FORESIGHT AND NATIONAL DECISIONS THE HORSEMAN AND THE BUREAUCRAT

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• Publication Date: July 1, 1987
• Content Type: MISC

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REMY
DEM C NS
contributions
dement
and
John
Bezold
Sterman
UNIVERSITY
PRESS.OF
AMERICA
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FORESIGHT AND
AND
NATIONAL
DECISIONS
The Horseman and
the Bureaucrat
by
Lindsey Grant
with contributions by
Clement Bezold
and
John Sterman
and a foreword by
Elliot L. Richardson
UNIVERSITY
PRESS OF
AMERICA
Lanham ? New York 0 London
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Copyright @ 1988 by
University Press of America,5 Inc.
4720 Boston Way
Lanham, MD 20706
3 Henrietta Street
London WC2E 8LU England
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
British Cataloging in Publication Information Available
"A Skeptic's Guide to Computer Models"
0 1988 by John Sterman
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Grant, Lindsey.
Foresight and national decisions : the horseman and the bureaucrat
/ by Lindsey Grant with contributions by Clement Bezold and John
Sterman, and a foreword by Elliot L. Richardson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographies and index.
I. United States?Politics and government-1981- ?Decision-
making. 2. Forecasting. I. Bezold, Clement. I. Sterman, John.
III. Title.
JK261.G7 1988 87-28088 CIP
ISBN 0-8191-6721-5 (alk. paper)
ISBN 0-8191-6722-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
All University Press of America books are produced on acid-free
paper which exceeds the minimum standards set by the National
Historical Publications and Records Commission.
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In about 200 BC, when Liu Pang had conquered
China, he was approached by Lu Chia, representing
the Chinese literati -- the erstwhile officialdom.
Lu Chia said to him:
"You can conquer the kingdom on horseback,
but you cannot rule it on horseback."
A bureaucrat is not a very dashing figure,
beside a man on horseback, but he had a point, and
the Emperor took his advice. A large society is a
complicated organism. No leadership will
willingly abandon to the bureaucracy its
prerogative to govern, but even the strongest
leadership is wise to govern systematically and to
solicit the best advice it can before it rides off
in pursuit of its own enthusiasms.
Ancient China was big, but changes came
slowly. The United States is bigger, and
fundamental changes crowd upon the world in
accelerating and bewildering confusion. Our
government is regularly embarrassed by "surprises"
-- by things it didn't anticipate or by
unanticipated results of its policies.
In the United States, we get a new horseman
every four years or so, and the best ways of
conquering the republic are not necessarily the
best ways to run it. There is justification for
an inquiry into institutional processes that may
help to bring foresight more systematically into
government.
This book offers, not a conclusion, but a
process: a systematic way of using the best
knowledge available -- the longest and broadest
possible perspectives -- when making national
decisions.
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CONTENT'S
Foreword (Elliot L. Richardson) vii
Preface xi
Part One The Issue Defined 1
Chapter I. What Is Governmental
Foresight Capability? 3
Part Two
Chapter II.
Chapter III.
Chapter IV.
Chapter V.
Chapter VI.
Chapter VII.
Chapter VIII.
Part Three
Chapter IX.
Chapter X.
Chapter XI.
Chapter XII.
The State of the Art 17
The Federal Executive.
What Has Been Tried?
19
Case Study:
the Global Issues Work Group 57
The Role of Congress 75
Lessons from State and
Local Government (Clement Bezold) . 83
Advice from Business 99
The World Outside:
International Connections 115
A Skeptic's Guide to Computer Models
(John Sterman) 133
What More Is Needed ? 171
Why More Foresight? 173
Current Proposals 195
The Obstacles 217
A Tentative Proposal 225
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Appendices:
A. The Cabinet Council System in the
First Reagan Administration 249
B. Presidential Statement of April 11, 1985,
Abolishing the Cabinet Councils 253
C. Federal Directories Relevant to Foresight 255
D. Survey of Selected Citizens' Goals and
Futures Projects 259
E. Project Description: "Corporate Use of
Information Regarding Natural Resources and
Environmental Quality" 265
F. 21st Century Studies 269
G. The Authors 273
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F4c,m--(ax,N7cIval-cl
by E1_11.ot RiLclaardson
Several years ago, I wrote the foreword for a
booklet titled Thinking Ahead: Foresight in the
Political Process. I was interested in the booklet
because it dealt with a central issue for modern
governments: in a complex world, how can the
government, in making decisions, better weigh the side
effects and long term implications of the policy
alternatives it is considering?
The problem has not gone away. Efforts to address
it are continuing, in the United States and elsewhere.
In Washington, however, proposals for better foresight
have been submerged in a budgetary crisis that is
itself the result of short term thinking over the past
decade or more.
I am delighted that the author has expanded that
original booklet into a fuller treatment of national
foresight and its connections with parallel processes
in local governments, in business, and elsewhere in the
world. Such a study is needed.
Since I still believe what I wrote in 1983, and
since there has been lamentably little progress toward
better national foresight, let me reiterate and restate
some of the thoughts I expressed in that earlier
foreword.
Abraham Lincoln once said, "If we could first know
where we are, and whither we are tending, we could
better judge what to do, and how to do it." To under-
stand whither we are tending is to have foresight
capability.
To know whither we are tending will not make us
wise in our choice of goals. It cannot tell us how to
weigh competing claims. If we have no heed for the
morrow, it will not force prudence upon us. What fore-
sight capability can do is make us better aware of the
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consequences of our present choices. It can tell us
that we can't get there from here by the path we're now
following, or that the cost of attempting it is higher
than we thought. It can make us aware of
opportunities. It can warn us of danger in time to
take preventive action. It can give us a precious
chance to adjust our course, our goal, or both.
Frequently doubted in his own time, Lincoln's good
sense is not often disparaged nowadays. It has been
ignored, however, in the reaction to past attempts to
improve the contribution of foresight to the political
process. The melancholy fate of these attempts is, of
course, partly accounted for by inertia.
Foresight, moreover, is said to stimulate
planning, and planning implies effort to bring about a
different outcome than the unimpeded flow of events
would otherwise produce. This effort, to be effective,
may require governmental intervention. Government
intervention is bad. Foresight, therefore, is to be
avoided.
Less muddleheaded reasoning would lead to the
opposite conclusion. The planning stimulated by
greater foresight capability can be that of the private
sector, and better private sector planning would tend
to reduce the need for government intervention. Recent
history is weighed down with examples, some cited by
Lindsey Grant, of botched regulation whose unintended
and undesirable side effects could only be corrected by
additional regulation. Better foresight capability
would have resulted in less government intervention.
The unwillingness to address national issues is
hardly a guarantee of our freedom, and the
unwillingness to use the best available processes to
inform those national decisions is hardly a compliment
to our intelligence.
Notwithstanding these Lincolnesque considerations,
inertia and irrationality have smothered virtually
every past effort to improve the ability of the U.S.
Government to take adequate account of visible trends.
It is hard not to be discouraged by the unsung demise
of such forward-looking initiatives as 1969's National
Goals Research Staff, 1972's Commission on Population
Growth and the American Future, and 1980's Global 2000
Report to the President.
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Why, then, has Lindsey Grant, who knows this his-
tory all too well, seen fit to devote his intelligence,
talent and energy to a renewed effort to improve the
U.S. Government's foresight capability? He is aware
both of the burgeoning complexities that compound the
difficulty of choosing among competing alternatives and
of the fallability of the data relied upon for the
projection of current trends. Does he persist, then,
merely because he is stubborn -- or a chronic hoper --
or a bit of both? No such assumption is necessary. He
knows that, rather than stumble in total darkness, it
is safer to aim our feeble flashlights in the direction
we want to go -- and that it behooves us meanwhile to
try to improve their candlepower.
We cannot, in any case, afford to be discouraged
by past failures. The onrush of change has so
radically augmented the need for foresight capability
as to transform a difference of degree into a
difference of kind. The depletion of nonrenewable
resources is forcing reliance on low-grade, remote, and
hard-to-extract ores; it also underscores the need for
alternative energy sources. Population growth coupled
with rising rates of consumption accelerates the
production of pollutants and wastes; urban hypertrophy
compels the creation of more elaborate municipal
infrastructures; deforestation, soil erosion,
desertification, acid rain, and the subsidence of the
water table demand ever more costly countermeasures;
and as all of these things occur, the competition for
capital becomes more and more excruciating.
The same developments that are generating this
capital crunch also make inevitable a suspenseful lag
between the decision to commit large-scale resources
and the stage when a return on this commitment can be
realized. The combination of complexity, size and long
lead-times multiplies the cost of being wrong. Even a
marginal gain in the improvement of foresight
capability can thus be worth far more than the expense
of achieving it.
Other consequences, meanwhile, are an enormous
ramification of the number of relevant variables and a
quantum jump in the importance of understanding the
ways in which they interact. No one is smart enough to
work out such equations in his head. Indeed, before
the advent of the computer, the effort to address such
interactions on a global scale would have been
inconceivable. Nothing less, however, than global pro-
jections -- and the capacity to break them down by geo-
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graphical regions and individual countries -- can
usefully address such massive yet subtle relationships
as those between population growth, food and energy
requirements, wood burning, deforestation, and climatic
change. Lacking adequate capacity to make such projec-
tions, the world community could not hope to achieve
the warning time needed to avert the disasters that
might otherwise occur.
It is one thing, of course, to recognize the need
for foresight capability and quite another to come for-
ward with realistic proposals for acquiring it. The
difference is clearly recognized in this book, and a
major part of its value consists in the solid good
sense of its effort to formulate such proposals. Mr.
Grant lays bare with clinical objectivity the
political and procedural considerations that proponents
of greater foresight in the federal government would do
well to reckon with in making their case and designing
their legislation. He is surely right, for example, in
recommending that such legislation should emphasize
process and be divorced from specific substantive
problems, that reliance should be placed on existing
government machinery rather than new bureaucratic
structures, and that foresight should be tied to the
long-range or lateral implications of issues that
actually have to be decided.
Mr. Grant's specific proposals for integrating
foresight into the decision-making process may well
stir debate. I hope they do. Such a debate would
itself be a useful product of this book, if it helps to
lead to a consensus as to what must be done.
If you have the imagination to grasp the
importance of these issues, you will have the interest
in the topic to appreciate his work in drawing together
a synoptic look at the present state of foresight, and
you will also have the wit to be intrigued and
challenged by the resourcefulness of his effort to
propose solutions. To you, particularly, I commend
this book.
Elliot L. Richardson
Washington, D. C.
April 1987
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Par.c?..1F-zaca
My father was born in 1990 and died in 1984.
In those years, he participated in one of the most
drastic transformations any species has ever
experienced. It is difficult to comprehend the
extraordinary changes that people have witnessed
in this century as a result of changes in science
and technology. We are so deeply imbedded in the
present that it takes a difficult mental effort to
comprehend the time scale of human life on Earth
and the recency of the kind of world that we live
in now...
Opportunites arising from profoundly enhanced
capabilities in science and technology are felt in
every sphere of life from:health to communication,
yet each has side effects that take time to
appear..."
There is little in our history as a species
to prepare us for this hypermodern world that we
have so rapidly made.
--David A. Hamburg, President
of the Carnegie Corporation
and President-elect of the
AAAS.1
Well said. Dr. Hamburg's point leads directly
into the purpose of this book.
The world is going through change at an
unprecedented rate, and human activities are coming
into a new scale of relationships with other natural
processes -- changes such as the ratio of people to
land and renewable resources, or the introduction of
chemicals into the environment, or weaponry. The lead
time to assess what humanity is doing, and if necessary
to change it, has shortened dramatically. As a
society, we need new and better ways of understnding
the implications of what we are doing.
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Modern societies have developed very effective
ways of expanding human knowledge and of applying it to
change the ways we all live. We have been much less
successful in dealing with the by-products of those
changes -- in foreseeing how change in one area of
activity may affect our well-being in other ways. We
do not adapt our behavior to avoid the by-products we
do not want. We embrace an energy-intensive culture
and are surprised to realize, belatedly, that the ways
we produce energy may be killing our forests.
We are beginning to learn, as a nation, that one
cannot ride pell-mell in the linear pursuit of every
seemingly desirable objective without considering the
interaction with other objectives. To put it in the
soberer language of the scientist (and again to quote
an AAAS president):
It is essential that decision-makers
understand the probable consequences of each
available option (including the option to do
nothing) sufficiently to make decisions that are
consistent with the values of society. This is as
true for positions taken in regard to social,
economic and political negotiations and actions as
for positions taken in regard to technological
changes...
--Anna J. Harrison, Professor
emeritus of chemistry, Mount
Holyoke College, and outgoing
President of the AAAS.2
One senses a widespread and growing recognition
that linear thinking is an insufficient approach to
today's problems. In scientific research, the outgoing
Director of the National Science Foundation called for
a more orderly approach to organizing multi-
disciplinary ?research in complex areas. He argued that
"this helps unify the research community, bringing
developments in various disciplines to the scrutiny and
attention of colleagues in other fields. This, in
turn, builds bridges between disciplines and helps
generate exciting new approaches to old problems." The
new Director is blunter. He argues that science has
come too much under the control of those who define
their subjects too narrowly, who fail to see the
connections between disciplines and between science and
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the practical world. He has made the creation of
interdisciplinary research centers central to his
policy.4
In education, the dean of a graduate school has
suggested that "the graduate curriculum today may need
to address issues and problems that cut across
disciplines and that are not usually embraced by
primarily discipline-oriented programs." He has
observed that industrial research is relying
increasingly on multi-disciplinary research teams, and
he calls for a new interdisciplinary approach to
graduate studies, with a "new seminar focusinq on the
process rather than the products of inquiry..."
In the White House, a senior National Security
Council (NSC) official calls national security planning
a "myth" and argues the need for systematic ways of
coordinating political and military planning and for
developing systematic procedures for crisis
management .8
Among state and local governments, there is a
surge of interest in "issues management" and
"alternative futures." The National Governors'
Association has passed a resolution stronger than
anything at the national level, endorsing worldwide
foresight processes in order to protect the Earth's
resources (see Chapter V).
American business has long seen the need for
"strategic planning," and businessmen have some strong
opinions as to how the government could be of greater
help to them (see Chapter VI).
A non-profit umbrella organization, the United Way
of America, has felt the need for a systematic process
of identifying societal needs and trends that may
affect charitable programs or that may require action.'
New institutional arrangements are cutting across
the traditional disciplines and compartments of
American society, as the need is felt for a wide
perspective. The AAAS in 1985 broke its pattern of
organizing itself by disciplines and created a
Population, Resources and Environment Program to
encourage analytical work integrating those three
disciplines.8
The Issues Management Association (IMA) was
created in 1981 and has grown to some 400 members,
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largely from business but including members from
government, academia and non-profit groups. The IMA
defines issues management in several ways, most
succinctly as "a program that enables a company to
anticipate sociopolitical issues that may affect it
rather than just react to them..." The IMA sponsors
annual meetings, publishes a newsletter, and invites
its members to "participate in the Issues Resource
Network, a directory of experts in eighty issue
ve9
areas.
The World Future Society is something of a grand
old presence in the field of futurology, and as early
as 1977 it attempted to begin the building of networks
in the futures field, with "The Future: A Guide to
Information Sources." The Society has recently created
a Professional Membership program and initiated the
Futures Research Quarterly to promote intercommunica-
tion among those professionally involved in planning
and related fields.1?
More informally, a Global Foresight Roundtable has
evolved in Washington, bringing together members of
government, academic institutions and non-profit groups
to "stimulate attention to...the need for better global
foresight and to encourage the creation of an informal
network of professionals interested in talking about
this issue."11
I could go on. Among private advocacy groups, in
business and among association executives, religious
groups and elsewhere, there are new ideas and new
organizations dealing with change, its cross-sectoral
ramifications and their effect upon the decisions one
must make.12
All these diverse groups are linked by the common
recognition that traditional ways of making decisions
are too narrow for a complex and changing world. Most
of them seek to improve the ways that society organizes
itself to anticipate change; they are not simply
interested in making forecasts.
The call for better "foresight" is the application
to government of this felt need for systematic,
interdisciplinary approaches in addressing complex
issues. It is the appeal for a broader horizon in
decision-making and for the establishment of procedures
to bring lateral and long-term issues into the process.
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There is no shortage of books advancing knowledge
and analyzing change in one sector or another.
Foresight, however, is more than that. In itself, it
embodies two distinct elements: cross-disciplinary
forecasting, and the process of getting the results of
those forecasts into the decision-making process.
There is more literature on forecasting than on that
second process,13 and it is to that second question
that this book will be principally addressed.
This book is focused on the political decision
process at the national level. It is not simply
descriptive. It is an instrument of advocacy, a call
for improved decision-making to match the complexity of
"this hypermodern world that we have so rapidly made."
The plan of the book is straightforward. Part One
is an attempt to define the issue and to describe
foresight. Part Two summarizes what has been tried and
what is being done now at the national level in the
way of deliberate cross-sectoral foresight; the
connections are shown between the foresight process at
that level and at other levels and centers of decision-
making; and the potential contribution of computer
tools is described and evaluated.
Part Three describes the foresight proposals that
have been before Congress. It surveys the political
realities within which a foresight proposal must be
framed and then offers such a proposal.
The machinery proposed here would consist of an
"ombudsman" office in the White House, linked to the
government agencies through a Foresight Policy Group
and Foresight Working Group. These groups would bring
the lateral implications into current decision-making,
and they would undertake periodic interdisciplinary
studies of current and anticipated trends, to identify
looming issues that merit the government's attention.
I propose ways in which this machinery should be
connected to related processes in Congress, the private
sectors, the states, and international activities.
The approach is evolutionary, not revolutionary.
The basic American political processes have held up
remarkably well through a period of extraordinary
change. The solutions proposed are meant to be
compatible with our national political structures and
habits. As a practical matter -- quite aside from the
conceptual advantage of building on what we have -- any
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proposal is more likely to succeed if it enlists rather
than antagonizing the political forces in Washington.
Part Two is the product of collegial effort. The
chapters are identified by author. Each of the authors
is responsible only for the conclusions in his own
chapter, but our very ability to collaborate in such an
effort speaks to a shared view that there are problems
with the nation's foresight machinery and that they
should be addressed.
The footnotes and the appendices constitute
something of a directory of organizations in the
foresight field. They are intended to assist in
establishing contacts among serious students, foresight
specialists themselves, and the political practitioners
who may, one hopes, be translating some of these ideas
into political reality.
The impetus for improved national foresight has
come primarily from people and organizations that, like
myself, are concerned about population growth and its
pressures upon "renewable" resources and the
environment. One may wonder: "why this interest in a
topic so far from those issues as 'foresight'?"
The answer is simple. If population, resource and
environmental issues can be brought systematically into
governmental decision making, their importance will
become as obvious to others as it is to
environmentalists. If, for example, the government can
be brought to recognize that its own actions help to
shape population change in the United States -- i.e.
that demographic change is not an independent variable
beyond governmental influence -- I will have achieved a
major objective. If I did not have that confidence, I
would not be in the foresight business.
Finally, let me express my appreciation to the
many people who gave me help and advice in writing this
book. I am of course particularly grateful to my co-
authors, Clement Bezold and John D. Sterman, who gave
much time and knowledge to the book.
Two other people were instrumental in preparing
Part Two of the book. Col. Thomas Magness (USA-Ret.)
was the Executive Director of the Global Issues Work
Group during its early and most active period, and he
provided most of the research on which Chapter III is
based. Joel Horn conducted the study on which Chapter
VI is based, and he did much to shape that chapter. I
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am deeply indebted to both of them. I will be arguing
that effective foresight requires a pooling of
perspectives and expertise. A book on foresight is a
good place to put the belief into action.
Special appreciation is due to Elliot Richardson,
who has written the foreword for this book and its
predecessor booklet. It is comforting to know that my
belief in the importance of improving our national
decision processes is shared by a man who has spent so
much of his career at the center of the national
decision making process.
Dr. Ralph C. Bledsoe '(Executive Secretary of the
Domestic Policy Council) and Lt.cGen. "COlin Powell
(Deputy Director of the National Security Council) were
most generous of their time and of great help in
explaining the current decision processes in the White
House. I wish also to thank Dr. Michael H. Armacost-
(Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs), Drs.
Theodore Harris and Paul Werbos of the Department of
Energy, and Coleman Nee of the Council on Environmental
Quality for their advice, suggestions and help. I am
indebted to Dr. Gerald 0. Barney of the Global Studies
Center, Arlington, for many ideas about foresight over
the years and for permission to print the Appendix on
global studies overseas.
Edward Cornish and Frank Snowden Hopkins of the
World Future Society read the manuscript and offered
much useful advice. Let me also thank the two
anonymous reviewers for their advice.
This book is an outgrowth of my booklet entitled
Thinking Ahead: Foresight in the Political Process,
published in 1983 by The Environmental Fund (now
Population Environment Balance), which generously gave
permission to draw heavily upon that booklet in writing
this book.
My appreciation to Marjorie Wilkinson for unscram-
bling and typing my drafts, to Roger Conner and the
Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) for
administrative support, to Production Editor Helen
Hudson of the University Press of America for her guid-
ance, and not least to my wife for putting up for years
with my preoccupation with this intractable topic.
Lindsey Grant
Bethesda MD
July 1987
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FOOTNOTES
1. Science, Vol.224, 1 June 1984, p.943. Reprinted by
permission of the publisher. Copyright 1984, the
American Association for the Advancement of Science
(AAAS).
