FOIA on Martin Luther King

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

have to be done rationally. I also believe that it will have to be done by humanists, and that before they can do it, we have somehow to lower, or at least make more permeable, the barrier that separates the Two Cultures. We will come back to this point later. Before that, let us return to the notion that engineers choose what they will work on.

## The Choices of Engineers

Most engineers do not make cosmic choices. They do not decide that this product will be built and that one won't be. Practically all engineers, I suspect, work for other engineers, who work for others, who work in companies where the products are determined not by science or philosophy, but by market analysis. Now market analysis has come a long way since the days of the Edsel, and it often guesses accurately, although not always so, what the public is interested in buying. But what the public buys is not necessarily what it needs.

## The Market-Place Guessing Game

We buy those things that are offered for sale that are better (in some vague way) than the alternatives available to us. Except for advertising or other ways of influencing public opinion, the basic mechanism of the market-place is a guessing game. Try this product, see if it sells. If it does, figure out what it was about it that sold, and push a little harder. If this one does not sell, retrench a little, or gamble on another change — and so on. Advertising and public opinion do play important roles — how else explain so many different labels on the same bar of soap, the same automobile? — but the decision as to how the engineers' skills will be used has, in the past, been largely determined by the instantaneous outcome of the market game.

## Major Civil Problems

Now please do not misunderstand me. The marketplace mechanisms are important for determining soap or automobile styles. I believe that criteria of risk-and-return of investment are elements of our decision-making processes that we could discard only at great peril to our society. What I am saying is that the major civil problems: pollution, poverty, and population density, for examples, are not likely to be defined by market analysis.

## These problems, for which acceptable solutions are needed, share these characteristics:

First, they cross product classification lines, and involve more than one sector of the economy. They are not just problems of the auto industry, or the mining companies, or manufacturing-but-not-service-industries they involve all of these. All the skills that all these sectors employ may have to be applied to these problems. The cement plants in the country and the transport companies in the city have pollution problems that differ only in detail. To expect them to do the necessary research and development separately, each with his eye on his own segment of the market, is to postpone until much too late, if not forever, solving even the smaller parts of our problems. The problems, so to speak, are too big.

## These Problems are Hardly Separable

In the same way, the major civil problems are not readily separable. One can reduce the amount of air

pollution caused by internal combustion engines by using electric autos, for example. If so, we may replace polluted air in the cities with polluted streams out in the country where the new massive power plants are. Or we can replace with solar energy the fissionable materials or fossil fuels we now use for power; however, at least in the near future, we would then have either much less energy or much more costly energy, and fewer jobs and more poverty. (Some among us tend to paint even blacker pictures. They point out that our society gave up slavery only when our technology developed to the point where machines were cheaper than slaves. Is it possible that we could deliberately reverse this process and end up with clean air, but with slaves?)

## Very Difficult Problems

This characteristic of tight linkage, or inseparability of the big problems, also suggests that we cannot rely upon the ordinary market-place mechanisms to determine how we employ our technology to solve our problems.

The third characteristic of our problems, that forces us to reconsider the mechanisms of choice, is that our problems are so very difficult. The technical solutions do not exist outside of social considerations. The social costs outweigh such usual factor costs as materials, labor, and capital. Our cities present much tougher problems than putting man on the moon. As someone smarter than but unknown to me, has said, "We couldn't have put a man on the moon if the moon had been inhabited".

## World-wide and Nation-wide Problems

All these characteristics, and others that I've left out, such as geographical diversity — some problems are not local, nor even regional or national, but world-wide — suggest that the organizations needed for these new problem-solving teams differ considerably from those of even our biggest, most diversified companies, or else that we need some super-industrial team of coordinators, who are to be responsive not to the elements of the market-place, but rather to the public interest. Whether that public is regional, or national or world-wide, someone who has thought this problem further through must tell. My own thoughts, tempered by a certain sourly pragmatic view of the interactions of various national governments, suggests that the approach most likely to succeed in the near future is the national one.

## The National Science Policy and Priorities Act

The essentials of a first step in a national plan are contained in the National Science Policy and Priorities Act, which, among other things, sets up procedures for contracting out to universities, companies and other organizations, the research and development necessary for solution of the major civil problems, including the design of civil science systems. Whether an agency like NASA should be set up, as the Act says, or whether an existing agency should supervise new programs, is a matter of debate. The importance to our discussion is that some federal funding agency, not the various product market-places, should establish the priorities and fund the solutions to our civil problems.

As you see, this bill or Act or plan makes a first approach to nationalizing the solution to national problems. At the same time it will lower local