicited from the citizen participation process, and down the side they listed every bill introduced in the State legislature in the course of the yearsome 700 bills or more, each ticked off to see whether it would advance or obstruct the movement toward those citizen goals.

I tell you this story, not because I think this is the ultimate solution to our problems by any means, but because it represents a way of thinking about processes that we need for developing long-range goals in the country. Unless we can have many such experiments, we are going to be bumbling along, our minds filled with obsolete thinking about "master plans," and we will work ourselves into a corner that we will never get out of.

Chairman GLENN. Thank you very much.

Mr. C. Jackson Grayson, former Chairman of the Price Commission, Southern Methodist University.

Mr. GRAYSON. Thank you, Senator.

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