2. ibid, p.941. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
3. Dr. Edward A. Knapp, in Science, Vol.225, 31 August
1984, p.881. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Copyright 1984 by the AAAS.
4. Erich Block "Basic Research and Economic Health: The
Coming Challenge," Science, 2 May 1986, pp. 595-599.
See also the New York Times, February 15, 1987, p.6F.
5. Robert B. Lawson, Dean of the Graduate College,
University of Vermont, in Science, Vol. 225, 17 August
1984, p. 675. Reprinted by permission of the
publisher. Copyright 1984 by the AAAS.
6. See Chapter II, footnote 11.
7. The United Way of America, 701 North Fairfax Street,
Alexandria VA 22314; [phone]; Linda Forbes,
Director, Strategic Planning Division. The United Way
has created a multidisciplinary Environmental Scanning
Committee (drawn mostly from business planners and
academicians) to help identify those trends for the
benefit of the United Way and its member organizations.
Under the direction of the Scanning Committee, the
Strategic Planning Division drafts Issues Papers, Study
Papers and Recommendations. It also publishes and
periodically updates a book identifying trends thought
to be of major importance to charitable organizations
(What Lies Ahead -- Looking Toward the '90s: An
Environmental Scan Report; $15.)
8. AAAS, Office of International Science; Population,
Resources and Environmental Program (PREP), 1333 H
Street NW, Washington DC 20005. Program Director Dr.
Amy Auerbacher Wilson, [phone]. The Program is
supervised by a Committee chaired by the Vice
President, Corporate Strategy, the Xerox Corporation,
and includes academicians, think tank officers, World
Bank officials and Congressman Buddy McKay.
9. Brochure of the Issues Management Association, 1615 L
Street NW - Suite 925, Washington DC 20036. Executive
Director Marie W. Kleeman, [phone].
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10. For further information, contact the World Future
Society, 4916 St. Elmo Avenue, Bethesda MD 20814,
[phone]; Edward S. Cornish, President.
11. Administrative support for the Roundtable is provided
by the Global Studies Center, 1611 North Kent Street,
Suite 600, Arlington VA 22209; Dr. Gerald 0. Barney,
Director, [phone]. The Center, in an effort to
promote the development of methodologies for global
modeling, also publishes "Global Perspective
Quarterly," offers a descriptive list of models
entitled Microcomputer Software for Development: A
Sourcebook, and offers a computerized bulletin board on
new developments in global modeling (accessed at the
above number). Its activities in, promoting global
forecasting abroad are described in Chapter VII.
12. A very broad group of U.S. non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) have gotten together, formed a
Steering Committee, and developed a Statement and an
Action Plan for sustainable development, the first such
private effort to cross the gaps among development,
environmental, resource and population organizations.
Published as Making Common Cause by World Resources
Institute (1987) in behalf of the Committee. Contact:
William J. Nagle, WRI, 1735 New York Avenue NW,
Washington DC 20006; [phone].
In business, The Futures Group (76 Eastern
Boulevard, Glastonbury CT 06033) has for years been
involved in cross-disciplinary modeling for government
and business clients. It is perhaps best known for the
computer models RAPID and RAPID II (Resources for the
Awareness of Population Impact on Development),
developed as an educational device for the Agency for
International Development.
The American Society of Association Executives
(ASAE) in 1983 queried association executives as to
what it should be doing. It was told to "conduct
research into what associations can do to better
prepare for the future." In response, the Society
sponsors futures studies, beginning with D.P. Snyder &
G. Edwards, Future Forces: An Association Executive's
Guide to a Decade of Change and Choice (Washington:
ASAE Foundation, 1984). (ASAE, 1575 Eye Street NW,
Washington DC 20005; President R. William Taylor,
[phone].)
Among religious groups, the most ambitious
foresight project is perhaps the Methodists' "Global
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2000 Project: The Churches' Social Witness to the 21st
Century," under the direction of Rev. Norman E. Dewire,
President of The Methodist Theological School in Ohio,
3081 Columbus Pike, Delaware OH 43015.
13. One of the few such studies is by John M. Richardson,
Jr., "Towards Effective Foresight in the United States
Government" (unpublished; prepared under contract for
the U.S. Department of State, OES, 25 June 1980). An
earlier exploration of foresight at the federal, state
and local levels, and of the role of private
organizations is Clement Bezold, Anticipatory
Democracy: People in the Politics of the Future (New
York: Random House, 1978).
The most detailed exploration of foresight is a
four-volume study done by the Congressional Research
Service; see Chapter IV, footnote 5.
See also the Office of Technology Assessment,
Federal Government Information Technology: Management,
Security and Congressional Oversight (Congress of the
United States: OTA, 1986). It is a wide-ranging survey
of federal information management, with recommendations
for improvement. Chapter 6, "Computer Modeling,
Decision Support and Government Foresight," is a useful
survey of the uses of models and other systematic
decision processes in government, with an extensive
bibliography and a brief description of proposals for
cross-disciplinary foresight machinery.
Peter W. House and Edward R. Williams, Planning
and Conservation: The Emergence of the Frugal Society
(New York: Praeger, 1977) is focused primarily on non-
renewable resources, but it contains interesting
information on proposals for planning processes during
the 1970s and the then-current attitudes toward them.
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Iit C3x-xe
I s sue D efiicl.
Governmental foresight has existed in some
form, presumably, since some primitive tribal
leader pondered what would happen if he disposed
of a rival or picked a fight with a neighboring
tribe. Since then, in varying degrees of
formality and sophistication, governments have
developed procedures for identifying and
evaluating the likely results of proposed courses
of action.
If the idea has been around for so long, why
the current proposals for the creation of a
"foresight capability" in the United States
Government?
The answer is that the current governmental
decision processes do not meet the criteria for a
modern foresight capability.
Let us begin with an attempt to describe what
the process should be like.
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I-
Wkit
C,c:sver-rIrrkx-i-t a1.
Fores.1_40-1-1.-t -txr"?.
About forty years ago, the population of the
developing world took off on a spurt of growth
unprecedented in human history, largely because of
the rapid application of disease control and
agricultural technologies developed during the
preceding century in the West. American aid
policies promoted that change. Any humane
observer would sympathize with the desire to bring
mortality down and to keep children from dying.
Nevertheless, c_a-7profound-d-isturbance-of-the-,
demograph-i-E---b-alance -was-generated-when-mortal-ity
cwa-s---Tlowered-whi-l-e---nothing was _ done about-TT)
ertilit-g) World population has doubled in that
very short time, and it will probably double again
-- if the Earth can sustain it -- even if the
developing world should achieve replacement level
fertility within the next generation. National
leaders trying to slow the surge of population
growth must bitterly wish that they had started
earlier. The ironic point is that demographers
could have told policy makers the results of their
policies. But nobody asked. That is what this
paper is about: te6:-__find-out-how----the-decision--,,
process-can-bring-the----implications of prolMsed
peil-icte-g7t76_p7511cy_makgr-s7-7-at-tent berore they?,
set---such--t-rairns-of-consequence-in-motion.
_
_
"Foresight" is simply a systematic process of
bringing lateral and long-range implications into
policy decisions.
It is an attempt to vi-derr-the---turii rr5-T
charactertstab":70f11-much-governmentai-de-CISIOn making and
to bring the probable secondary and tertiary effects of
courses of action into the decision process before
decisions are made.
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It is, if you will, an effort to institutionalize
the questions "what if . . . and then what?" In the
example above, somebody should have been asking "what
if birth rates don't fall as we lower death rates?"
Such questions should be asked of every proposed
policy. They seldom are.
Proponents of better foresight would agree that an
effective government foresight capability must meet all
the following criteria:
* It clooksAaheathlmbIts function is to provide both
a wider perspective and a longer horizon to government
decision processes. It should inform policy makers
- how policies under consideratior relate to
other national policies -- i.e. how they may
reinforce or conflict with each other. ("As
to the proposed new agricultural policy: if
we need to keep Egypt afloat, we are going to
need some of the budgetary savings from that
policy to buy them the food they are now
getting from PL-480.")
- how the pursuit of the proposed policy may be
affected by events and forces elsewhere in the
system ("There are new breakthroughs in
super-conducting magnets that will probably
make that proposed neutron accelerator a lot
cheaper if we wait for two years.")
- how long-term trends and their potential
intersections may foreshadow looming issues
that could justify anticipatory action. ("We
have summed up the anticipated capital costs
of maintaining growth at present rates
throughout the economy for the next twenty
years, and they are about three times the
current national savings rate. Perhaps we
need a study as to ways of promoting increased
savings, or alternatively of accommodating a
lower growth rate.")
* It is systematically organized. It requires
411-11a-MIAIatqa.elgEtEangements which assure that the
potential results, by-products and implications of
proposed courses of governmental action are examined
before decisions are taken. IVIIPF-equdaimpeTA:odl,c
fg7TrgrAblAturrentatrendsumndmithel-Amj,nteractIoneMan11110A
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the_goVernment to changeg-that- may
affect:its interests.
* It is coordinated. It requires that specialists
be in communication and be able to draw upon each
other's expertise in conducting their analysis. That
the energy specialist, for instance, be in touch with
the agricultural specialist to know when they are
competing with each other for water resources, that
both be in touch with the water resource specialist to
get the best estimate of the water resources available,
and that all three be in touch with the macro-
economists to learn whether their requirements for
capital are realistic.
This communication in turn requires that the
different components of government use mutually
compatible definitions and terminology. If, for
instance each department compiles its data by
different measures or by differing geographic
divisions, the data will be mutually useless.
* It deals with_jerr-the-gijniTicant rama.fis-7-)
that canTbb-Tidentlfied The most important results of
human activities are frequently the unexpected ones.
The originators of a proposal may simply be unaware of
the likely impact of that proposal in some Other area
of governmental concern. Who gets invited into the
"clearance" process may be the result of tradition,
formal lines of authority, bureaucratic competition or
accident. The-current_agitati151-7-WeThine-fft-al------,
foresigh=EEZ-Apab-irrty7has come-Irifaildip-alrlyTIrom_peopl
activG7In_ the --"new" - areas of -gOVefnfribiltal-concern-77-1
popu-ration -resources-_and__enviroilment 7-- who have--
ai5?iant-evi dance? that --theix__Interafd7-are7-not---.,
considered-in - the -governmental decision- making process
As a result, decisions with potentially disastrous
consequences for population, resources or environment
are being made by people who may be unaware that their
decisions affect these fields.
* It makes use of the tle-t-avaikable-technologies---)
The advent of the computer, coupled with improving
statistical data and sophisticated foresight modeling,
has made it possible to quantify trends and
implications in ways that were never before possible.
These techniques are simply the handmaidens of the
decision making process. They should never dominate
it, but they are such useful servants that the decision
maker may be simply overwhelmed with data if he or she
refuses to use them.
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* Its scope is the world. Some issues may be
truly local; others involve the whole Earth.
Governments have long recognized the potential
importance to them of political or military
developments arising abroad. By now, the same may be
said of economic issues. It remains to convince
governments that comparable importance must be attached
to world-wide trends arising in the areas of
demography, resources and the environment. National
security is no longer simply a matter of weapons.
Mexican migration, fed by population growth and
unemployment and perhaps by political instability, may
influence the United States' prosperity and security
more than a foreign military threat to an oil producer
in Arabia.
* It is holistic. The term itself is generally
associated with the environmentalists who recognize, if
governments do not, that political/military/economic/
demographic/resource/environmental classifications may
be artificial. They must be understood and analyzed
together. A threat or issue under any of those
headings may be generated by developments in any of the
others.
For Example. .
It would perhaps be useful to make these
abstractions more real by attempting to imagine how the
process would actually work in the government.
Let us examine an idealized example. You are an
energy planner exploring the question: "How much use
can be made of biomass to meet future energy needs, if
traditional oil sources become expensive or
unavailable?"
You are undertaking this inquiry because your
superiors are exploring energy alternatives. Other
agencies have been alerted to consider the implications
of such a shift, and the Department of Agriculture has
been asked for an agriculturalist's response to the
same question.
You will have a good idea of costs and potential
production from various biomass sources, and in this-
sense you could answer the question alone. In the
present state of affairs, you would probably do just
that. However, in our newly-foresightful government,
somebody will need to pose the collateral questions to
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other experts. On the demand side, what are the
population projections and anticipated energy
consumption requirements? On the supply side, what is
the range of estimates of domestic production, import
availability and prices for the next twenty years?
When and under what conditions would biomass
become competitive with oil? Could this happen through
natural economic processes? Or is the lead time such
that some form of government encouragement is
necessary?
What would be the net impact on balance of
payments? What, if any, shift would occur in fer-
tilizer/pesticide/herbicide requirements? How would
this affect their price and availability? What would
be the effect on soil productivity and erosion of
diverting organic matter from soil conditioning to
energy production? What, if any, shift in water
requirements would there be? And what would be the
effect on competing uses? on groundwater quality? on
fishery production? Would the proposed change bear
upon national security by preserving the nation's indi-
genous energy capacity? Upon the stability of friendly
countries? What would be its impact on worldwide
atmospheric and climatic issues such as acid rain and
the introduction of CO2 into the atmosphere? Would the
biomass option justify an artificial price advantage
compared with coal simply to avoid an ecological
calamity? What part could other energy systems such as
direct solar conversion be expected to play?
What would be the impacts of a shift in the
geographic location of the energy source from overseas,
and from mining and oil-drilling areas to the agricul-
tural heartland? How much cropland diversion would
there be, and how would it affect food production and
food exports?
What, if any, steps could the government take to
encourage or discourage such a shift to biomass? And
what would be the budgetary implications? How do these
proposals relate to the new Conservation Reserve
Program? Should the government consider encouraging
the shift of food-producing areas to biomass, instead
of idling them as at present in order to reduce food
surpluses?
Can the initial problem be addressed by changing
the parameters? What could energy conservation
measures achieve, and how could they be encouraged?
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Would the need for additional energy sources be
ameliorated by a reduced projection of population
growth? Could this reduction in turn be achieved by
changing immigration policy? Should the appropriate
departments be looking at this?
After you and other experts have looked at these
ramifications, you may need to approach the questions
again, changing your assumptions concerning population
growth, or selecting another crop mix for biomass,
picking up synergisms such as joint production for food
and biomass, etc.
You will need to combine these results with
parallel calculations for other energy sources, made by
other specialists.
And finally, you will need to be able to package
your conclusions, along with those of other agencies,
into a manageable set of choices for the White House
when it addresses national energy policy.
By this point in my narrative, any reader familiar
with the government will cry "stop." The variables are
too many, the choices too complex, the trains of
possible implications from each potential decision too
vastly ramified. In the real world, there is no chance
that a president could be offered all those choices in
a manageable package for decision.
Agreed. No such exploration can be started up to
produce instant answers. The value is in the
exploration itself, and in the communication among all
those experts. The questions I have posed are real and
they are important, and any specialist could probably
ask a dozen more. If there is a continuing system for
exploring such issues within the bureaucracy, each
expert will have begun to understand the limitations of
his own pet project. The non-starters will have been
eliminated, the externalities such as limitations upon
water and capital better understood, the benefits and
dangers for other players in government better
understood. The Department of Defense, for instance,
might find itself agreed with EPA on the desirability
of an expanded domestic alcohol production capability.
If industry and outside experts have been brought into
the game, the process will have begun of framing the
terms of a national consensus about what can be and
should be done.
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When the real question becomes insistent enough to
demand White House attention -- probably when oil
prices start rising and older fields dry up -- the
question will probably be posed to the experts in very
broad terms: "What do we do about energy?" Because of
the foresight work that has gone before -- the
systematic exploration of these coming issues -- the
experts will be well down the road to offering a
manageable set of alternatives. The different
departments will have a sense of the implications of
different choices for the pursuit of their own
responsibilities. The more horrifying unintended
consequences -- such as the failure mentioned in the
headnote to this chapter to consider fertility and
mortality together -- would be identified and, one
hopes, avoided.
The -f-anciful_idealiz-a"tlb4i7of'the foresight-ss-3
e rfeed?fo-f _crass-comnanii
importance _of Ehe---interpenetrati-on
igSues- usually-kept-far-apart-:(such as balance of
payments, soil erosion, and demography), and the need
to bring in long-term issues such as soil fertility and
water degradation. It suggests how the process would
eventually influence actual policy recommendations.
Thirc5-uld--_not require an expanded bureaucracy
,MT16-p-doPle are there, but they are not in touch with)
each-Other-Or with the decision makers. _They_writi
(Ydauminous studieS-1-411d-dh nobody can find 6--U-Se.
_
Some idea of the correlation -- or lack of it --
between this idealized model and current practices may
be gotten from the following true story.
There is an analyst in the Department of Energy
with particular responsibility for modeling the future
path of energy requirements in agriculture and mining.
The present analyst reports that, upon taking up this
responsibility, he noticed that the energy requirements
for this entire sector were represented as a constant
coefficient of energy use in manufacturing. This
procedure had been used for as long as anybody could
remember.
That simplification is the kind of crutch that
makes forecasts go wrong. There is no justification
for assuming such a correlation. In fact, since 1972 --
while manufacturing has been becoming more energy-
efficient -- agriculture has been going through several
adjustments, most of them unrelated. Energy
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application requirements in terms of fertilizer per
unit of output have risen. Irrigation and its energy
requirements have been going through a series of
galvanic changes, with the widespread new exploitation
of groundwater supplies, the beginning of overuse and
exhaustion in the Ogallala aquifer and elsewhere, the
two oil shocks, which raised the cost of raising water
from underground, and finally the credit bind resulting
from farmers' misreading of price and demand trends.
If anybody could sort out these vectors, it would not
be a single energy specialist. For starters, he needs
a specialist on irrigation practices, an agronomist and
an agricultural economist.
This energy specialist recognized that he needed
other specialized advice. He set out to find somebody
who could answer the basic questions about what is
happening in agriculture. His search led him from the
Department of Agriculture modelers, to the agricultural
participants in Global 2000, to the private Worldwatch
Institute, to Resources for the Future and to Data
Resources Inc., before he found agricultural
specialists -- back in the Department of Agriculture --
who could help him refine his projection.
The point here is that there was no network to
which the energy specialist could turn to identify the
people in his own government who might help him to
refine his thinking about a very important question.
This shouldn't happen.
What It Isn't. .
Foxesight ls_lnotedia-tidii.-: It is not simply
forecasting. There is a stubborn myth that foresight
is synonymous with futurism and that the object of both
is to paint pictures of what the future will be like.
Nobody can predict the future, notwithstanding the
popular books and articles that appear regularly,
purporting to tell us what the world will be like in
one hundred years or so. The_Worrd-. is tOb
The prediction will be buffeted by too many unexpected
variables. The idea of prediction itself embodies an
unspoken fatalism; it assumes that people cannot change
the course of events. Th-e-best-predicti-on-thatv.Onbe
made-about_predictions. is that they will
_
, process of identifying7T
trends-=.and_how th7ey-may-intersec-tTatiff-what-th-at means
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TiipolicT\rThe projections must be constantly changed
aTJ1jii,ectorsevoive and as_knowledgp?improves.
(Fore-ight?Eartpretend to do more than to offer the
lbe-at available description of the potential
TEPlications_when a decision must be made, and to
Tb-rewarn_the political le-dder-s-hip when it appears that
WITassue_demands
This having been said, one must admit that most
"foresight" literature, here and abroad, has in fact
been presented as projections of "The World in the Year
XXXX," and many foresight advocates see their mission
as one of creating an office somewhere near the
President, to make such projections.
Such "World in XXXX" exercises can have a useful
function, if they are viewed with sufficient
skepticism. They can force the bureaucracy to lift its
eyes beyond its normal preoccupation with current
crises. They require a communication among different
specialists that may reveal the likelihood of problems
ahead (e.g. they may force the specialists to realize
that their sectors cannot all hope to use the same
water and the same capital). They force the
specialists to think systematically about their own
assumptions and thought processes.
Such global exercises force the specialists to
begi-n?a_process---thst_may=lead_-the-government=to-----
srifrcipate-isafies,-----In drafting the global projection,
they have to begin to answer some key questions about
projected change:
*M5J,TaTE5-57)
Lllow-b_artain2_Th
* how-imp5rtant is it-IT it does happen? _D
All the forces of inertia conspire to make the
government reluctant to take preventive or anticipatory
action, unre-g-?77thTe-need-fo-r7-aqtion-i-?72apparent=drid-Ta
palitical-constituency-has- developed-demanding-act-f?
Particularly if outsiders such as academicians are
brought into the process, the "World in XXXX" exercise
can generate publicity that in turn mobilizes public
opinion and pushes an issue into the zone of the
politically doable. Something of the sort seems to
have been happening with the acid rain issue, and the
1980 Global 2000 Report was an element in that
progress.
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Beyond these functions, however, the utility of
periodic global projections to decision making is
probably limited. There is a central point that is too
often overlooked: foresight is irrelevant unless it is
brought to bear on real decisions. The "What if . . ."
question must be connected with the choices that the
political leadership is facing. A detached group of
modelers, preoccupied with developing their own
projections, courts the danger of being too far from
the action to realize what questions they should be
answering, and when.
Foresight is not a mathematical model. As a
nation, we are beguiled by the moon landings. With a
powerful enough computer, can one not analyze all the
variables and predict what will happen?
Here on Earth, it isn't that easy. Some principle
of entropy seems to be at work as the systems become
more complex. Even with supercomputers, mankind does
not do very well at predicting the weather. Enter the
human element -- perhaps itself trying to beat the
system -- and there is no model or set of formulae that
can predict.
Perhaps the best-known models in the United States
today are the econometric models used to forecast the
performance of the economy. They don't necessarily
work very well.
In Chapter VIII we will explore how such
mathematical models can and cannot assist the foresight
process. The present point is that they cannot
substitute for it. There is no substitute for
communication among experts, involved in a constantly
reiterated process of asking "What if . . . ," changing
the assumptions, and asking the question again. This
probing approach, sometimes almost intuitive, is at the
heart of the policy process. With its nuances, its
instinctive winnowing of potential consequences, this
thought process cannot be matched by computers; they
can only serve it.
There is no "cheap fix" approach to foresight.
Foresight is not a solo sport. Even if one mind
could contain all knowledge, one person could not
constitute a foresight capability. Government is not a
business; it is a maze of different perspectives and
objectives and interests. The7prohlem is-not-sImply7t
-
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develop -a_long-term perspective. - Onemust-- also --find --
iTays-fiii-jthe_compartments to-communicate.J They must
seek mutually beneficial courses of action where
possible. At least, they should bring the relevant
perspectives into the decision process so that the
myriad competing benefits and penalties of alternative
courses of action can somehow be examined together.
This means that those benefits and penalties must be
organized and presented in a way that enables the
political leadership to make a deliberate and informed
choice among them.
Foresight is not central planning.' The criticism
is regularly heard that "this sounds like a planned
society." Not so. It is neutral. (The proper use of
foresight at this stage in history would, probably
remind us, in fact, that market economies are doing
better than planned economies.) Toresiglit-is_simi55-!
qray- _of _bririging-15-etter infolITIAt-itiri to bear in)
Tovernment. What-government decides to do about it-is
a separate issue. Whether it passes a law, provides a
subsidy, changes a rule, or does nothing must remain a
political decision. It is hard to see how critics of
any political stripe other than the most extreme
Libertarian could oppose foresight in principle. It
would be a conscious decision not to make use of
available instruments in steering the ship.
Basic Questions About Foresight
So far, most proponents of foresight would
probably say, "Yes, this is what we are seeking."
Beyond this point, however, the consensus vanishes.
There has been no consensus, or even an attempt to
develop one, on some fundamental issues.
* (Wnat-basis7exists-in-Corfgtess and thg0V-Or1ment,
kor-such7a7foresight_capabirity
* In what respects is it inadequate?
* What machinery must be created to improve the
foresight process?
* What should be its scope? Should foresight
proponents simply press to bring
population/resource/environment into the
decision process, or should we attempt to bring
other issues -- balance of payments, full
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employment, social equity, and so on -- into the
same system?
* Should environmentalists be pressing for a
process or for substantive acceptance of their
conclusions? (e.g. should proposed legislation
simply create a procedure for bringing
demographics into policy, or should it state a
conclusion about U.S. population growth? My own
predisposition is probably already foreshadowed
by the definition in this chapter. If the
purpose of foresight is to bring the widest
possible range of perspectives to bear upon
decisions, it would seem inappropriate to
freight it with a preordained viewpoint as to
the conclusions it should reach.)
* What is the most practical way to go about
seeking improved foresight in government? What
are the obstacles, and how can they be avoided
or even exploited?
* Who are the players? Should the effort be
directed toward the Executive branch or toward
Congress? Should it be run by environmentalists
alone, or should allies be recruited among other
interest groups, labor, business...? Who are
the people to reach in government?
Those questions interlock. Some preliminary
answers will be attempted before the close of this
book.
F" 00 P 1.4 OP S
1. The definitions of "planning" are many and frequently
amorphous. For a sample of the range of viewpoints, I
would refer the reader to three very different
perspectives:
Rachelle Alterman & Duncan MacRae, "Planning and Policy
Analysis: Converging or Diverging Trends?", Journal of
the American Planning Association, Vol. 49, No. 2,
1983.
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Otis L. Graham, Toward a Planned Society. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1976.
Robert L. Rothstein, Planning and Policymaking in
Foreign Affairs. Boston: Little, Brown, 1972.
One can easily defend the categorical statement
that foresight is not central planning. To attempt to
compare foresight with all the other definitions of
planning would require a book, and one as diffuse as
the definitions themselves. Foresight is a new term to
describe rather specific proposals for improvements in
the decision process. It does not envisage any shift
in the formal locus of authority for political decision
making. The term should not be loaded with all the
inclarities and connotative associations of "planning."
For example, most but not all descriptions of
planning include a goal-setting function (as indeed
does "foresight" in its local applications as described
by Dr. Bezold in Chapter V). National "foresight" as
defined in this chapter would inform decision making
and goal setting, but the decisions themselves would
rest with the existing political machinery.
Example 2: Planning is not necessarily or even
frequently holistic; foresight necessarily is. The
historical description of foresight in Chapter II and
the critique in Chapter IX are confined to those issues
that fall within "foresight" as it has been described
above. I will not endeavor to cover all the activities
that by one definition or another might be subsumed
under "planning."
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Part Two
Tlie State c=sE tile Art
In Part One, an effort has been made to show
what "foresight" means. Let us now undertake to
trace a brief history of conscious efforts to
introduce better foresight into the United States
Government. This may illuminate how far the
nation is from a working foresight system.
Then let us look afield. It is easy in
Washington to forget that foresight is also
necessary to decision making in local and state
government, in business, and in other countries
and the world community. The decisions that those
people take may be as important to the future of
all of us as are the decisions taken in
Washington. Local governments and private
businesses need information that only the federal
government can assemble, and their data in turn
contribute to the national foresight capability.
As mankind's understanding of the environment
grows, we are ever more forcefully reminded that
the world is interdependent. We can /earn what is
happening to the Earth only through international
cooperation, and some of the issues we face as a
nation--particularly those related to the
atmosphere--can be successfully addressed only if
they are addressed multilaterally. Before
proposing how to improve national foresight, it
would be well to consider how that process relates
to other centers of decision making and other
sources of information.
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-
Execiurt 17.
WI-1E3-U 11E3E313ri 9PX7iLERtdr?
A brief historical survey is in order as to
what has been done in the Executive branch of the
government
to bring lateral and long-range
implications into policy decisions;
to introduce the specific areas of
15-6Paation_resourcesland_environment7into
cthese_poll-ffg:detl-slons.
These two issues are very different, though both
are elements of foresight. A government could develop
an effective, integrated decision making process and
yet be deficient in foresight if it failed to bring
population, resource and environmental questions into
it. Conversely, the government could enunciate the
most elegant policies about those three matters and yet
not have foresight if it failed to connect those
policies with the actual decisions it was making.
Everything is connected, and a routine decision about
foreign aid policy may have more demographic impact
than an eloquent statement of population policy.
Let me hazard a few generalizations, and then
justify them with a brief survey of past and current
U.S. Governmental foresight processes.
* Efforts to improve cross-communications within
the government, the struggle to escape tunnel
vision, have been continuing at least since the
turn of the century, and there has been wavering
progress. The recent experiment with the
Cabinet Council system appears at least on paper
to be the most systematic technique for cross-
communication yet developed in the federal
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government in peacetime. It has been scrapped
and replaced with a new triad: the Domestic
Policy Council (DPC), the Economic Policy
Council (EPC) and the National Security Council
(NSC). Particularly since the NSC was
reorganized following the 1986 Iran-contra
fiasco, this new system seems to offer real hope
of better coordination than ever before between
"domestic" and "national security" issues at the
White House level. There are still holes in the
system, however, and below the top level the
processes for coordination and cross- I
communication are still chaotic. I
* Efforts to address resource issues have at least
as long a history. The much more recent concern
with the environment culminated a decade ago in
major legislation dealing with many
environmental issues. These efforts, unlike the
attempts to improve cross-communications, focus
on the long term. However, the environmental
legislation itself has tended to set absolute
goals (such as zero water pollution), rather
than to relate environmental and resource goals
to each other or to national goals. The third
element of the triad--population change--has
been brought into governmental thinking
processes only tentatively, and only as a
parameter to be reckoned with, not as a variable
itself influenced by governmental decisions.
* Governmental studies of these three elements and
their interconnections with technological,
social and economic changes consist of a very
few reports, most of them from the 1970s.
* With the single exception of the National
Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA), there
has been little effort to integrate resource,
environmental or demographic issues into the
ongoing process of governmental decision making,
or to relate them to technological and socio-
economic change.
Without pretending to be definitive, let us take a
somewhat more leisurely look at each of those four
generalizations.
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First, the Coordination (Cross-Communication) Efforts.
The government is laced with traditional and
informal cross-agency review and clearance procedures
when the interconnections between issues are readily
recognized. Examples are the long-standing clearance
arrangements between the Department of State's Bureau
of Politico-Military Affairs and the Defense
Department's Bureau of International Security Affairs
on political-military relationships; the State/Treasury
connections concerning international financial
relationships; and the State/Commerce interactions on
trade. It seems unlikely that anybody knows all these
connections or their origins.
Formal interagency structures: their history.
Legislation requiring the Executive branch to submit a
formal annual budget to Congress was passed only in
19211. Since then, the process has been increasingly
formalized, and Congress in recent years has elaborated
its own procedures. Because it forces choices, the
budget process necessarily involves an element of
cross-departmental analysis, the weighing of objectives
against each other, and an effort to look at the whole
before making decisions about individual programs.
The early efforts at creating formal lateral
coordinating machinery seem to have been forced by wars
or the Great Depression, which dramatized the need for
coordinated action. President Franklin Roosevelt had
an abiding interest in improving the government's
capability for coordinated planning. A National
Planning Board was established in 1933 to coordinate
the planning of public works projects. This Board was
transformed into a Cabinet-level National Resources
Board under the Secretary of the Interior, and by late
1934 it issued a detailed report which claimed to bring
"together for the first time in our history, exhaustive
studies by highly competent inquirers of land use,
water use, minerals, and related public works in their
relation to each other and to national planning." The
report addressed itself to such problems as
"Maladjustments in Land Use and in the Relation of Our
Population to Land, and Proposed Lines of Action." It
also included an inventory of water resources, a
discussion of policies for their use and control,
recommendations for a national mineral policy and a
discussion of its international aspects.2
then.
One wonders how far we have really come since
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The Board evolved eventually into the National
Resources Planning Board, which survived until 1943,
when the President dissolved it in the face of
unrelenting opposition from Congressional and other
opponents.
The modern Executive Office of the President had
its origins in an almost forgotten 1937 report: the
Report of the Committee on Management in the Federal
Government (the "Brownlow committee").3 The Report had
been requested by the President and commissioned by
Congress to address the problem of managing the
government. Over the years, the bureaucracy had
sprawled into over 100 separate organizations, and the
President lacked any central staff to coordinate or
even to keep track of it. A remarkably concise
document, the Report was prepared by a three-man
committee chaired by Louis Brownlow. First among its
five recommendations was a proposal to provide the
President with executive assistants (he already had a
staff to deal with the press and the public, but no
regular staff to deal with the government itself). The
Report recommended that there be
...executive assistants.. .probably not exceeding
six in number...to deal with agencies of the
Government... These aides would have no power to
make decisions or issue instructions in their own
right. They would not be interposed between the
President and the heads of his departments. They
would not be assistant presidents in any sense.
Their function would be, when any matter was
presented to the President for action affecting
any part of the administrative work of the
Government, to assist him in obtaining quickly and
without delay all pertinent information possessed
by any of the executive departments so as to guide
him in making responsible decisions; and then when
decisions have been made, to assist him in seeing
that every administrative department and every
agency is promptly informed. Their effectiveness
in assisting the President will, we think, be
directly proportional to their ability to
discharge their functions with restraint. They
would remain in the background, issue no orders,
make no decisions, emit no public statements....
I would urge the reader to fix in his mind images
of Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, Zbigniew
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Brzezinski, Patrick J. Buchanan and Donald Regan, and
then to go back and read that passage again.
The Committee also proposed that the Civil Service
Commission, the Bureau of the Budget and the National
Resources Board be placed within the Executive Office
of the President, since their responsibilities crossed
departmental lines.
The President passed the recommendations unchanged
to Congress, and many of them were incorporated in the
Reorganization Act of 1939, including the six executive
assistants. Thus was created the core out of which the
modern Executive Office of the President, a $100
million enterprise, was born.
The experience of World War II led to the creation
in 1947 of the National Security Council (NSC) system,
the first of the formal coordinating systems presently
in use. The machinery has changed from administration
to administration, as have the names and formats of the
decision documents that the system produces. It is a
statutory body, chaired usually by the President's
Assistant for National Security Affairs, with
participation by relevant agencies including State and
Defense. Its scope is limited. It deals only with
foreign policy/defense issues, and it is
institutionally ill-fitted to deal with the
interactions of domestic and foreign policy issues.
The Domestic Council was created by President
Nixon to provide a parallel coordinating mechanism on
the domestic side, but it never developed its goals and
procedures sufficiently to rival the NSC in importance.
The Cabinet Council system. In 1981 President
Reagan created a series of Cabinet Councils with
overlapping memberships that functioned as subgroups of
the full Cabinet and were entitled Commerce and Trade,
Human Resources, Economic Affairs, Natural Resources
and the Environment, Legal Policy, Food and
Agriculture, and Management and Administration. Each
Council was supported by an Executive Secretary located
in the White House, with a secretariat drawn mostly
from the participating departments.
On paper, at least, this system elevated the
Cabinet to an importance it has probably not had in
modern times. (Presidential Cabinets are usually
selected with objectives in mind other than coordinated
planning, and the Cabinet as a collegial body has not
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usually played a very important part in decision
making.) Coupled with the NSC system, the Cabinet
Councils constituted an impressive machine for lateral
coordination. (The official description of the Cabinet
Council system is attached at Appendix A.)
There was a provision for the circulation of
Cabinet Council papers to all departments, not simply
to those participating in the Council in question.
This arrangement could provide the nucleus for improved
systematic consideration of lateral implications of
proposed decisions.
The Cabinet Councils did not produce much that is
visible to the outside eye, and it is probably too
early to evaluate their work. How did they relate to
each other and to the NSC? How were lateral
implications crossing the seven defined categories
brought into the decision process? How did the
Councils determine when there might be such lateral
implications? Perhaps the memoirs of some of the
participants will help to answer those questions.
As with all governmental organizational charts,
there is always the question as to whether the real
decisions were made in such formal structures or in
more informal and less public councils. Some Councils,
I am told, would go a year without meeting, which
suggests that they were simply cosmetic. Brent
Scowcroft, erstwhile National Security Adviser to the
President and a student of the workings of the White
House, has characterized them as ineffective, and for a
very human reason: Cabinet officers, he says, "don't
like to work for other Cabinet officers." Unless the
convenor of a committee has recognized status as first
among equals, the others will attempt to conduct their
business through other channels. This deficiency in
the Cabinet Council system, at least, has been remedied
in the successor arrangements.
Beyond that question, there is another concern.
An administration with a specific mind-set on an issue
can simply bury problems by putting a fox in charge of
that particular hen house. Environmental and resource
issues, for instance, were dealt with in a Council
initially chaired by Secretary of the Interior James
Watt. (The Environmental Protection Agency was not
even a member, originally, but it was formally included
in 1983.)
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These Councils were abolished in April 1985, so
the description is only of historical interest. It is
given in some detail, however, because the Cabinet
Council system offered some interesting possibilities
for systematic coordination.
The present system in the White House. The
Cabinet Councils have been replaced by two bodies: the
Domestic Policy Council and the Economic Policy
Council. (They are described in the Presidential
Statement of April 11, 1985, at Appendix B.)
The change seems to reflect the power realities
around the President. In effect, domestic policy
coordination has been given to Attorney General Meese
and economic policy to Secretary of the Treasury
Baker .4
The overlapping memberships that had offered the
hope of a wider perspective in the Cabinet Council
system have been wiped out. Only the Director of the
Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and a White House
staffer sit on both Councils. The practice of sending
copies of agendas and documents to other departments
has been terminated, and no agency head below Cabinet
level can even request a copy, if he should learn of
its existence. The Council on Environmental Quality
(CEQ) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are not
on the new Councils. They may attend only when
invited. The circle of decision makers has been
dramatically shrunk. One staffer remarked that
"Cabinet members are not around (the White House) so
often."
The survivors seem to feel that they have a much
better decision making process with fewer participants.
That may well be true, in the traditional view of
decision making. A smaller group can engage in a more
fruitful dialogue and come more easily to decisions.
From the standpoint of this book, however, the question
is whether they have achieved simplicity at the expense
of breadth of perspective.
There are some unannounced features of the new
system that give it substantially more flexibility than
the brief description above would suggest. These
features may help to avoid tunnel vision.
For one thing, the foreign/national security
policy apparatus is better connected with domestic and
economic policy than ever before. By Presidential
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order, Attorney General Meese and Secretary Baker sit
regularly on the National Security Council. The
reciprocal is not true: National Security Assistant
Carlucci does not sit by right on either of the other
Councils; and there is no regular overlap of staff
attendance across the "foreign/domestic" line (though
it is said to be under consideration). However,
Carlucci and his aides have regularly been invited to
attend meetings of the Domestic and Economic Councils
and their working groups when it seemed appropriate,
and the Executive Secretaries of those Councils have
been invited into NSC Senior Interagency Groups (SIGs).
Another important change has been the changed
perception of the role of the NSC since the 1986
Iran/Nicaraguan contra affair and the NSC
reorganization that followed it. The Iran/contra
scandal has been widely perceived as a failure of the
government's decision making processes. Failure it
was, indeed, but the failure was the misuse of the
system rather than the lack of it.
I have pointed out that the Brownlow Committee
fifty years ago, in recommending the creation of the
Executive Office of the President (EOP) stressed that
it must be impartial. Its function should be to
coordinate and digest the advice coming from the
departments and agencies of the government, so that the
choices before the President can be put before him in a
manageable way, and so that he can see the implications
of each choice. That is an excellent idea and a good
beginning at foresight.
Th-6-7Problbm-iS-thatTstrong-W-iiledliSe6-Pie usually
haveltheir ow'n--agendaS,, and-I-it-fa-Very -tempting: t6_-Use,
one's proximity- to the -President to -own
cgoar The NSC, except perhaps during the Eisenhower
presidency, has seldom functioned as it was intended.
The National Security Assistant has, since the
incumbency of Henry Kissinger, emerged as a partisan
advocate, often more powerful than Cabinet members.
The public tends to confuse the NSC with the NSC
staff. In the Iran/contra case, the National Security
Council and the National Security Planning Group
existed to provide a balanced summary of the advantages
and penalties of proposals such as the Iran deal. For
whatever reasons, the President chose to bypass that
advice and to allow the NSC staff to function as an
operating agency to pursue objectives dear to his
heart. No institutional arrangements will work if the
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President simply elects not to use them. In that case,
the redress lies -- not with the Executive branch
institutions -- but with Congress, the Supreme Court
and ultimately with the people.
The 1987 Assistant for National Security and his
staff represent a viewpoint very different from their
predecessors. They do not go so far as to disclaim the
right to policy views on their own, but they do argue
that others must have the right to be heard and to have
their views represented to the President. Otherwise,
those other agencies will try to circumvent the NSC
system. The practical upshot has been a conscious
effort to involve all the appropriate players in
developing policy options.
One of the most effective devices for widening the
participation in developing policy options is the
informal working group. Each of the three Councils
employs the device. Senior Interagency Groups (SIGs),
organized by geographic region or by subject, have long
been a part of the NSC system, and other interagency
groups function at a lower bureaucratic level. Since
1985, the Domestic and Economic Policy Councils have
from time to time organized similar working groups as
the need is perceived. There may be eight or ten of
them in existence at any given time. They deal with
some interesting topics. Consider this list (probably
incomplete) of working groups created by the Domestic
Council:
* biotechnology;
* federalism;
* privatization;
* torts;
* patent law;
* anti-trust policy;
* productivity;
* civil service simplification;
* emergency management.
This is an impressive group of topics of legitimate
interest to the government in the 1980s. Some of the
groups are co-sponsored by the EPC.
At least two of the working groups seem likely to
exist more or less permanently. The Working Group on
Government Operations, Administration and Management is
a direct outgrowth of Meese's old Cabinet Council on
Management and Administration. The indefatigable Ralph
Bledsoe was Executive Secretary of the old Cabinet
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Council; he now chairs the Working Group -- aside from
his job as Executive Secretary of the Domestic Policy
Council.
Bledsoe is also (at least for the present)
chairing the other more or less permanent Working Group
on Energy, Environment and Natural Resources. Thereby
perhaps hangs an illustration of the problem of
conducting coordinated policy in Washington. The
comparable Cabinet Council was chaired by the Secretary
of Interior. In the reorganization of 1985, Interior
lost it to the Deputy Secretary of Energy, a man with
impressive White House connections. When that Deputy
Secretary left to become a federal judge, Bledsoe was
assigned the job. It seems a good guess that both
Interior and Energy would prefer to have the Chair
given to a White House staffer of known impartiality
and good sense, rather than see it go to the other
agency. There is a lesson in this for the organization
of any foresight capability.
These working groups draw in participants from the
rest of the government on an ad hoc basis. This
provides an avenue for traditional agencies'
participation in drafting decision documents, below the
Cabinet Secretary level. CEQ and EPA participate (as
of the time of writing) in the Working Group on Energy,
Environment and Natural Resources. They thus have a
chance to be heard, though they depend on others for an
invitation to participate at the policy level when the
President sits with the Domestic Policy Council to make
decisions.
Another informal feature tends to broaden the
access to the White House for non-Cabinet agencies.
There is something of a "ward" system (the term is
mine, not from the White House). When EPA, the
Veterans Administration (VA), the Office of Personnel
Management (OPM) or the General Services Administration
(GSA) have issues that need resolution at the White
House level, they tend to come to the Domestic Policy
Council. Similarly, NASA, the Small Business
Administration (SBA), the Office of Science and
Technology Policy in the White House, and economic
regulatory agencies tend to go through the Economic
Policy Council. Presumably, this implies that the
Executive Secretaries of the relevant Councils are also
keeping those agencies' interests in mind when inviting
participation in working groups.
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The recent handling of the "acid rain" issue
provides a good case study of the strengths and
weaknesses of the new arrangements. The Canadians for
several years have been pressing the United States to
reduce cross-boundary transport of acid precipitation.
In 1985, the President and the Prime Minister agreed to
appoint binational special envoys to study the problem.
They reported in 1986, and it was certain that acid
rain would be a principal Canadian issue when the
President and the Prime Minister met again in April
1987.
I
1 Foreign, domestic and economic policy all come
together on acid rain, since any effort to reduce it
would go to the very guts of the domestic economic
system. The Chief of Staff assigned the Domestic
Policy Council the task of developing a position paper
with the policy options spelled out. The DPC gave it
to the Working Group on Energy, Environment and Natural
Resources, which in turn asked the Department of State
to chair a sub-group at the staff level. That sub-
group is designated the "BACG" -- the U.S. side of the
Bilateral Advisory Consultative Group set up at the
recommendation of the Canadian and U.S. special envoys.
The BACG is chaired by the Assistant Secretary of State
for Oceans, International Environmental and Scientific
Affairs (OES). It includes staffers from the
Departments of Energy, Interior, State and Justice,
from EPA, from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) in Commerce, and from five White
House units (the Domestic Policy Council, the Office of
Policy Development, the Office of Science and
Technology Policy, OMB and CEQ). Membership is
flexible, and this list may be incomplete. The BACG is
a continuing group, though it has no formal charter.
The BACG prepared a policy options paper and sent
it up the ladder to the DPC. Meanwhile, in the NSC,
the Policy Review Group (a deputy-level oversight
group) was keeping up with its progress as one element
of the impending bilateral summit.
The acid rain options were presented to the
President at an expanded DPC/NSC meeting, with the
Director of EPA and the Chairman of the CEQ, among
others, invited to participate. (It is perhaps a good
sign that, among the participants themselves, there is
uncertainty but no apparent concern as to who formally
convened the meeting. It was apparently the DPC.)
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The President selected an option: to promise the
Canadians that the United States would undertake a $2.5
billion study over the next five years. In fact, while
in Ottawa, the President himself decided to add a
sweetener: an offer to discuss an acid rain agreement
with the Canadians. He told National Security
Assistant Carlucci of his decision. Carlucci passed
the word to others. Whether or not he consulted with
Carlucci or others is unclear; in any event, he had had
the exposure to their views earlier, at the expanded
meeting.
This policy process did manage to bridge the
traditional foreign policy/domestic policy gap, and it
has brought in an impressive collection of
perspectives. From the foresight standpoint, the
question is whether the process started in the middle
and was defined too narrowly.
The potential seriousness of acid precipitation
has been recognized by specialists for a decade. The
Carter Administration began the process of studying it
nationally and through international cooperation.
Since then, there were reports by expert study groups
to the National Research Council and to the White House
in 1983. An ongoing governmental study group ("NAPAP"
-- the National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program)
is chaired by the EPA Director and is scheduled to
report in 1990. The policy group, BACG, is informally
linked with NAPAP, but there is no unified direction.
More important, perhaps, is the list of missing
players: the Departments of Transportation, Commerce
(aside from NOAA), Housing and Urban Development,
Agriculture, Treasury. The acid precipitation problem
may well require a fundamental reordering of national
priorities and the directions of growth. There is
hardly a Cabinet department that does not have a stake
in the decisions. The interagency process should be
bringing in the "tangential" departments that may not
yet even recognize how acid precipitation control
policies may eventually affect them. It should inform
the Administration on issues such as the priority to be
given to acid precipitation in research budgets, the
view to take of Congressional initiatives on acid rain,
and on issues as diverse as energy, housing and
transportation policies, the view of population growth
and of immigration reform. The approach to the
Canadians should have been dovetailed into the broader
and more systematic examination. The answer to the
Canadians would have emerged naturally from the broader
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perspective. And the broader process should be
continuing.
Participation by EPA in the critical meeting with
the President depended upon an invitation from the
Domestic Policy Council (which probably meant its
Executive Secretary). This will work if the DPC has a
broad enough viewpoint to recognize all the potentially
relevant viewpoints that should be heard, and if it is
impartial and therefore interested in getting all those
viewpoints heard. (A DPC with its own policy interests
may be tempted to exclude those voices with different
viewpoints.)
In this instance, the criteria seem to be met.
However, the recent experiences of the NSC would
suggest that, if the President is to rely upon this
process for assuring that he hears all the relevant
views, the Councils' mandates should be spelled out --
as they have not been -- and there should be an
obligation of impartiality upon the Council staffs
themselves.
A better way might be to lodge that responsibility
elsewhere, perhaps in the Chief of Staff or his Deputy.
The idealization of the Brownlow committee about the
Presidential assistants' role perhaps could be made to
work -- it has not really been tried -- but the
experience of fifty years would suggest that the
original task of bringing all opinions to bear should
be separated from any substantive responsibility.
There is a whiff of the Star Chamber about these
working groups and their work. All of these issues --
not least among them acid rain -- are of interest to
the government precisely because they are important to
society. Awareness of the acid rain problem first came
from academia. The working group members are not
barred from exchanging information outside the
government, so long as they do not divulge classified
information, but they are not particularly encouraged
to do so. There is no procedure for informing the
public of the results of the working groups'
deliberations. An opportunity is missed. If, for
instance, something is tb be done about ballooning
damage claims in lawsuits, a national consensus or at
least a majority will need to be mobilized, and
discussing publicly the conclusions of the working
group on torts would be a step toward building that
consensus. Some things of course need to be kept
secret. It would hardly be a good idea to publicize
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one's negotiating position before meeting with the
Canadians. However, with these groups as with the
Global Issues Work Group (see Chapter III), the general
policy has been one of secrecy.
A final point of concern is that the new
coordinating machinery is directed usually toward
operational issues, not toward the long term. Somebody
should be looking ahead. Some of the groups have
undoubtedly tried to look ahead at emerging trends, but
it has not apparently been an ongoing responsibility of
the work groups, and their temporary character does not
encourage the long view.
At the start of the Reagan administration, one
small and tentative step was taken to bring long-term
trends to the President's attention, if not directly
into the decision process. The National Indicators
project was set up under Presidential Assistant Richard
Beal to brief the President on trends of potential
importance. A few such briefings were given, but they
have been dropped.5
The Office of Planning and Evaluation, created in
the White House early in the Reagan administration,
seems never to have been plugged into the system, and
the office withered away early in the administration.
From the foresight standpoint, there is one
potentially promising feature of the new arrangements.
The White House Office of Policy Development (OPD) has
not disappeared, and its director sits on both the
Domestic and Economic Policy Councils. His Office is
charged with the medium and long term view. In a
bureaucracy, this usually means that one has been told
to stay out of the current decisions. However, the
right person sitting on that job could, by virtue of
his participation in the Policy Councils, serve a
significant foresight role. He could become more
valuable in that role if his office should establish
regular connections with the planning elements in the
government departments. Through this network there
might, under the best of circumstances, emerge a sort
of "back door" foresight function.
Decision structures must change to fit comfortably
with the different styles of different presidents.
This can be taken too far. From experience, I know
that each new NSC staff, at the beginning of each
administration, walks into empty offices with no files
and no institutional memory.
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It is too early to judge the new structure. At
least, it contains some institutional arrangements that
could be used for the elaboration of a systematic
foresight process. The problem is that each president
must learn the job anew. This time, it has taken six
years of an eight-year presidency to get this far.
Without derogating from the right of each president to
organize his staff to fit his needs, it would seem that
a more formal description of what needs to be done, and
the formal establishment of the institutions needed to
achieve those ends, would show what has worked before.
Once the institution exists, and the need for it is
perceived, it tends to survive. The formal budget
process did not exist before 1921 but since then I
don't believe that anybody has seriously proposed
reverting to the haphazard earlier process. Even in
the wake of the Iran/contra crisis, there have been
proposals to reform the NSC, but not to abolish it.
Coordination at the working level. The commitment
to foresight must come from the top, but the process
itself must begin much farther down. The principals in
the government have neither the time for the expertise
to identify and evaluate all the ramifications of a
policy issue. They need the experts' help, and the
experts in turn need to be able to identify each other,
to have their responsibilities clearly identified, and
to learn from each other through a systematic process
of communication. The hypothetical example of Chapter
I can exist only when those conditions are present.
The government does not have the underpinnings at
the working level for such foresight.
In such an information void, the federal failure
affects the quality of local government and business
foresight, since those institutions cannot find the
information they need from the federal government.
The failure of course affects the federal
government itself. The White House can hardly get the
full range of inputs into decisions if it cannot
identify the inputters. Moreover, the failure
fragments the bureaucracy. Outside his own circle, the
government bureaucrat is likely to be nearly as lost as
any outsider from business or academia or a state
government.
At the most fundamental level, the process of
foresight begins with communications, and the need for
better communication is a leitmotif throughout this
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book. The energy analyst cannot find the irrigation
specialist. The policy maker does not hear the
relevant perspectives. The businessman complains that
he cannot penetrate the bureaucracy to find where the
data are.
First, there is the problem of finding where the
information is.
It sounds simplistic, but the first important
contribution to foresight would be a usable functional
directory. At football games, the hawkers warn that
"you can't tell the players without a program." The
warning is relevant to government.
To demonstrate the problem to the reader, let us
set up some hypothetical searches.
If you were looking for the expert on a given
topic, you might begin with the U. S. Government
Printing Office, which publishes a bibliographic
"Directories and Lists of Persons and Organizations."
You would probably start with the U.S. Government
Manual, which describes departments' and agencies'
formal responsibilities down to the bureau or office
level. The Manua/ is, however, a very formal document,
reflecting a formal process of establishing
responsibilities and couched in opaque bureaucratic
English. It is organized by agency, rather than by
topic, and it doesn't give names and telephone numbers.
The Congressional Directory, organized for the
convenience of Congressional staffers, is actually a
more accessible source of addresses and telephone
numbers for the Executive branch, as well as Congress,
but it is not functionally organized.
The next step would be the departmental
directories. They vary widely in usefulness (and some
agencies -- Health and Human Services, for instance --
do not have unified directories).
An inquirer with a question about Brazil can buy
the Department of State Telephone Directory and look up
the address and telephone number of the Brazilian
Embassy in Washington, plus the State and AID "Country
Officers" for Brazil, plus an indication of which
officers have responsibilities for economic and
consular matters. There are even home telephone
numbers. Those officers can answer some questions
immediately or in turn can guide the inquirer to other
sources and bibliographies.
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The more traditional the category of information
sought, the better the prospects of success. A chemist
interested in existing patents on polymers need only
know that the Patent and Trademark Office is in
Commerce, and he will find telephone numbers for
different classes of polymers under "Chemical Examining
Groups." But what if the inquirer is interested in
finding indicia of the rates of technological change?
The query is valid, and the issue is vitally important
to any projection of the future. As an experiment,
this author called the office of the Assistant
Commissioner for Patents and said that he was seeking
information as to the annual rate at which new patents
were being issued in certain specific technological
fields. Whom could he call to get the information? An
earnest voice at the other end of the line didn't think
there was such information and couldn't even think of
anybody to call to find out if there was.
We have described how to learn something about
Brazil. Let us hypothesize that you, the inquirer, are
a Department of State desk officer making a projection
of US-Brazilian relations -- or perhaps a businessman
planning investment or trade, and interested in making
an assessment of your chances of getting your money
out. Who would you call to learn the government's
projection of the balance of payments with Brazil? The
Planning and Economic Analysis staff or the Office of
Monetary Affairs in State? The Bureau of International
Policy and Research, or the Office of Economic
Development Policy and Planning, or the Associate
Director for National Economic Accounts, or the
Associate Director for National Analysis and
Projections, or the Associate Director for Regional
Economics, or the Associate Director for International
Economics in Commerce? The Deputy Assistant Secretary
for International Monetary Affairs, the Deputy
Assistant Secretary for Trade and Investment Policy, or
the Deputy Assistant Secretary for International
Economic Analysis in Treasury? All of the above? None
of the above?
The directories we have been talking about are at
the simplest conceptual level: lists of people,
alphabetically, and lists of offices by organization.
The communications revolution is in explosive
growth, and the government is not keeping up. Private
data banks and computerized directories of information
sources are burgeoning, even in Washington. If they
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function properly, such systems should permit a survey
of available sources by functional area or
responsibility, by topic or by key words. For the
purposes of foresight, it is critical that the inquirer
be able to find precisely who has information and/or
policy responsibility for every area of potential
interest to government. Such cross-referenced guides
can be public or private, or a combination, so long as
they work.
Private enterprise has moved into the vacuum left
by the disarray of governmental directories, and there
is at least one good and up-to-date privately-published
listing of Executive branch and Congressional offices
and key staffers, the Federal Executive Directory. It
has a key-word index.7
Congressional Information Service, Inc. (a
subsidiary of the Dutch publishing conglomerate,
Elsevier) publishes the American Statistics Index, a
state-of-the-art guide to U.S. Government statistical
publications. It alone is a sufficient guide to
published federal statistics for most imaginable
purposes -- if the government and the private sector
know about it. Perhaps there is something to
"privatization." (Appendix C gives details on these
and other guides to federal statistics.)
It is not customary to praise the United Nations
for efficiency, but in this respect they are far ahead
of the United States. The inquirer can walk down to
the U.N. Bookstore in Washington and buy a three-part
Directory of U.N. Information Systems.
For an example of the second step -- the clear
assignment of responsibility -- let us go back to the
question of demographics. Few would challenge the
statement that demography is of some importance. The
responsibility for demographic data collection and
analysis clearly lies with the Bureau of the Census,
but it disclaims any responsibility for policy.
The policy responsibility concerning population
issues outside the United States resides fairly clearly
with the Department of State Coordinator for Population
Affairs, who chaired a now-defunct Interagency Ad Hoc
Committee on Population.
The most senior population official in a domestic
agency is the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Health and
Human Services for Population Affairs. The author, in
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a six-week effort by letter and telephone in the summer
of 1984, attempted unsuccessfully to obtain any
statement from that Deputy Assistant Secretary as to
whether
* the United States has an official view of the
desirable size of the United States population.
(In fact, it does not.)
* her office constituted the "population unit at a
high level of the national administrative
structure to integrate population measures and
programs into comprehensive social and economic
plans," called for by the Bucharest World
Population Plan of Action in 1974 and signed by
the United States.
* if her office was not such an office, was there
one in the United States Government.8
The point is not whether the Deputy Assistant
Secretary could answer those questions the way I would
have liked. The point is that she did not feel
empowered to answer them at all. Is it surprising that
outsiders look in vain for clarity from such a fudge
factory?
Policy makers can hardly begin to consider "all
the significant ramifications that can be identified"
if they have no system of identifying who may know
about those ramifications, and if the bureaucrats do
not even know whether they are responsible for knowing
about a specific issue.
This sort of confusion can lead to dangerous
policy failures.
The third element of mobilizing the working levels
to participate in foresight is communications:
creating a process that will encourage and require the
experts to be in regular touch with each other across
the departmental and agency boundaries as in the
hypothetical example in Chapter I.
This process is almost totally missing in the U.S.
Government, except for the sort of informal and
traditional "clearance" channels mentioned at the start
of this chapter.
In fact, departments may actively discourage their
people from communicating "out of channels." When I
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was on loan from the Department of State to the
National Security Council, my erstwhile cohorts at
State were under instructions not to communicate with
NSC staffers except through the Secretariat.
(Fortunately for all, the instructions were regularly
ignored.) The fear of course was that the NSC would
pick the experts' brains and cut the top levels of
State out of the policy process, or that State
employees would take ideas to the NSC that they had
been unable to sell at home.
The fear was legitimate, but the effort to solve
the problem by building stone walls was ill-advised.
One can easily envisage a system in which the cross-
communication exists, but with the knowledge and
encouragement of the top officials. If it should
produce information raising doubts about a particular
policy, so much the better for the formulation of good
policies.
The fostering of such communication should be an
element of any proposal for better federal foresight.
One way of doing it -- once the community is
identifiable -- is to pose questions to it as in the
hypothetical example, even long before the question is
of interest to the White House -- questions, perhaps,
about acid rain. "Year XXXX" exercises are another way
of doing it; the Global 2000 study brought many of its
participants together for the first time.
At the working level, coordination is not simply a
question of integrating policy development. It is the
less glamorous but very important business of
developing compatible data (e.g. common measurements, a
common system of geographical nomenclature and computer
programs that can talk with each other) so that
information can be exchanged. It is also the process
of clarifying and rationalizing the planners'
assumptions (i.e. learning when two agencies'
conclusions on an important issue diverge simply
because one of them is basing its calculations on false
assumptions).
The need for improvement in these areas has been
recognized, but not much has been done about it. There
have long existed recognized sources of data in
specific areas--the Bureau of the Census and the
National Bureau of Standards are probably best-known--
but inter-agency coordination to make data mutually
useful has lagged far behind. There existed a
Statistical Policy Branch, variously named and located
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at one time or another in Commerce or in the Office of
Management and Budget (OMB), but it was abolished in
1982.
Moreover, the data base itself may be shrinking
rather than expanding as the Reagan administration
seeks to reduce governmental paperwork. An
authoritative commentator, Joseph Duncan, argues that
the declining quality of federal economic statistics
may be a basic source of present "confusion and
contradictions in economic forecasting." He cites the
decline of statistical data and the failure to adjust
the reporting system to reflect a changing economy. As
an example of the "profound implications" of this
deterioration, he suggests that analysts may have been
thoroughly misled as to the impact upon the economy of
the recent strong dollar.9
As this chapter is written, there are reports of a
governmental study underway to find ways further to
reduce the government's data collection and statistical
systems.1?
In urging the rationalizing and coordination of
the present chaotic state of data collection and
processing, I am somewhat surprised to find an ally in
the Grace Commission, which excoriated the present
statistical practices and identified two central
problems:
The first is a major leadership void in the
overall management of information. There is no
focal point to provide the direction,
coordination, and standardization needed to
operate effective information systems in the
individual agencies. Further, and of a
potentially critical nature, there is no central
authority integrating individual information
systems into a coherent management information
system necessary to support decision making in the
Executive Office of the President (EOP).11
This is a very succinct statement of a fundamental
problem that the nation must address if it is to
improve foresight. It comes from a group that has
hardly been identified as an advocate of foresight. If
the spectrum of support can extend so far -- and if the
debate can be removed from its present ideological
context -- there may be hope.
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On this note, I will leave the government's record
of efforts to improve cross-sectoral coordination. At
the policy level, the record shows halting progress
over the years toward better coordination, with
periodic reversals. No sustained and systematic effort
has been made to mobilize and coordinate the working
level. To the ardent eye of the foresight advocate,
the system is archaic and anarchic.
Let us turn now to the second generalization made
at the start of this chapter.
Second, the History of Efforts to Address Long-Term
Resource, Environmental and Population Issues.
Governmental efforts to protect resources or the
environment go at least as far back as efforts to
control poaching in the King's Forest or ordinances
governing urban zoning or waste disposal. This summary
addresses the evolution of policies in the United
States addressed consciously to the concepts of
resources, environment and population change.
Resources. The traditional starting point is the
creation under President Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford
Pinchot of the National Conservation Commission and of
the Forest Service. That was an effort to bring some
concept of long-term management to the nation's mineral
resources and public forests, a reaction to the
ruthless turn-of-the-century exploitation of forest
resources. Later, when the Dust Bowl dramatized the
problem of soil loss, President Franklin D. Roosevelt
created the Soil Conservation Service (SCS).
Concern has periodically arisen about minerals
scarcity or the long-term prospects for resource
availability. This concern has usually led to the
creation of ad hoc commissions. Among these were
President Truman's Materials Policy Commission (the
"Paley Commission" of 1951), the National Academy of
Science's Committee on Natural Resources in 1961, and
the National Commission on Materials Policy created by
an act of Congress in 1970.
The ongoing organizations such as SCS and the
Forest Service continue to shape policies. It would be
hard to identify in present policy any trace of those
temporary study groups. This suggests a conclusion
that will recur later in this book: to achieve any
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lasting results, create ongoing institutions with
policy responsibility in their subject areas.
The federal resource institutions are rather
haphazard, reflecting historical accident, bureaucratic
"turf" wars and, presumably the state of national
awareness of different resource issues. Some
organizations (e.g. the National Park Service, the Fish
and Wildlife Service, the Marine Mammals Commission)
exist primarily to protect aesthetic and non-economic
values from economic depredation. Others (e.g. SCS)
are conservation-oriented, but the conservation is
intended to serve economic ends -- continued
agricultural protectivity -- as well as secondary non-
economic benefits such as the preservation of wildlife
habitat. Still others (the Forest Service, the Bureau
of Land Management, the National Marine Fisheries
Service) are charged with the dual functions of
protecting and facilitating the economic use of
renewable resources over which the federal government
has ownership or control. The weight given to each of
these responsibilities changes with the national mood.
We tend to be less solicitous of "non-renewable"
than of "renewable" resources, perhaps because the
renewable resources consist generally of living things
with which we can identify. The Geological Survey and
the Bureau of Mines, for instance, are concerned with
identifying and facilitating private exploitation of
minerals, not with saving them. An exception perhaps
is the newest entrant into the resource field: the
Department of Energy. It combines research, production
and management, regulatory, conservation (the Bureau of
Conservation and Renewable Energy) and policy planning
functions.
The resource responsibilities described above are
scattered among the Departments of Agriculture,
Commerce, Interior and Energy, plus one independent
commission. There is no systematic coordination, and
the only regular overview is provided in the Council on
Environmental Quality (CEQ) Annual Report. That report
is not geared to any specific decision process or
machinery, and the report itself was two years behind
schedule as this book goes to the publisher.
Environment. It is easy to forget how very recent
the concepts of "the environment" and
"environmentalists" are. The term itself, in its
modern meaning, apparently came into use only in
1956.12 Problems quickly generate their own
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terminology, however, and the growing urban problems of
the 1960s--"smog" being perhaps the most important
early issue--generated a series of environmental laws:
* The Water Quality Act (1965);
* Endangered Species Preservation Act of 1966
(amended in 1969);
* Environmental Quality Improvement Act of 1970;
* National Environmental Policy Act of 1969;
* Clean Air Amendments of 1970;
* Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments
of 1972;
* Federal Environmental Pesticide Control Act
(1972, amending the Federal Insecticide,
Fungicide and Rodenticide Act of 1947);
* Noise Control Act of 1972;
* Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972;
* Endangered Species Act of 1973;
* Safe Drinking Water Act (1974);
* Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976;
* Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976.
Responsibility for carrying out all these laws is
somewhat less diffused than is true of resource
policies, because of the central role of the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
The best single characterization of this wave of
legislation is that, long overdue, it attempted to
redress a whole series of specific environmental
problems, sometimes by setting very strict linear
goals. (The Federal Water Pollution Control Act
Amendments of 1972 stipulated that " ... it is the
national goal that the discharge of pollutants into the
navigable waters be eliminated by 1985.")
For environmentalists, it was a heady period, but
it is dangerous in environmentalism or anything else to
pursue absolutes. Even among environmental goals, the
pursuit of a prohibition on water pollution may simply
shift that pollution to the atmosphere or to landfills.
Financial resources are not unlimited, and society must
learn how to get the most pollution control for its
money.
Several of the environmental acts have been coming
up for renewal, and each time the question is posed:
Will the environmentalists "succeed" (i.e. be able to
maintain the priority for environmental goals?) Will
they fail (i.e. will the laws be gutted?) Or will the
nation find a means to bring these environmental goals
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into the decision process, to be weighed against other
goals when any decision is contemplated that might
affect the environment? So far, the tendency has been
to renew the legislation substantially unchanged.
The reader should turn to other books for a
detailed look at the Reagan administration's policy
concerning environment and resources.13 The early
effort to push nationally held coal, petroleum and
timber resources into the private domain for economic
exploitation is perhaps the hallmark of the
administration's conservation policy. On the
environmental side, EPA went through a 44% decline in
funding (in real dollars) from 1981-84 and a 29%
decrease in personne1;14 it has subsequently
stabilized.
In a period that regularly brings us new bad
tidings about toxic chemical dumps, the national
Chemical Information System has been cut adrift by EPA,
to be funded by private business if it will. For over
a decade, this has been the integrated data base for
physical and regulatory data about chemicals.15
Examples such as this could be multiplied.
The energy forecasts in the Department of Energy
have cut their time horizon from 2020 to five years.
The rationale, as the erstwhile Deputy Secretary Danny
Boggs gives it, is that long-term energy forecasts are
notoriously inaccurate, anyway. To the foresight
advocate, this misses the point. One does not expect a
long-term forecast to be definitive. Rather, it may
identify some potential issues that should be watched
as subsequent projections are made every year. With
the shorter time frame, the specialists are told not to
look out beyond five years to identify those potential
issues and begin to watch them.
Population. The government has persisted in a
remarkable official blindness to population as an issue
in the United States, given the fact that population is
in the denominator of almost every equation dealing
with human welfare, and that migration patterns and
rates of population growth have fluctuated widely since
World War II.
Only 25 years ago, President Eisenhower was able
to say of efforts to introduce birth control
information into developing countries receiving U.S.
aid that he "... cannot imagine anything more
emphatically a subject that is not a proper political
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or governmental activity or function or
responsibility."16 (To his credit, he said after
leaving office that he shouldn't have made the
statement.)
Since then, the government has come to support
efforts to control population growth in the less
developed world, but only one President has dared to
suggest that it might be desirable for the United
States. In 1969, President Nixon said:
In 1917 the total number of Americans passed
100 million, after three full centuries of steady
growth. In 1967--just half a century later--the
200 million mark was passed. If the present rate
of growth continues, the third hundred million
persons will be added in roughly a thirty-year
period. This means that by the year 2000, or
shortly thereafter, there will be more than 300
million Americans.
The growth will produce serious challenges
for our society. I believe that many of our
present social problems may be related to the fact
that we have had only fifty years in which to
accommodate the second hundred million Americans.
Where, for example, will the next hundred
million Americans live? ...
Other questions also confront us. How, for
example, will we house the next hundred million
Americans? ...
How will we educate and employ such a large
number of people? Will our transportation systems
move them about as quickly and economically as
necessary? How will we provide adequate health
care when our population reaches 300 million?
Will our political structures have to be
reordered, too, when our society grows to such
proportions? ...
... we should establish as a national goal
the provision of adequate family planning services
within the next five years to all those who want
them but cannot afford them.17
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President Nixon at the same time created the
Commission on Population Growth and the American Future
chaired by John D. Rockefeller III, who had been active
in pressing for its creation. The Commission reported
in 1972. Election years are not a good time to float
controversial recommendations. The report concluded
that the Commission could find no way in which further
population growth would benefit the country. It also
had recommendations on abortion which the White House
saw as highly controversial, and the report was quietly
shelved--including the broader recommendations on
population.
Since then, the only Presidential reference to
U.S. population growth has been an oblique one.
President Carter, commissioning The Global 2000 Report
in 1977, included population along with resources and
environment among the global issues to be addressed.
The Reagan administration's view of population has
become entangled in the abortion debate. The President
himself has been guarded as to whether he himself
considers population growth to be a problem, anywhere
in the world. The administration position, as
developed for the Mexico City International Conference
on Population (August 1984) was a tortured compromise
between warring factions within the administration. It
ascribed third world countries' difficulties more
directly to their failure to adopt private enterprise
economic systems than to their population growth, and
it opposed abortions and coercion.18 In the face of
Congressional opposition, the administration has
abandoned an early proposal to end family planning
assistance in its AID program; the AID population
budget has instead been slowly whittled down since FY
1985.
On the social and economic implications of United
States population growth, the administration has been
silent.
What conclusion does one draw from this reticence?
Presidents and their advisers, more sensitive to
political winds than the professional concerned about
population growth, are either themselves unconcerned
about population issues, or they detect a great deal of
continuing political resistance to government's
concerning itself with Americans' decisions as to how
many children they will have or where they will live.
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Many poor countries, with serious and immediate
population problems, have had to face the necessity of
entering these contentious areas. It demands quite an
adjustment for the United States to grow in less than a
century from a frontier society to one in which we
recognize that limits to population growth may apply
here, too. The rapidity of our own national growth has
precipitated the need for that profound change in
thinking. One way to educate the government and the
citizenry to the need for this change is systematically
to examine how population growth affects efforts to
solve the other problems with which we are dealing.
Which leads us to ...
Third, the Development of Integrated Foresight Studies.
There has been very little effort by the Executive
branch to think about the interaction of demographic,
resource and environmental issues with each other, with
technological trends, or with other economic and social
issues.
When such efforts were undertaken, presidents
usually asked a temporary group outside the government
to do them. An example is the "Commission on National
Goals" commissioned by President Eisenhower, which
produced a widely-read report, Goals for Americans.
Much later, President Carter asked the President of
Columbia University to head the Commission for a
National Future. Its report, published at the very end
of the Carter administration, was simply lost in the
Reagan transition.
Both of these reports were primarily goal-setting
exercises, as was the Rockefeller Commission report of
1972. As such, they required a certain amount of
systematic foresight to justify the goals they set
forth; they were integrated studies, but far from
foresight as it is envisaged in this book.
Perhaps the most significant effort to create an
in-house cross-sectoral foresight operation following
the demise of the National Resources Planning Board was
the creation by President Nixon of the National Goals
Research Staff in 1969. It was given the following
task:
... forecasting future developments, and assessing
the longer range consequences of present social
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trends; measuring the probable future impact of
alternative courses of action, including measuring
the degree to which change in one area would be
likely to affect another; estimating the actual
range of social choice--that is, what alternative
sets of goals might be attainable, in light of the
availability of resources and possible rates of
progress; developing and monitoring social
indicators that can reflect the present and future
quality of American life, and the direction and
rate of its change; summarizing, integrating and
correlating the results of related research
activities being carried on within the various
Federal agencies, and by State and local
governments and private organizations.19
The history of this Staff is both poignant and
instructive. Its mandate could be written today, and
it would still be a very good one. It was created by
the President, in the Executive Office of the
President, precisely what some advocates of foresight
are presently advocating. Yet the Staff died quietly
after one unsung (but good) report, destroyed by
political infighting, without ever having played a role
in national decisions.
President Carter's 1977 Environmental Message
called for
...the Council on Environmental Quality and the
Department of State, working in cooperation with
the Environmental Protection Agency, the National
Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration, and other appropriate
agencies, to make a one-year study of the probable
changes in the world's population, natural
resources, and environment through the end of the
century. The study will serve as the foundation
of our longer-term planning.20
The result was The Global 2000 Report to the
President. It was the most comprehensive effort since
the Rockefeller report to relate population, resource
and environmental issues, and its scope was enlarged to
cover the world on the reasonable assumption that U.S.
interests may be affected by developments elsewhere.
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Even though hampered by inadequate and
inconsistent data, Global 2000 did present a detailed
and documented picture of the interrelationships
between population, resources, and the environment. It
was much less successful in relating these areas to
other relevant questions. In the end (to simplify
mercilessly), it had to content itself by simply
extrapolating recent performance in most relevant
areas: technological change rates; social development;
economic growth; international trade; political
stability, and even the weather.
What Global 2000 established above all else is
that integrated thinking about these relationships is
just at its beginnings. Global 2000, unlike its
predecessors, focused upon the weaknesses of the
government's thinking processes on which the report
itself was based. The awareness of the inadequacies of
the government's foresight apparatus has not
disappeared. The hope remains (and motivates this
book) that out of Global 2000 will come -- not just
decisions about policy -- but improvements in the
decision process itself.
President Carter, be it noted, called for Global
2000 to serve as the foundation" for future planning.
He did not ask for policy recommendations. In this
sense, Global 2000 is as close as we have yet come to
formal foresight: a systematic exercise to survey
long-term trends and inform policy makers.
Since 1981, governmental interdisciplinary studies
of population, resources and environment and their
relationship to other goals have been confined to the
work of the Global Issues Work Group, whose record will
be examined in the next chapter.
Fourth, the Connection of Foresight to Policy.
The critical question, once an integrated
analytical capability is in place, is "how do you bring
it to bear on real world decisions?"
It would be hard to identify any hard governmental
decisions taken as a result of Global 2000 as it was of
the Rockefeller and Paley reports. Follow-up
recommendations were prepared, but they were not
staffed out by the government.21 They were offered as
broad ideas rather than as specific proposals ready for
the President's signature. The follow-up report was
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completea just at tne cnange of administration, and the
Reagan administration studiously ignored it.
When ad hoc study groups disband, there is nobody
left to carry on. The study group may itself generate
legislation and enough public interest to push it
through. Failing that, the results are likely to be
lost on the wind, unless such studies are integrated
into a regular process for offering policy choices to
the administration.
I have said that the important issues of
population, resources and environment have not been
plugged systematically into Executive branch decision
making.
There is one -- and only one -- major exception to
that generalization.
The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA)
deserves special treatment because it created a process
intended to close that gap. Under this law,
... all agencies of the Federal Government shall--
(A) utilize a systematic, interdisciplinary
approach which will insure the integrated use
of the natural and social sciences and the
environmental design arts in planning and in
decisionmaking which may have an impact on
man's environment;
(B) identify and develop methods and procedures,
in consultation with the Council on
Environmental Quality established by title II
of this Act, which will insure that presently
unquantified environmental amenities and
values may be given appropriate consideration
in decisionmaking along with economic and
technical considerations;
(C) include in every recommendation or report on
proposals for legislation and other major
Federal actions significantly affecting the
quality of the human environment, a detailed
statement by the responsible official on--
(i) the environmental impact of the
proposed action,
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(11) any aaverse environmental effects which
cannot be avoided should the proposal
be implemented,
(111) alternatives to the proposed action,
(iv) the relationship between local short-
term uses of man's environment and the
maintenance and enhancement of long-
term productivity, and
(v) any irreversible and irretrievable
commitments of resources which would be
involved in the proposed action should
it be implemented.
Prior to making any detailed
statement, the responsible Federal
official shall consult with and obtain
the comments of any Federal agency
which has jurisdiction by law or
special expertise with respect to any
environmental impact involved. Copies
of such statement and the comments and
views of the appropriate Federal, State
and local agencies, which are
authorized to develop and enforce
environmental standards, shall be made
available to the President, the Council
on Environmental Quality and to the
public as provided by section 552 of
title 5, United States Code, and shall
accompany the proposal through the
existing agency review processes;
(D) study, develop, and describe appropriate
alternatives to recommended courses of action
in any proposal which involves unresolved
conflicts concerning alternative uses of
available resources;
(E) recognize the worldwide and long-range
character of environmental problems and,
where consistent with the foreign policy of
the United States, lend appropriate support
to initiatives, resolutions, and programs
designed to maximize international
cooperation in anticipating and preventing a
decline in the quality of mankind's world
environment;
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(F) make available to States, counties,
municipalities, institutions, and
individuals, advice and information useful in
restoring, maintaining, and enhancing the
quality of the environment;
(G) initiate and utilize ecological information
in the planning and development of resource-
oriented projects; and
(H) assist the Council on Environmental Quality
established by title II of this Act.22
This is the origin of the Environmental Impact
Statement (EIS).
The point here is that the Act did not tell
government what it could or could not do. It was a
process bill, despite the general (and still very
powerful) preambular language as to the importance of
preserving the environment for ourselves and future
generations. It told the government it must consider
the environmental consequences of proposed actions. It
did not say what the government must do once it had
considered these implications. It was, in effect, the
single most relevant prototype for foresight
legislation now being discussed.
The Act's greatest strength and its greatest
weakness was a feature which seems to have been
unintended by its Congressional sponsors. It opened
the way to judicial review. Environmentalists could
sue the government to force it to show that it had
considered the environmental consequences adequately in
an EIS. This feature also permitted opponents of an
action, environmentalists or not, to slow up the action
by throwing it into the courts. The judicial review
feature has caused the bureaucracy much difficulty.
This and future administrations would probably be wary
of any proposed foresight legislation that might open
the way for judicial review. The question posed for
proponents of foresight legislation is how to find an
equivalent forcing mechanism without the penalties.
The Act also created the Council on Environmental
Quality (CEQ), which promptly began putting out a very
good annual report on the environment. Some proponents
of foresight legislation emphasize the importance of an
office in the Executive Office of the President, making
periodic assessments of world trends. They should look
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at that annual report and ask themselves which aspect
of NEPA, the EIS or the CEO annual report series has
been more effective in forcing the government to look
at environmental issues. The answer, I think is self-
evident. The process has been more important than the
office or the report.
The Executive branch is (or was) diligent in
turning out EISs to meet the requirements of NEPA for
all sorts of concrete activities, such as highway
construction. It has been much less careful to conduct
overall analyses of major decisions such as President
Carter's energy proposal or the Natural Gas Act, or
President Reagan's far-reaching initiatives such as
accelerated sell-off of coastal oil-drilling rights and
Western timbering concessions. Perhaps this reflects
the constituency; there may be more organizations ready
to sue to force an EIS on a specific proposal than
there are organizations with so broad a perspective as
national resource or energy policy. The problem is
that, while any single nibble may be environmentally
unimportant, the effect of a series of nibbles may be
disastrous. The encroachment upon the nation's
wetlands is a good case in point.
The lesson here, presumably, is that an ongoing
constituency is needed to see that any foresight
mechanism is employed.
Neither CEO nor the EIS procedure has brought
environmental issues into the heart of the decision
process. One by-product, however, of the EIS process
is that every agency was required to designate an
office responsible for preparation and comment on EISs.
Although many of these were at a fairly low
bureaucratic level, the list constitutes the sole
available listing of governmental entities with
environmental foresight responsibilities. The list
changes regularly; it is maintained (after a fashion)
by the Council on Environmental Quality, and is
unclassified.
NEPA has been subsiding into disuse. Aside from
the major decisions, most of which were never brought
into the EIS process, routine environmental impact
statements have been declining more or less steadily
from about 2000 per year in the early 1970s to 549 in
1985.23
Anybody who seeks to improve national foresight,
and to bring environmental issues into it, could well
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begin with NEPA--as a model and perhaps as a vehicle.
It is, after all, still the law of the land.
In short, the federal government has yet to
develop the machinery for systematic scanning of long-
term trends and the lateral implications of
contemplated actions. Its long-term analysis of
population, resource and environment issues has been
sporadic and -- despite the clear mandate in the
National Environmental Policy Act -- it has not found a
way to connect those issues with national decision
making.
The trend, if anything, has been in the wrong
direction in recent years. It would take imaginative
new ideas to preserve the government's capacity to
address these matters in the fact of intense budget-
cutting, and there are few new ideas in evidence.
00 a" S
1. U.S. Code, Title 31, Budget and Accounting Act of
1921, Sec. 11(a).
2. The quotation, and much of the historical matter in
this section, is taken from Robert Cahn and Patricia
L. Cahn, "Lessons from the Past," Global 2000 Report
to the President, Vol. II, p.685 ff.
3. Report of the Committee on Administrative Management
in the Federal Government (Washington: U.S.
Government Printing Office, 1937. LC# JK 421 A45
1937.)
4. This description is pieced together from conversations
with those involved. There is no formal public
description of these arrangements. See, however,
Peter T. Kilborn, "How the Big Six Steer the Economy,"
New York Times, November 17, 1985, Section 3.
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5. "... the National Indicators System (NIS), which was
born in early 1981, flourished during the summer, and
was moribund by spring 1982. NIS was a program for
systematically informing the President and senior
officials of social, demographic, and economic trends
in a policy-relevant format. The system was
structured to conduct regular briefings in order to
present an objective review of national conditions,
drawing on the statistical resources of the Federal
government. When NIS did work, it was able to provide
high quality briefing materials that appeared to
directly influence several policy decisions. But the
shortfalls in the NIS system included: 1) the
difficulty of regularly getting on to the President's
calendar; 2) the failure to respond quickly enough to
rapidly changing White House needs; 3) the failure to
prepare secondary briefings to officials other than
the President; 4) the failure to develop the
cumulative computerized data base that was envisioned;
5) the lack of any kind of institutional or
programmatic existence for the NIS system." Review of
The Natural History of National Indicators by J.
Timothy Sprehe (Society, 2-:1, xxx 1982, pp.26-28,
reprinted in Future Survey, 5:2, 1983, p.9.)
Beal himself was transferred to the NSC to plan
for the management of crises. He died tragically
young. Just before his death, he addressed the AAAS
and said quite candidly that national security
planning in this or earlier administrations is a
"myth," and that without it, crisis management is very
difficult. (Science, August 31, 1984, p.907.)
6. U.S. Government Printing Office, Subject Bibliography
SB-114, November 5, 1986.
7. Carroll Publishing Company, 1058 Thomas Jefferson
Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20007. Updated
bimonthly; sold by subscription for $140 per year.
The company publishes similar county, state, city and
other directories.
8. Letter dated July 5, 1984, from Lindsey Grant to
Marjorie Mecklenberg, Deputy Assistant Secretary for
Population Affairs, U.S. Department of Health and
Human Services; follow-up telephone calls July 18,
August 22 and August 24.
9. Joseph W. Duncan, director of statistical policy for
the OMB 1974-81, now corporate economist and chief
statistician for Dun & Bradstreet, "The Economy Has
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Left the Data Behind," New York Times, June 30, 1985,
p. 2F.
10. New York Times, March 31, 1985, p. 1.
11. The President's Private Sector Committee on Cost
Control, Report to the Piesident, January 1984,
Washington, GPO, Vol. I, p. 111-20. See also Volume
VII "Information Gap in the Federal Government."
12. Supplement to Oxford English Dictionary, Vol. 1, 1972.
13. See for instance Norman J. Vig and Michael E. Kraft,
Environmental Policy in the 1980s: Reagan's New
Agenda (Washington: Congressional Quarterly Inc.,
1984). For a more general effort to describe the
condition of major environmental indicators, see State
of the Environment: An Assessment at Mid-Decade (The
Conservation Foundation, 1717 Massachusetts Avenue,
N.W., Washington, D. C. 20036; 1984).
14. Natural Resources and the Environment: The Reagan
Approach, Paul R. Portney, ed. (Washington: The Urban
Institute Press; 1984; p.68).
15. Science, August 3, 1984, p.483, and November 16, 1984,
p.816. As of the date of writing, two firms were
offering commercial access to the CIS data base. The
author does not know what provision has been made for
maintenance and up-dating. EPA maintains certain
portions for its own purposes. Readers interested in
this particular data base should address inquiries to
the Chief, Systems Development Branch, Office of
Information Resources Management, Environmental
Protection Agency, Washington, D. C. 20460.
16. President Dwight Eisenhower's News Conference, Dec.
2, 1959, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the
United States, (Washington: ? Office of the Federal
Register, 1959), p.787.
17. U.S. President Richard M. Nixon, "Special Message to
the Congress on Problems of Population Growth, July
18, 1969," in Public Papers of the Presidents of the
United States, (Washington: Office of the Federal
Register, 1969), p.521.
18. See Policy Statement: International Conference on
Population, July 13, 1984, and the Plenary Statement
presented by Ambassador James Buckley to the
International Conference on Population, Mexico City,
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August 8, 1984. Both are unclassified and should be
available from the Office of the Coordinator of
Population Affairs (OES/CP), Department of State,
Washington, D. C. 20520.
19. U.S. National Goals Research Staff, Toward Balanced
Growth: Quantity with Quality, (Washington: GPO,
July 4, 1970).
20. U.S. President Jimmy Carter, "Environmental Message to
the Congress, May 23, 1977," in The Global 2000 Report
to the President, Vol. 1, Preface.
21. U.S. Council on Environmental Quality and Department
of State, Global Future: Time to Act, (Washington:
GPO, January 1981).
22. U.S. Code, Title 42, National Environmental Policy Act
(NEPA), Sec. 102.
23. The totals (including draft statements) are as
follows:
Year
No. of EISs
Year
No. of EISs
1970-72
5,834
1979
1,273
1973
2,036
1980
966
1974
1,965
1981
1,033
1975
1,881
1982
808
1976
1,802
1983
677
1977
1,586
1984
577
1978
1,355
1985
549
The 1970-77 data are by personal communication
from the Office of Federal Activities, EPA, March
2, 1983. The 1978-84 figures are from CEQ
Environmental Quality 1984, Table A-69, p. 719.
The 1985 figure is by personal communication with
CEQ.
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XXX _
Ca.s S.-U-Lic1:5r=
lthAst. C3-1_4:31Da3L XE3E31.3.esE Vac:km-1-c C;X:N=701-11:3
If "foresight" is as broad an idea as I have
defined it, it is not confined to a single
component of government. There was, however, a
study group in the Reagan administration
specifically tasked to address long-term global
trends and their significance for the United
States. That body was the Global Issues Work
Group of the Cabinet Council on Natural Resources
and the Environment, and it was the lineal
descendant of Global 2000, the Rockefeller
Commission, the National Goals Research Staff, and
the Paley Commission.
A look at the functioning of the Work Group
may illuminate the issues and problems faced in
any effort to bring foresight effectively into
decision making.
History of the Work Group
My belief is that the Global 2000 Report is
not an end in itself; it is the first step into
the future.
-- A. Alan Hill
Chairman, CEQ
Global 2000 Conference
February 26, 1982
In early 1981, the new Reagan administration found
the "foresight issue" squarely on its doorstep. Global
2000 had just been published and there were a number of
legislative proposals aimed at improving the
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government's long-range planning capability. Public
discussion and media reviews of Global 2000 still made
good news, and articles and reports of studies
supporting or debunking Global 2000 regularly appeared
in both scholarly and popular journals. Pointed
questions were raised on the Administration's views on
the report, on the recommendations contained in the
companion paper, Global Future: Time to Act, and
particularly on its position on the central issue of
foresight.
During his June 1981 Senate confirmation hearing,
Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) Chairman-
designate A. Alan Hill stated that a high priority for
the Council would be coordination of White House
efforts to address global environmental issues. He
noted, also, that in order to help in the development
of Administration policy, CEQ would be refining the
Global 2000 report with further analysis of the data
and modeling.'
On September 22, 1981, Hill wrote a letter to the
heads of those federal departments and separate
agencies having major environmental and natural
resource responsibilities. He referred to White House
guidance and asked for designation of a senior agency
official from each of them to participate in a Global
Issues Work Group (GIWG) to "identify global
environment and resource issues of national concern,
and recommend appropriate government action." The
letter also noted that Global 2000 had stressed "the
need to improve the U.S. national capability to gather
information and to forecast future trends."2
The bureaucratic levels of those designated varied
widely, from a Senior Policy Advisor to the President
to an Assistant Office Director at AID, but most were
at a policy level capable of speaking for their
agencies with some authority. Initially, attendance
was by principals only. However, after several
meetings, agencies were often represented by both
policy and senior staff participants. A mix of the two
ultimately came to be the norm. Despite its title, the
Work Group met infrequently -- only two times, for
instance, in 1984.
In October 1981, Hill addressed the Environmental
Quality Committee of the National Association of
Manufacturers. Citing the Administration's commitment
to reviewing issues raised in Global 2000 and other
reports, he identified improvement of the government's
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forecasting skills as "an important first step,"
noting, "if our government's ability to forecast is not
the best, how can we expect to plan effectively?"3
The initial meeting of the Global Issues Work
Group was held on January 22, 1982. A CEQ Scope
Memorandum prepared for this meeting suggested the
proposed objectives and scope for the Work Group:
GLOBAL ISSUES WORK GROUP
January 22, 1982
Work droup Objectives
Scope
* Improve the quality of the government's
information base in the areas of global
environment, resources and population.
* Improve the ability of the government to analyze
such information, to forecast future trends, and
to make policy recommendations.
* Provide the optimal basis for long-term policy
decisions on the part of the President.
* Inventory and evaluate effectiveness of existing
U.S. international activities (multilateral and
bilateral) with regard to global issues, and
make recommendations.
* Examine the current status, agency-by-agency, of
information gathering and forecasting
capabilities; examine capabilities government-
wide.
* Update information on substantive issues covered
in Global 2000.
* Report to the President.
Although no formal work plan was adopted at the
meeting, the suggestions for action contained in the
Scope Memorandum formed the basis for many of the
projects subsequently undertaken by the Group.
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At the Global 2000 Conference in St. Louis,
Missouri, in late February 1982, Chairman Hill
delivered a speech in which he outlined many of the
Reagan administration's positions and priorities
regarding global environmental issues in general, and
foresight capability in particular. While underscoring
many of the Administration's differences with the
Global 2000 report, particularly that report's
perceived reliance on outdated data and trends already
in the process of change, Hill strongly endorsed Global
2000's call for improvements in the government's
forecasting ability, stating, "We intend to do all
possible to see that improvements are made.
Specifically," he noted, "we must upgrade the sets of
global data, improve the analytical and predictive
models that are used in forecasting and analyses, and
develop what I call 'linkages' among the models that
deal with only small segments of global resources and
environment." "Further," Hill added, "a system of
making data available on a more timely basis needs to
be implemented. "4
In early spring 1982, the attention of the Work
Group was focused on formulating the following set of
Global Environmental Principles "to further the
Administration's commitment and to guide its policies."
Specifically, the "Principles" were intended for
inclusion in the U.S. Plenary Address at the UN Session
of a Special Character commemorating the 10th
anniversary of the Stockholm Conference, the forum that
had given birth to the United Nations Environment
Program.
Global Environmental Principles
* A healthy environment is fundamental to the
well-being of mankind.
* Economic growth and social progress are
necessary conditions for effective
implementation of policies which will protect
the global environment and promote wise use of
the earth's natural resource base.
* Environmental policy should be based on the
interests of present and future generations.
The most successful policies are those which
promote liberty and individual rights, as well
as protection of the physical environment.
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* Nations should pursue economic development in
furtherance of the security and well-being of
their citizens in a manner which is sensitive to
environmental concerns. Due respect should be
given to different approaches which various
nations may adopt to integrate environmental
considerations into development strategies based
on their particular national values and
priorities.
* Careful stewardship of the earth's natural
resources can contribute significantly to sound
economic development. Individual ownership of
property, and free and well-developed markets in
products and capital, are powerful incentives
for resource conservation. These institutions
best promote the use of renewable resources and
the development of substitutes for renewable
resources, ensuring continued resource
availability and environmental quality.
* When environmental problems extend beyond the
boundaries of any one nation, all affected
nations should participate in investigating the
nature of the problem, understanding its
implications, and developing cost-effective
responses.
* Governments, like individuals, should act so as
to minimize environmental degradation.
Decisions on environmental policies and programs
should take into account the concerns of those
closest to the problems and most directly
affected.
* Increased scientific understanding of
environmental problems, and improved methods of
forecasting environmental conditions, are needed
to address environmental issues in an effective
and efficient manner. Ultimately, resolution of
environmental problems which are global in
nature will be determined by the quality and
credibility of scientific and technical
knowledge as well as by the degree of
cooperation among nations, including the
effective involvement of private sector
institutions.
These principles later formed the philosophical basis
for the Work Group's draft "Perspective Paper"
discussed later.
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A second project (resulting from the Work Group's
January 1982 Scope Memorandum) was the compilation of
an inventory of the nation's bilateral and multilateral
agreements relating to issues of population, resources
and environment. This project was undertaken to
provide an indication of the extent of federal
government involvement in international matters and how
information developed through these agreements could be
made available to policy makers in a timely manner.5
Although a draft inventory was quickly prepared and
widely circulated, finalization was delayed until
January 1984 as Work Group efforts shifted to other
priorities. The inventory, entitled "U.S. Government
Participation in International Treaties, Agreements,
Organizations and Programs in the Fields of
Environment, Natural Resources and Population," remains
unpublished, but is available from CEQ or the Office of
Food and Natural Resources of the Department of State.
The other aspect of that project -- to make
recommendations to policy makers -- was never pursued.
As a third project, the Work Group undertook a
survey of federal agencies to determine the extent of
their activities in the population/resource/environment
field and in the practice of foresight. The answers
that came back from different agencies varied widely in
depth and detail. Some of them apparently tended to
substantiate conclusions reached in Global 2000, while
others were at variance with it. Efforts were made
within CEQ to analyze the results of the survey, but
the task proved overwhelming, and no agreed conclusions
were ever drawn from the survey.6
As a fourth concurrent project, CEQ sponsored a
contract with the World Wildlife Fund (U.S.) to study
the "Corporate Use of Information Regarding Natural
Resources and Environmental Quality." This study was
commissioned to explore Chairman Hill's often voiced
contention that, in addition to the federal government,
other entities collect, store and analyze information
on population, resources and environment, and that a
mechanism for better cooperation with them must be
developed.7
The report of this project, released in May 1984,
strongly confirmed Hill's contention, and showed a
large and largely unsatisfied private sector need for
timely access to accurate government information on the
global environment and natural resources. It also
revealed a strong private sector distrust of most
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federal government forecasts. (The study is summarized
at length in Chapter VI and Appendix E.)
The most ambitious and continually frustrating
project undertaken by the Work Group was its central
effort to develop a credible, consistent consensus
Administration response to Global 2000.
Characterizing the tasks facing the Group after
its second meeting as "formidable," Hill, in testimony
before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs in April
1982, described the function of the GIWG as one of
providing "the Administration, through the Cabinet
Council process, with the collective thinking of senior
officials able to take policy level responsibility to
recommend appropriate Government action on global
environmental issues of national concern."8 On the
subject of foresight, Hill stated that as the work of
the group progressed it would "suggest mechanisms to
improve the quality of the government's information
base access and recommend improvements in the ability
of the Government to forecast future trends, and
provide an optimal basis for long-term policy
decisions." As it has turned out, the difficulties the
Group has experienced in obtaining the "collective
thinking of senior officials" about global issues in
general, and about the foresight process in particular,
make the appropriateness of Hill's choice of the label
"formidable" almost prophetic.
One element of this central Work Group project was
a planned review of Global 2000 itself. This review
was mentioned by Chairman Hill in the April House
hearings and again in July 1982 testimony before the
Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
Although it appears that no formal review was
undertaken, reference to Global 2000 was made in a
number of Administration speeches, and portions of the
various drafts of the "Work Group Options Paper"
circulated during 1983 were devoted to a description of
some of the perceived strengths and weaknesses of
Global 2000.
Meanwhile, Chairman Hill continued to remind
listeners of his two-fold purpose to assess global
trends and to improve the government's foresight
machinery. Speaking to the National Chamber Litigation
Center Forum in September 1982, Hill said the Reagan
administration recognized Global 2000 as "an important
document that raises a number of tough questions." He
also noted recognition of a number of "inadequacies
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which detract from its usefulness as a basis for
formulating policy." Singling out Global 2000's
identification of governmental inadequacy in doing
accurate forecasts, Hill noted its finding that
"assumptions used by computer modelers not only vary
from agency to agency but often are inconsistent," and,
referring to the mandate that established the GIWG,
said that "a project to determine how the Federal
Government's forecasting capabilities can be improved"
had been undertaken at White House request.9 This
theme was echoed once more in 1982 in the Chairman's
address at the EPA Region IV Environmental Review
Conference in October.1?
Work continued on the effort to identify and
assess substantive global issues but in late 1982 it
took a new direction. Throughout the fall and winter
months of 1982 and into the spring of 1983, several
drafts of an "Options Paper" were circulated among
members of the GIWG. These internal working documents
were intended to give the Cabinet Council a summary
statement of Administration views on global issues and
to suggest options for an Administration response to
Global 2000. Chairman Hill apparently felt the need to
get a mandate from the Cabinet Council.
A final version of the Options Paper was presented
to the Cabinet Council on Natural Resources and the
Environment on March 25, 1983. In keeping with normal
Cabinet Council practice, no public release of the
report was made.
That March 25th meeting was the only occasion on
which the work of the Work Group was discussed by a
policy-level group. (As Chairman Hill's letter of
September 22, 1981, had made clear, the Work Group was
not a policy group, having authority only to
"recommend.") The Administration considers the
deliberations of the Cabinet Councils, and the papers
submitted to them, to be entitled to "executive
privilege." Therefore, no complete first-hand record
of the March 25 meeting is publicly available. Some
sense of the directions which the Work Group was
instructed to follow may be had from the following
elements taken from the public record.
At the Global Tomorrow Coalition Conference on
June 2, 1983, Hill reported the GIWG to be moving on
two tracks: one, to "lead to an expanded statement of
our approach to global issues in general" and the
other, to be "devoted to a review of specific issues
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and programs." "Further," he added, "we will continue
examining the important area of forecasting. Our need
for timely and accurate information is obvious. As
this information becomes available, we can make better,
more informed decisions." A new note of caution
entered his remarks, however. "Government," he said,
"must exercise great care in reacting to unverified
trends and forecasts. It is very appropriate for
government, business, academia and public interest
organizations to compile and share reliable data on
global environmental conditions. It is also vital to
watch for warning signs and trends. But, if we permit
the tools and models of modern technology to become
regarded as infallible crystal balls, we face the
danger of reducing the effectiveness of the most
valuable tool of all: human ingenuity."11
One may deduce from Chairman Hill's remarks that
the Cabinet Council had allowed him to continue his
work but had warned him to proceed very cautiously, if
he should continue his work on foresight. He has since
spoken of the Cabinet Council's charge to produce a
relatively brief Perspectives Paper outlining the
Administration's philosophy concerning environmental
issues, and he has underlined that this must be reached
by "consensus."12 Since "consensus" in government is
equivalent to the lowest common denominator, Hill was
saying in effect that the Cabinet Council had told him
not to bring back anything controversial.
Following that March 25th meeting, there has been
no further talk of a detailed rebuttal to Global 2000,
and we must assume that the decision was taken to drop
that idea.
A somewhat more detailed glimpse of the Work
Group's instructions following the March 25th Cabinet
Council meeting was given to the public on January 26,
1984, when Chairman Hill convened a meeting with
several Washington-based environmental organizations
under the "Sunshine Act." At Hill's request, the Work
Group Staff Director again outlined a "two track"
decision of the Cabinet Council and a "three part
implementation plan" envisaged by CEO and the Work
Group.
The "two tracks" were to be "an expanded statement
of our approach to global issues" in the form of a
"Perspectives Paper." This Paper was to be based upon
the 1982 "Global Environmental Principles." It would
state the philosophical and policy underpinnings for
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the second "track," which was to consist of individual
"Issue Papers" reviewing "specific issues and
programs."
The third element, added in the "implementation
plan," was to be a description of the Administration's
approach to the question of governmental foresight
capability, or Foresight Paper.
In response to questions concerning any ultimate
public dissemination of Work Group products, the Staff
Director responded that the charge from the Cabinet
Council called for a document "suitable for
publication," but cautioned that the decision on
release of any GIWG documents ultimately rested with
the Cabinet Council.
The desirability of having a "perspectives"
document completed in advance of, and as a tone setter
for, the individual Issue Papers was broadly
recognized. The governing factor, however, turned out
to be timing -- a generally perceived need to have the
project completed well in advance of the 1984
elections, to avoid charges of political motivation or
manipulation. It was therefore agreed to proceed
simultaneously on parallel tracks: the Perspectives
Paper and the Issue Papers.
In early spring 1984, Chairman Hill suggested a
modification in Work Group goals. Rather than
continuing to ,press for simultaneous completion of all
elements of the project, Hill, sensing an escalation in
coordination and timing difficulties facing the Group,
asked it to focus on completion of the Perspectives
Paper and several representative Issue Papers. These,
he suggested, stood a better chance of completion and
could be presented to the Cabinet Council in early
summer with a memorandum documenting project status,
making recommendations for subsequent steps, and
requesting approval or further guidance. Completion of
the balance of the Issue Papers and the yet-to-be-
formatted Foresight Paper would await the Cabinet
Council decision. In this way, the Group's progress to
date could become a matter of record, the appearance of
a missed pre-elections deadline could be avoided, and
breathing room obtained to allow work on the missing
elements of the project to continue.
Faced with competing agency priorities,
development of these documents progressed slowly. A
semi-final draft Perspective Paper submitted for/
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"final" professional editing in April 1984 triggered
suggestions for yet further major revision. By late
summer 1984 it was apparent that no consensus was
likely before the November elections.
Concurrently, some 26 candidate Issue Papers were
drafted following a standardized format. By mid-May
1984, tentative agreement was reached within the GIWG
to consolidate these Issue Papers under several topical
headings. Several polished drafts were indeed
produced, and the draft on genetic diversity was even
subjected to some informal non-governmental peer
review.
Drafting of other consolidated papers lagged as
policy interest waned. No formally cleared final
consolidated Issue Papers were ever completed.
The element of the global issues project which
turned out to be the most difficult to handle, however,
was preparation of the Foresight Paper. With both the
Perspective Paper and the Issue Papers there was,
despite a myriad of problems preventing completion, a
certain sense of direction and conceptual expectation
of a finished product. This was not the case with the
proposed foresight capabilities document.
Whereas there was willingness on the part of one
or more members to take the lead or to join in drafting
other papers, the Foresight Paper remained largely
without an active GIWG constituency. The notable
exception was the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Responding to Hill's request for assistance, the NSF
Division of Policy Research and Analysis solicited
private sector advice and developed a systematic
proposal for a process to develop an improved
foresight capability in the government. The heart of
the process was a decision grid (shown here), intended
to permit decision makers to decide what degree of
centralization and coordination would be (a) effective
and (b) cost-efficient at each stage of the foresight
process as it was envisaged by NSF.13
While this author would prefer to see the
foresight process more explicitly connected to policy
making, the proposal is an interesting contribution to
the process of selecting a decision making process.
Although the NSF draft has not been formally
considered, it could be of use if the Work Group -- or
some future group -- returns to the subject.
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0
0
0
0
C
0
CO
0
0
0
0
CO
LO
0
CC
434Es1s
by Jobn D.. Sterman
But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain;
The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft a-g/ey,
An' /ea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!
Robert Burns, "To a Mouse"
This chapter has a narrowly focused purpose. It
is not about the uses of computers in foresight; it is
a guide to the strengths and weaknesses of computerized
mathematical models. Computers have other potential
uses in foresight that do not necessarily involve
computer modeling, such as electronic data bases for
the storage, retrieval and communication of data. For
these uses, I would refer the reader to other
sources.1
There have been misunderstandings on all sides as
to the role computer modeling should play in foresight,
at which level and what stage models should be brought
into the process. Those decisions will depend upon the
way the foresight process itself is structured, and
there are other studies addressing those relationships.
This chapter is intended to give the non-modeler a
sense of the terminology and concepts of different
models, to help him or her to decide what models'
capabilities are and how they may be useful.2
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The Inevitability of Using Models
Computer modeling of social and economic systems
is only about three decades old. Yet in that time,
computer models have been used to analyze everything
from inventory management in corporations, to the
optimal distribution of fire stations in New York City,
to the performance of national economies, to the
interplay of global population, resources, food and
pollution. Computer models have been front page news
as in the case of Limits to Growth,3 have been the
subject of numerous congressional hearings, and have
influenced the fate of legislation. Computer modeling
has become an important industry, generating hundreds
of millions of dollars of revenues annually.
As computers have become faster, cheaper, and more
widely available, models have become commonplace in
forecasting and public policy analysis, especially in
economics, energy and resources, demographics and other
crucial areas. As computers continue to proliferate,
more and more policy debates will involve the results
of models. Though we are not all going to be model
builders, we are all becoming the consumers of models,
whether we know it or like it. The ability to
understand and evaluate computer models is fast
becoming a prerequisite for the policy maker,
legislator, lobbyist, and citizen alike.
Each of us will be faced with the results of
models and will have to make judgments about their
relevance and validity. How can such decisions be made
in an intelligent and informed manner? Can modeling be
made accessible to the ordinary person or will it
remain the special magic of a technical priesthood?
This chapter offers tentative answers to those
questions. It first highlights the characteristics and
capabilities of computer models such as are used in
foresight. (Models of physical systems such as the
models NASA uses to test the space shuttle are not
discussed.) The advantages and disadvantages, uses and
misuses of formal models will be presented. What are
the fundamental assumptions of the major modeling
activities? What are the crucial questions a model
user or model consumer should ask when evaluating the
appropriateness and validity of a model?
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Mental and Computer Models
Fortunately, everyone is already familiar with
models. People use models every day -- mental models.
Our decisions and actions are based not on the true
state of affairs, but on mental images of the state of
the world, how the parts of the system are related, and
how our actions will influence the system.
Mental models have some powerful advantages. The
mental model is flexible. It can take a wide range of
information into account, not just numerical data. It
can be adapted to new situations and modified as new
information becomes available. The great systems of
philosophy, politics, and literature are, in a sense,
mental models. But mental models are not easily
examined by others. Their assumptions are hard to pin
down in debate or discussion. Interpretations differ.
Ambiguities and contradictions can go unresolved.
Of more concern is the fact that people are not
very good at interpreting the assumptions of their own
mental models. Psychologists have shown that people
can take only a few factors into account in making
decisions.4 People often make errors in deducing the
consequences of their assumptions. Research on the
behavior of people in organizations (e.g. families,
businesses, the government) shows that decisions are
not made by rational consideration of objectives,
options, and consequences. Rather decisions are often
made by rote, using standard operating procedures that
evolve out of tradition and which adjust only slowly to
changing conditions.5 These decision making rules
often make sense given the role of the decision makers
in the organization, the information available to them,
and the limited time available to make decisions. The
problem is that individual perspectives may be
parochial, information incomplete, dated, or biased,
and the time available to weigh alternatives
insufficient. Decisions are strongly influenced by
organizational context, authority relations, peer
pressure, cultural perspective, and selfish motives.
As a result many decisions turn out to be incorrect
because the complicated puzzle of choosing the best
course of action is too difficult. Psychologists and
organizational observers have identified dozens of
different biases that creep into human decision making
as a result of cognitive limitations and organizational
pressures.6 Hamlet exclaims "What a piece of work is a
man, how noble in reason, how infinite in
faculties...!" But it seems that people, like Hamlet
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himself, are simply not capable of making rational
decisions without error and without being swayed by
societal and emotional pressures.
Enter the computer model.
Computer models offer an improvement over mental
models because
* they are explicit, and their assumptions are
open to all for review.
* they infallibly compute the logical consequences
of the modeler's assumptions.
* they are comprehensive, and able to interrelate
many factors simultaneously.
These are powerful advantages. However, in
practice, many models are
* so complex and poorly documented that no one
can examine their assumptions. They become
black boxes.
* so complex the user has no confidence the
assumptions are consistent or correct.
* unable to deal with relationships and factors
which are difficult to quantify, or for which
numerical data do not exist, or which are
outside the expertise of the specialists who
built the model.
In part because of these problems, computer models have
often been misused. Models have often been used to
lend authority to an argument, to justify decisions
already taken, or to provide a scapegoat when a
forecast turns out wrong.
How can a policymaker know what kind of model is
appropriate for the problem at hand? How can a
prospective model user decide whether a model is
appropriate for the purpose at hand, whether its
results are valid or useful? How can one guard against
the misuses of models? No single or comprehensive
answer can be given, but some useful guidelines can be
given.
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The Importance of Purpose
A model must have a clear purpose. The purpose
should be to solve a particular problem. A clear
purpose is the single most important ingredient for a
successful modeling study. Beware the analyst who
proposes to model an entire social or economic system
rather than a problem. What is the difference? For
example, a model designed to understand how to
stabilize the business cycle is a model of a problem.
A model designed to understand how the economy can
make a smooth transition from oil to alternative energy
sources is a model of a problem. A model that claims
to be a comprehensive representation of the economy is
a model of a system. Why does it matter? All models
are simplifications of the real system. A truly
comprehensive model would be as complex as the real
system and just as inscrutable.
The art of modelbuilding is knowing what to leave
out. In this context, the purpose of a model is a
logical knife. It provides a criterion for deciding
what to cut out, leaving only the essential features
necessary to fulfill the purpose. In the example
above, the comprehensive model of the economy will
likely be enormous. In order to answer all questions,
it will include many factors irrelevant to the business
cycle such as long-term population growth or resource
depletion. And it will include factors irrelevant to
understanding the energy transition such as short-term
changes in unemployment and interest rates. Because of
its size, it will be next to impossible to examine the
assumptions. The model builders, not to mention the
intended consumers of its output, are unlikely to
understand its behavior, thus its validity will be
largely a matter of faith.
A model designed just to examine the business
cycle or energy transition, on the other hand, can be
much smaller. It can be limited to those factors
thought to be important in understanding business
cycles or energy. Its validity for its purpose can be
assessed by asking how its assumptions relate to the
most important theories of the business cycle or
resource economics. Of course, a model with a clear
purpose can still be incorrect, large, and difficult to
understand. But a clear purpose allows model users to
ask the questions that can reveal the utility of a
model for solving the problem at hand.
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Two Kinds of Models
There are many types of models and they can be
classified in many ways. Models can be static or
dynamic, mathematical or physical, stochastic or
deterministic. One of the most useful classifications,
however, is to divide models into those that optimize
versus those that simulate. The distinction between
optimization and simulation models is particularly
important since these types of models are suited for
fundamentally different purposes.
Optimization models. The Oxford English
Dictionary defines "optimize" as "to make the best or
most of; to develop to the utmost." The output of an
optimization model is a statement of the best way in
which to accomplish some goal. For example, a
nutritionist would like to know how to design meals
that fulfill certain dietary requirements but cost as
little as possible. A salesperson must visit a certain
number of cities and would like to know how to make the
trip as short as possible, taking into account the
available transportion between cities. Instead of
trial and error, an optimization model may be used to
determine the best way.
An optimization model typically consists of three
parts. The objective function specifies the goal or
objective. For the nutritionist, the objective
function is to minimize the cost of the meals. For the
salesperson, it is to minimize the travel time or total
mileage of the trip. The decision variables restrict
the choices of the decision variables to those that are
possible or acceptable. In the diet problem, the
constraints would specify that consumption of each
nutrient must exceed the minimum daily requirement.
The constraints might also specify that you don't want
potatoes more than three times a week. The constraints
in the salesperson's problem would specify that each
city must be visited at least once, and would restrict
the selection of routes to the available connections
(e.g. if there were no direct flights from Boston to
Cincinnati, the constraints would require you to pass
through Cleveland or Pittsburgh or wherever on the
way)
Thus an optimization model takes as input the
goals to be met, the choices to be made, and the
constraints to be satisfied. It yields as output the
best decision that can be made given the assumptions of
the model. Because optimization models tell you what
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to do in order to make the best of the situation, they
are normative or prescriptive models. The purpose of
an optimization model is not to tell you what will
happen in a certain situation, but what ought to be
done to optimize the objective.
Limitations of optimization. There are a variety
of limitations and problems with optimation models
which a potential user must bear in mind.
Whose objectives? One obvious difficulty is the
problem of specifying the objective function. It is
clear that the dietician wants to minimize the cost of
food, but what is the objective function of the mayor
of New York City? How is the optimal population of the
world to be defined? How can intangibles like the
quality of life be measured and incorporated in an
objective function? How should conflicting goals and
the differing agendas of special interest groups be
balanced? The objective function embodies the values
and preferences held to be desirable. Whose values and
preferences should be used?
Because optimization is prescriptive, it always
involves subjective value judgments. Users of
optimization models should always scrutinize the
objective function and constraints to examine the
values they embody, both explicitly and by omission.
For example, a water quality model may find the
cheapest way to place sewage treatment plants along a
river so as to meet water quality standards. The model
user should ask how the model takes into account the
impacts on fishing, recreation, wild species, and the
development potential in the affected areas. Unless
explicitly incorporated in the model, these
considerations are implicitly held to be of no value.
Though difficult, the problem of choosing an
objective function is not insurmountable. Intangibles
like quality of life can often be quantified, at least
roughly, by for example breaking them into measurable
components. Quality of life in a city might be
represented as depending on unemployment, housing
adequacy, the crime rate, air quality, etc. A variety
of techniques have been developed to help extract
preferences from interviews and other impressionistic
data. The attempt to make values explicit may itself
have enormous value for the clients of a modeling
project, and is a worthwhile exercise in any study.
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Linearity: A more important problem relates to
the verisimilitude of optimization models. Because a
typical optimization problem is very complex, involving
hundreds or thousands of variables and constraints, the
mathematical problem of finding the optimum is
extremely difficult. To render the optimization
problem tractable, a number of simplifications are
commonly introduced. One common simplification is to
assume all the relationships in the system are linear.
In fact the most popular optimization technique, linear
programming, requires the objective function and all
the constraints to be linear.
Linearity is convenient mathemetically but almost
always unrealistic. For example, a model of a firm's
inventory distribution policies may lcontain a
relationship between inventory and shipments. If the
inventory of goods in a warehouse is 10% below normal,
shipments may be reduced by, say, 2% because certain
items will be out of stock. If the model required the
relationship to be linear, then a 20% shortfall would
reduce shipments by 4%, a 30% shortfall by 6%, and so
on. But obviously, when the warehouse is empty (a 100%
shortfall of inventory), no shipments are possible,
while the linear relationship indicates shipments would
be 80% of normal, an absurdity.
This may seem like a trivial example, but consider
the sorry fate of the passenger pigeon, ectopistes
migratorius. Before the colonization of North America,
passenger pigeons were extremely abundant. Huge flocks
of the migrating birds would darken the skies for days.
They often caused extensive damage to crops and were
hunted both as a pest and for food. For years, hunting
had little impact on the population. The prolific
birds reproduced fast enough to offset most losses to
hunters. But the fertility of the pigeons depended
nonlinearly on their population density. In large
flocks they could reproduce at high rates. But in
small flocks fertility dropped precipitously. As
hunting gradually reduced the population, fertility
fell, accelerating the decline in population. Lower
population levels further lowered the birth rate, in a
vicious cycle. By 1914, the passenger pigeon was
extinct.
There are some techniques available to solve
certain nonlinear optimization problems, and research
is continuing. But in general, the nonlinearities that
can be handled are limited, and the vast majority of
optimization models assume the world is linear.
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Lack of feedback: Complex systems are highly
interconnected. There is a high degree of feedback
between sectors. For example, a water quality model
may assume the sewage load to be treated is fixed, and
compute the optimum size of treatment plants to be
built. But if the water quality improves as a result
of treatment, the attractiveness of the river for
development will increase, raising the sewage load.
The results of the plant siting decisions feed back
through the physical, economic, and social environment
to alter the conditions that the policy was,suited for.
A model that ignores feedback effects is said to
have a narrow boundary. Such models tend to rely on
exogenous variables. There are two basic kinds of
variables in a model; endogenous and exogenous
variables. Endogenous variables are those that are
calculated by the model. They are the variables
explained by the structure of the model, the variables
for which the modeler has an explicit theory.
Exogenous variables influence other variables in the
model but are not calculated by the model. They are
given simply by a set of numerical values over time.
The values of exogenous variables may come from other
models but are most likely the product of an
unexaminable mental model.
Ignoring feedback can result in policies that are
diluted, delayed, or defeated by the system, or which
generate unanticipated side effects.23 An illustration
is provided by the construction, in the 1950s and 60s,
of interstate highway networks and freeways to
alleviate congestion around major cities. In Boston,
for example, it used to take a half an hour to drive
from the neighborhood of Dorchester to the downtown
area, a journey of only a few miles. With the
construction of a limited access highway network,
travel time dropped substantially. But by reducing
congestion, outlying communities were opened up. The
population in the suburbs soared. Today the rush hour
journey from Dorchester to downtown often takes half an
hour or more. The center city has become more
congested and polluted. Its population has declined.
Many businesses moved to the suburbs or were squeezed
out by shopping malls. In the suburbs, farmland was
paved over or turned into housing developments. The
point is not to condemn these changes but to illustrate
how a policy aimed at reducing highway congestion
generated a wide range of side effects and was
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eventually undone by feedback effects which were
largely unanticipated.
In theory, feedback can be incorporated in
optimization models. But in practice, the resulting
complexity and nonlinearity usually renders the
optimization problem insoluble. As a result, many
optimization models ignore most of the feedback
effects. Model users should identify the degree to
which important feedbacks are incorporated in the model
and how excluded effects might alter the assumptions of
the model and thus invalidate the results.
Lack of dynamics: Many optimization models are
static. They determine the optimal solution for a
particular moment in time without regard for how the
optimal state is reached or for the future evolution of
the system. For example, the U.S. Forest Service once
constructed a linear programming model to optimize the
use of government lands. The model was enormous, with
thousands of decision variables and tens of thousands
of constraints. It required the full use of a large
computer for hours or even days at a time to find the
solution. Typographical errors in the model's huge
database required months of debugging. Despite the
effort required, the model produced the "optimal" use
of forest resources for a single moment in time. It
did not take into account how harvesting a particular
area would affect its future ecological development.
It did not consider how land use needs or lumber prices
might change in the future. It did not consider how
long it would take for new trees to grow to maturity
in the harvested areas, or the economic and
recreational effects during this time. The model
provided the optimal decisions for a single year even
though those decisions would influence the development
of forest resources for decades.
Not all optimization models are static. The
MARKAL model, for example, is a large linear
programming model designed to determine the optimal
choice of energy technologies. Developed at the
Brookhaven National Laboratory, the model produces as
output the least-cost mix of coal, oil, gas, etc. in
five-year intervals well into the next century. It
requires exogenous inputs of future fuel prices,
construction and operating costs for unconventional
energy technologies, and energy demands. The model is
dynamic in the sense that it provides a "snapshot" of
the optimal state of the system at five-year intervals.
But it does not explain how the system moves from one
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optimal state to another. For example, it does not
incorporate construction delays for energy production
facilities, delays which are often much longer than
five years. The model assumes that people, seeing what
the optimal mix is for, say, the year 2010, would begin
construction far enough in advance to have the required
plants ready on time.
Delays are pervasive. It takes time to acquire
capital plant and equipment, to clean up a waste dump,
to acquire information. Delays are a major source of
instability in complex systems. Delays in carrying out
or perceiving the effects of decisions may cause
overreaction or prevent timely intervention. Acid rain
provides a typical example. Many scientists feel it
will take years to determine the extent to which
incipient damage to the forests of New England, the
Appalachians, and Bavaria are caused by acid rain or
by natural forces. Until scientific and then political
consensus emerges, legislative action is not likely to
be strong. Implementation of pollution control
programs, once passed, will take years. The lifetimes
of existing power plants and other pollution sources is
measured in decades. Settlement patterns and
lifestyles dependent on the automobile change over even
longer periods. By the time sulfur and nitrogen oxide
emissions are reduced sufficiently, it may be too late.
Delays are crucial in determining the dynamic
behavior of systems. But as with nonlinearity, it is
difficult to incorporate delays in optimization models.
When possible, delays are usually assumed to be of
fixed length. The results of such models are of
questionable value. Users of these optimization models
may find, like the city tourist on the back roads of
Maine, that "you can't get there from here."
When to use optimization. Despite the limitations
discussed above, optimization techniques can be
extremely useful. But they must be used for the
proper problems. Optimization models can substantially
improve the quality of decisions in many areas,
including computer design, airline scheduling, the
location of factories, and the operation of oil
refineries. Whenever the problem to be solved is one
of choosing the best from among a well-defined set of
alternatives, optimization should be considered. If
the meaning of "best" is also well defined, and if the
system to be optimized is relatively static and free of
feedback, optimization may well be the best technique
to use. Unfortunately, these latter conditions are
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rarely true for the social, economic, and ecological
systems that are frequently of concern in foresight.
Beware, however, the optimization model which
purports to forecast actual behavior. The output of an
optimization model is a statement of the best way to
accomplish a goal. To interpret the results as a
forecast of likely actual behavior or the likely
future behavior of the system is to assume that people
in the real system will in fact make the optimal
choices. It is one thing to say "to maximize profits
the following decisions should be made" and quite
another to say "people will succeed in maximizing
profits, and therefore the following decisions will be
made." The former is a prescriptive statement of what
to do; the latter a descriptive statement of what will
happen. The optimization model will only be valid for
the latter purpose if people in fact optimize. It may
seem reasonable to expect that people behave optimally
-- after all, it would be irrational to take second
best when you could have the best. But the evidence on
this score is conclusive; real people do not behave
like optimization models. As discussed above, real
people make decisions with simple and incomplete mental
models, models that are often systematically incorrect,
or that reflect goals and motives that are not
captured in an optimization framework. Real people do
not have the perfect information, foresight, and
computational powers required to solve for the optimum
solution. As Herbert Simon puts it,
The capacity of the human mind for formulating and
solving complex problems is very small compared
with the size of the problem whose solution is
required for objective rational behavior in the
real world or even for a reasonable approximation
to such objective rationa/ity.6
Optimization models augment the capacity of the human
mind to solve the problem of finding the objectively
rational course of action. Nevertheless, even
optimization models must make simplifying assumptions
so as to be tractable -- even with a computer the best
we can hope for is a reasonable approximation to
objectively rational behavior. But to model how people
actually behave rather than how they ought to behave
requires a different set of modeling techniques.
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Simulation Models
The latin verb simulare means to imitate or mimic.
The purpose of a simulation model is to mimic the real
system so that its behavior can be anticipated or
changed. A simulation model is a laboratory replica
of the real system. By creating a representation of
the system in the laboratory, experiments can be
performed which are either impossible, unethical, or
prohibitively expensive in the real world.
Simulations of physical systems are commonplace,
ranging from simulations of weather patterns and the
depletion of oil reservoirs to wind tunnel tests of
aircraft designs. Similarly, economists and social
scientists have used simulation to understand how
cities evolve and respond to urban renewal policies.
how energy prices affect the economy, how corporations
grow, how population growth interacts with food supply,
resources, and the environment. There are many
different simulation techniques, including stochastic
modeling, input-output models, system dynamics,
discrete simulation, and role-playing games. Despite
the differences, all simulation techniques rely on a
common approach to modeling.
A simulation model has two main components. It
must include a representation of the physical world
relevant to the problem under study. For example, to
understand why America's large cities have continued to
decay despite massive amounts of aid and numerous
renewal programs, a model would need to include a
representation of the physical components of the city:
the size and quality of the housing stock, commercial
structures, and other infrastructures; the size, skill
mix, income, and other attributes of the population;
the flows of people, money, etc. into and out of the
city; and other factors which characterize the physical
and institutional setting. The degree of detail
needed depends on the specific problem to be addressed
with the model. A model designed to understand why
urban renewal programs have generally not worked in a
variety of cities requires only an aggregate
representation of the features common to such
cities.7 But a model designed to improve the location
and deployment of firefighting resources in New York
City had to include a detailed representation of the
streets and traffic patterns.8
In addition to the physical structure of the
system, a simulation model must portray the behavior of
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the actors in the system. Behavior in this context
means the way in which people respond to different
situations. The behavioral assumption of a simulation
model describes the way in which people make decisions.
The decision rules are the input. The pattern of
decisions is the output of the model. For example, in
a pioneering simulation study of corporate behavior,
Cyert and March found that department stores used a
very simple decision rule to determine the floor price
of goods.9 The rule was basically to mark up the
wholesale cost of the items by a fixed percentage.
When excess inventory piled up on the shelves, a sale
was held and the markup was gradually reduced until the
goods were sold. If the sales goals were exceeded,
prices were boosted. Prices were also adjusted towards
those of competitors. The normal markup was determined
by tradition -- it adjusted very slowly towards the
actual markup on the goods sold. Cyert and March
found that when these rules for pricing were tested
with actual store data, the model reproduced the
pricing decisions of the floor managers quite well.
Thus the inputs to a simulation model are
assumptions about the physical structure of the system
'and the procedure people use to make decisions. The
state of the system determines the nature and quality
of the information available to decision makers. The
model plays the role of the decision makers, using the
available information to mimic their decisions. The
decisions made then feed back and alter the state of
the system, giving rise to new information and new
decisions.
Simulation models are "what if" tools. They are
descriptive models. The purpose of a simulation model
is not to tell a policymaker what should be done, but
what would happen in a given situation. Often such
"what if" information is more important than knowledge
of the optimal decision. For example, during the 1978
debate over natural gas deregulation, President
Carter's original proposal was modified dozens of times
before a final compromise was passed. During the
congressional debate, the Department of Energy used a
simulation model to evaluate each version of the
bill.10 The model did not indicate what ought to be
done to maximize the economic benefits of natural gas
to the nation. Congress had its own ideas on that
score. But by providing an assessment of how each
proposal would affect gas prices, supplies, and
demands, the model generated useful ammunition for the
administration in lobbying for its proposals.
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Limitations of simulation. Like any model, a
simulation model is only as good as its assumptions.
Naturally, a good simulation model should have an
adequate representation of the the physical system it
represents. In general, simulation models are quite
flexible and can portray the physical environment with
detail and accuracy sufficient for their purposes.
Unlike optimization, simulation models can easily
incorporate feedback effects, nonlinearity, and
dynamics. The structure of simulation models is not
rigidly determined by mathematical limitations as those
of optimization models often are. Indeed, one of the
main uses of simulation is to identify how
nonlinearities, physical delays, and the limited
information available to decision makers interact to
produce the troubling dynamics that have persistently
resisted solution.
Accuracy of the decision rules. A potential
trouble spot is the accuracy of the decision rules
portrayed in simulation models. Simulation models must
represent human decision making as it is, even if it is
not optimal. The decision making heuristics and
strategies people use, including their limitations and
errors, must be modeled. Only if a model mimics the
response of decision makers to changing circumstances
will it respond to policy interventions in the same way
the real actors would. In principle there is no
limitation on the accuracy of the decision rules
portrayed in models. In practice, discovering those
rules is often difficult. Decision making rules cannot
be determined from aggregate statistical data, but must
be investigated first hand. Primary data on the
behavior of the actors can be acquired through
observation of decision making in the field, that is,
in the boardroom, on the factory floor, along the
salesperson's route, in the household. The modeler
must discover what information is available to each
actor, examine its timeliness and accuracy, and infer
how that information is processed to yield a decision.
The skills of the anthropologist and ethnographer are
often needed. Fortunately, psychologists, behavioral
scientists, sociologists, and other social scientists
have developed an extensive body of primary data which
describes how decision making is done. The best
simulation modeling draws on a wide variety of
disciplines as well as first hand observation of the
system to elicit the decision rules of the people in
the system.
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Soft variables. Because simulation models must
portray decision making as it is, they must often
include variables which are difficult to quantify. It
is frequently necessary to represent intangibles such
as product quality, optimism, reputation, expectations,
desires, and so on. Again, there is no limitation in
principle to the inclusion of such soft variables, and
many simulation models do. Unfortunately, some
modelers limit the factors they include to those
variables that are measurable, and often measurable by
numerical data. This practice is sometimes defended as
more scientific than "making up" the values of
parameters and relationships for which no numerical
data are available. Without numerical data, how can
statistical tests be performed? How can parameter
values be estimated?
The overwhelming majority of all data are
descriptive and qualitative. And the majority of these
data have never been written down. Yet they are
crucial for understanding and modeling complex systems.
Imagine trying to operate a school, factory, or economy
solely on the basis of the available numerical
information. Without the descriptive knowledge of
operating procedures, political subtleties,
organizational structure, and so on, the result would
be chaos. To leave out of a model a relationship known
to be important but for which no numerical data are
available is just as much an unscientific value
judgment as using judgment to estimate the
relationship. Ignoring the relationship implies it has
a value of zero -- probably the only value known to be
wrong!11
Model boundary. A great strength of simulation
models is the ability to capture the important feedback
relationships that shape the behavior of the system and
govern its response to policies. In practice, however,
many models ignore factors outside the expertise of the
modelbuilders or the mandate of the sponsoring
organization.
The consequences of omitting feedback are often
serious. For example, many energy models assume the
economy is unaffected by the price of energy. The PIES
model (Project Independence Evaluation System), used in
the 1970s by the Federal Energy Administration, and
later by the Department of Energy, provides a typical
example. The PIES model assumed that economic growth,
the costs of unconventional fuels, interest rates,
inflation and world oil prices were all unaffected by
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domestic energy prices, production, or policies. A
full embargo of imported oil or doubling of oil price
would have no impact on the economy, according to the
model. Yet the FEA described the model's purpose the
following way:
[Energy] strategies are evaluated in terms of
their impact on:
* Development of alternative energy sources;
* Vulnerability to import disruptions;
* Economic growth, inflation, and unemployment;
* Environmental effects; and
* Regional and social impacts12
By treating the economy exogenously, the PIES model was
inherently contradictory. The model showed that the
investment needs of the energy sector would rise
substantially as depletion raised the development costs
of new sources of oil and as synthetic fuels were
developed. But at the same time, the model assumed
that the higher investment needs of the energy sector
could be satisfied without reducing investment or
consumption in the rest of the economy and without
raising interest rates or inflation. In effect, the
model let the economy have its pie and eat it too. In
part because it ignored the feedbacks between the
energy sector and the rest of the economy, the PIES
model consistently proved to be overoptimistic. In
1974 the PIES model projected that by 1985 the U.S.
would be well on the way to energy independence.
Energy imports would be only 3.3 million barrels per
day, production of the shale oil would be 250,000
barrels per day, all at an oil price of about $22 per
barrel (1984 dollars) and with vigorous economic
growth. In reality oil imports are about 5.5 million
barrels per day. A shale oil industry remains a dream.
All this despite huge reductions in oil demand caused
by oil prices that have exceeded $30 per barrel and the
most serious recession since the Great Depression (see
the appendix in Stobaugh and Yergin 1979 for a good
discussion of the limitations of the PIES and other
energy models).
Narrow model boundaries are not limited to energy
analysis. The Global 2000 Report showed that most of
the models used by government agencies rely
significantly on exogenous variables. Population
models assumed food production was exogenous.
Agriculture models assumed that energy prices and other
input prices were exogenous. Energy models assumed
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that economic growth and environmental conditions were
exogenous. Economic models assumed that population and
energy prices were exogenous. And so on. Because
important intersectoral feedbacks were ignored, the
models produced inconsistent results.
A broad model boundary that includes important
feedback effects is more important in a model than a
great amount of detail in the specification of
individual components. It is worth noting that the
PIES model provided breakdowns of energy supply,
demand, and price for dozens of fuels, each for
different regions of the country. Yet its projections
for 1985 aren't even close. One can legitimately ask
what purpose was served by the effort devoted to
forecasting the price of jet fuel or naphtha in the
Pacific Northwest when the basic assumptions were so
palpably inadequate and the main results so woefully
erroneous. (In fairness, the PIES model is not unique
in the magnitude of its errors. Nearly all energy
models, of all types, have consistently been wrong
about energy production, consumption, and prices. The
evidence shows clearly that energy forecasts actually
lag behind the available information, reflecting the
past rather than anticipating the future.13)
Econometrics
Strictly speaking, econometrics is a simulation
technique. But it deserves separate discussion for two
reasons. First, econometrics evolved out of economics
and statistics, while most other simulation techniques
emerged from engineering or operations research. The
difference in pedigree leads to large differences in
purpose and practice. Second, econometrics is one of
the most widely used formal modeling techniques.
Pioneered by Nobel Prize-winning economists Jan
Tinbergen and Lawrence Klein, econometrics is taught in
nearly all business and economics programs, and ready-
to-use statistical routines for econometric modeling
are now available for many personal computers.
Econometric forecasts are regularly reported in the
nation's media.
Econometrics is literally the measurement of
economic relations, and originally involved statistical
analysis of economic data. As commonly practiced
today, econometric modeling consists of three stages.
These are specification, estimation, and forecasting.
In the first step, the structure of the model is
specified. Structure means the set of relations
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between variables, both those that characterize the
physical setting and those that describe behavior. For
example, an econometric model will typically contain
accounting relations that specify how GNP is
determined by consumption, investment, government
activity, and international trade. It also will
include behavioral equations that describe how these
quantities are determined. The Phillips curve is an
example of such a behavioral relation. If the model
contains a Phillips curve, one of the equations will
specify that the rate of inflation depends on the
amount of unemployment. Presumably the modeler expects
that high unemployment reduces inflation and vice-
versa. An econometric model will typically consist of
a set of such equations, with many inter-relationships
between the variables. For example, another equation
may relate unemployment to the demand for goods, the
wage level, worker productivity, etc. Still other
equations may explain these in terms of other factors.
A large econometric model may have hundreds or even
thousands of equations.
Not surprisingly, econometrics draws on economic
theory to guide the specification of models. The
validity of the models thus often depends on the
validity of the underlying economic theory. Though
there are many flavors of economic theory, a small
number of basic assumptions about human behavior are
common to most (especially modern neoclassical theory
and the "rational expectations" school). These
include:
Optimization. People (economic agents, in the
jargon) are assumed to be concerned with just one
thing: maximizing their profits. Consumers are assumed
to maximize the "utility" they derive from their
resources. Decisions about how much to produce, what
goods to purchase, whether to save or borrow, are the
result of optimization by individual decision makers.
"Non-economic" considerations (defined as any behavior
which diverges from profit or utility maximization) are
ignored or treated as local aberrations and special
cases.
Perfect information. To optimize, economic agents
need accurate information about the world. The
information needed goes beyond the current state of
affairs. Also needed is complete knowledge of the
available options and their consequences. For example,
to determine the optimal mix of labor, machines,
energy, and other inputs to the production process, a
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firm must know not only the wages of workers and the
prices of machines and other inputs, but also how much
could be produced with different combinations of people
and machines, even if those combinations have never
been tried. Such knowledge is assumed to be freely and
accurately known in most economic models. Many go
further, assuming people know not only the current
situation, but future prices, technologies, and
possibilities as well, including the ability to
perfectly anticipate the consequences of their own
actions and those of competitors.
Equilibrium. The pioneers of mathematical
economics were primarily concerned with the net result
of optimization by individuals and firms. The net
result defines the equilibrium of the money or economy.
The crucial questions of theory involved the nature of
the equilibrium state for different situations. Given
people's preferences and the technological
possibilities for producing goods, at what prices will
commodities be traded, and in what quantities? What
will wages be? What will profits be? How will a tax
or monopoly power influence the equilibrium? These
questions proved difficult enough without tackling the
more difficult problem of dynamics. Indeed, dynamic
theory, including the recurrent fluctuations of the
business cycle, of the growth and decline of industries
and nations, of inflation, remained primarily
descriptive and qualitative long after equilibrium
theory was completely mathematized. Consequently,
dynamic behavior in economics tends to be seen as a
transition from one equilibrium to another. The
transition is usually assumed to be stable.
The rich heritage of static theory in economics
left a legacy of equilibrium for econometrics. Many
econometric models assume markets are in equilibrium
at all times. When adjustment dynamics are modeled,
variables are usually assumed to adjust in a smooth
and stable manner towards the optimal, equilibrium
value. The lags are nearly always fixed in length.
For example, most macroeconometric models assume the
capital stocks of firms in the economy adjust to the
optimal, profit maximizing level with a fixed lag of
several years. The lag is the same whether the
industries that supply investment goods have the
capacity to meet the demand or not. Yet clearly, when
the supplying industries have excess capacity, orders
can be filled rapidly. When capacity is strained,
customers must wait in line for delivery. Analysis
shows that there are significant differences between
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a model that assumes a fixed investment lag regardless
of the physical capability of the economy to fill the
demand and one that explicitly models the determinants
of the investment delay. In general, models that
explicitly portray delays and their determinants will
yield different results from models that simply assume
smooth adjustments from one optimal state to another.
Economists acknowledge the idealization and
abstraction of their assumptions about human behavior,
information, and equilibrium, but point to the helpful
results that have been derived from them. However, a
growing number of prominent economists argue that
these assumptions are not only abstract but false. In
his Presidential address to the Royal Economics
Society, E. H. Phelps-Brown said
The trouble here is not that the behaviour of
these economic chessmen has been simplified, for
simplification seems to be part of all
understanding. The trouble is that the behaviour
posited is not known to be what obtains in the
actual economy.14
Nicholas Kaldor of Cambridge University is
more blunt.
...in my view, the prevailing theory of value --
what I called, in a shorthand way, "equilibrium
economics" -- is barren and irrelevant as an
apparatus of thought....15
even
As mentioned earlier, a vast body of empirical research
in psychology and organizational studies has shown that
people do not optimize or act as if they optimize, that
they don't have the mental capabilities'to optimize
their decisions, that even if they had the
computational powers necessary they lack the
information needed to optimize. Instead, they try to
satisfy a variety of personal and organizational
goals, use standard operating procedures to routinize
decision making, and ignore much of the available
information to reduce the complexity of the problems
they face. Herbert Simon, in his acceptance speech
for the 1978 Nobel Prize in economics, concludes
There can no longer be any doubt that the micro
assumptions of the theory -- the assumptions of
perfect rationality -- are contrary to fact. It
is not a question of approximation; they do not
even remotely describe the processes that human
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beings use for making decisions in complex
situations."
The second stage in econometric modeling is
statistical estimation of the parameters of the model.
The parameters determine the precise strengths of the
relationships specified in the model structure. In the
case of the Phillips curve, for example, having assumed
in advance that unemployment affects inflation, the
modeler would then use the past data on inflation and
unemployment to estimate precisely how strong that
relationship has been. Sophisticated statistical
routines are used to estimate the parameters of the
model. In essence, these routines, known generally as
regression, are simply fancy curve-fitting techniques.
They use the historical data to find the parameter
values that best match the data itself, for example,
matching the inflation rate in terms of the
unemployment rate.
The use of statistical procedures to derive the
parameters of the model is the hallmark of
econometrics, and distinguishes it from other forms of
simulation. All modeling methods must specify the
structure of the system and estimate parameters. But
the focus in econometrics on statistical parameter
estimation to the exlusion of other techniques imposes
a strong discipline on the modelbuilding. It gives
econometricians an insatiable appetite for numerical
data, for without numerical data the statistical
procedures used to estimate the models are useless. It
is no accident that the rise of econometrics went hand
in hand with the quantification of economic life. For
example, the development of the national income and
product accounts by Simon Kuznets in the 1930s was a
major advance in the codification of economic data, for
the first time permitting consistent measures of
economic activity at the national level. To this day
all major macroeconometric models rely on the national
accounts data, and indeed, macroeconomic theory itself
has adapted to the national accounts framework.
It is obvious that policy evaluation and foresight
depend on an accurate knowledge of the state of the
world and of its history. Econometrics has been a
valuable stimulus to the development of much-needed
data gathering and measurement by government and
private companies alike. But at the same time, the
relentless focus on numerical data blinds econometric
modelers to less tangible but no less important
factors. Econometric models portray the behavior of
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people. But aggregate statistical data measure only
the result of the decisions made, not how or why those
decisions were made. Statistical data do not reveal
the nature and quality of the information people used
to make decisions, and therefore models based on such
data cannot be used to indicate how changes in that
information would alter future decisions.
Reliance on statistical procedures to estimate the
parameters forces econometricians to exclude from their
models variables for which no numerical data exist such
as soft variables and unobservable concepts like
desires, goals, perceptions, and so on. Potentially
observable quantities that haven't been measured must
also be ignored or handled with proxy variables for
which data do exist. For example, the literacy of a
population may be proxied by education expenditures per
capita, though the connection between the two may be
tenuous.
Another problem is the failure of econometric
techniques to distinguish between causal relationships
and correlations. Simulation models must portray the
causal relationships in the system if they are to mimic
its behavior, especially in new situations or in
response to new policies. But the statistical
techniques used to estimate parameters in econometric
models only reveal the degree of past correlation
between the variables. Statistical techniques can
never tell the modeler whether a relationship is
causal. The problem in using correlations is that the
correlations may change or shift as the system evolves.
Consider the Phillips curve as an example. The
Phillips curve stopped working sometime in the early
1970s. Inflation rose at the same time unemployment
got worse. Many economists argued that structural
change had occurred. By structural change they meant
that the underlying causal structure of the system had
changed. In fact, the Phillips curve was never a
structural relationship at all -- it never represented
the causal forces that determine inflation or wage
increases. Rather, the Phillips curve was nothing more
than a way of restating the past behavior of the
system. In the past, the curve said, low unemployment
had tended to occur at the same time inflation was
high, and vice-versa. Naturally, when the inflation of
the 1970s took prices to levels unprecedented in the
industrial era, the historical correlation broke down.
The behavior of the system had changed. But the
underlying structure of causal relationships need not
have changed. As inflation worsened, causal
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relationships that had been present all along but
which were unimportant in an era of low inflation
suddenly became active determinants of behavior.
Because econometric models rely on historical
correlations, an appeal to "structural change" usually
means the inadequate structure of the model was altered
because it failed to anticipate the behavior of the
system.
A related problem caused by the reliance on
statistical estimation arises from the limited range of
historical data usually available. Aggregate
statistical data do not provide a guide to behavior
outside the historical range of experience or under a
different set of policies or incentives. Historical
relationships are assumed to remain valid in the
future. Consequently, many econometric models are not
robust -- changes in policies or conditions that carry
the system outside the range of historical data often
cause the models to break down. To illustrate, in 1979
the DRI model was used to test policies to eliminate
oil imports. The model assumed that the response of
oil demand to the price of oil was rather weak -- a ten
percent increase in oil price caused a reduction of
oil demand of only two percent, even in the long run.
To reduce oil consumption by 50 percent (enough to cut
imports to zero at the time), the model indicated that
oil had to rise to $800 per barrel. Yet at that
price, the annual oil bill for the remaining 50% would
have exceeded the total GNP for that year.17 Today,
with the benefit of hindsight, economists agree that
oil demand is much more responsive to price than was
earlier believed. But considering the behavior of the
model in extreme conditions could have revealed the
inconsistency of the original assumptions much earlier.
The validation of econometric models is also
strongly influenced by the reliance on numerical data.
Because the micro-level data that describe how
decisions are made are commonly ignored in
econometrics, the criterion for the goodness of an
equation or model becomes the degree to which it fits
the data. (The model's predictive accuracy is also a
criterion, but this is never known in advance -- at
best one knows how well a model predicted in the
past.) The statistical routines used to estimate
parameters indicate the degree of fit between the
estimated and actual variables, and tell the modeler if
the relationship between the variables is statistically
significant. When a relationship fails to be
significant, the modeler may try another specification
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for the equation, hoping for a better statistical fit.
Without recourse to the descriptive, micro-level data,
the resulting equations may be ad hoc and bear only
slight resemblance to either economic theory or actual
behavior. Alternatively, the discrepancy between the
model and data may be explained by faulty data,
exogenous influences, or other factors. The Phillips
curve again provides an example. When the Phillips
curve broke down, numerous revisions of the equations
used to predict inflation were made, with limited
success. Some analysts pointed to the oil price shock,
Russian what deal, or other one-of--a-kind events as the
explanation for the change. Still others argued that
there had been structural change which caused the
Phillips curve to shift out to higher levels of
unemployment for any given inflation rate. Others
argued that the Phillips "curve" was really a vertical
line -- that in the long run, the rate of inflation was
solely dependent on monetary policy and had no
relationship to unemployment at all.
Econometrics texts teach that the statistical
significance of an equation is an indicator of the
correctness of the relationship.18 But this is a
mistaken view. Statistical significance does not mean
a relationship is a correct or true characterization
of the way the world works, but simply indicates how
well the equation fits the observed data. A
statistically significant relationship indicates the
variables in the equation are highly correlated -- and
that the apparent correlation is not likely to have
been the result of mere chance. But it does not
indicate that the relationship is causally correct or
even that it is causal at all. While the criterion of
statistical significance as a yardstick for judging
models seems plausible, failure to find a
statistically significant relationship may simply
indicate that there aren't enough data, or that the
data don't contain enough information to allow the
statistical procedures to discriminate between
competing hypotheses. Or there may be statistical
limitations. The regression procedures used to
estimate parameters only yield unbiased estimates under
certain conditions. These conditions are known as
maintained hypotheses because they are assumptions
which must be made in order to use the statistical
technique. The maintained hypotheses can never be
verified, even in principle, but must be taken as a
matter of faith. In the most common regression
technique, ordinary least squares, the maintained
hypotheses include the assumptions that the variables
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are all measured perfectly, that the model being
estimated corresponds perfectly to the real world, and
that the random errors in the variables from one time
period to another are completely independent.
Validation in the sense of establishing the truth
of a model is not possible. All models are
simplifications of reality and therefore literally
false. The question is whether a model is useful;
whether one should place confidence in its results;
whether it provides a better guide to reality than
other available models, including mental models.
Validation is not a one-time activity which
vaccinates a model against error. The process of
building confidence in a model is continuous. Beware
of models which present statistical tests and claim
these tests "validate" the model. Many tests are
required. Statistics may or may not be relevant.
The restrictive assumptions and mixed results of
econometrics have generated serious criticism from
within the economics profession. Phelps-Brown notes
that because controlled experiments are generally
impossible in economics, "running regressions between
time series is only likely to deceive."19 Lester
Thurow notes that econometrics has failed as a method
for testing theories and is now used primarily as "a
showcase for exhibiting theories." But as a device for
advocacy, econometrics imposes few constraints on the
prejudices of the modeler. Thurow concludes
By simple random search, the analyst looks for the
set of...variables and functional forms that give
the "best" equations. In this context the "best"
equation is going to depend heavily upon the prior
beliefs of the analyst. If the analyst believes
that interest rates do not affect the velocity of
money, he finds a "best" equation that validates
his particular prior belief. If the analyst
believes that interest rates do affect the
velocity of money, he finds a "best" equation that
validates this prior belief.20
But the harshest assessment of all comes from
Nobel laureate Wassily Leontief:
Year after year economic theorists continue to
produce scores of mathematical models and to
explore in great detail their formal properties;
and the econometricians fit algebraic functions of
all possible shapes to essentially the same sets
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of data without being able to advance, in any
perceptible way, a systematic understanding of the
structure and the operations of a real economic
system.21
But surely such theoretical problems matter little
if the econometric models provide accurate predictions.
Unfortunately, econometrics fails on this score as
well. The predictive power of econometric models, even
over the short term (one to four years) is poor and
virtually indistinguishable from that of other
forecasting methods. There are several reasons for the
failure to predict accurately.
To forecast, the modeler must provide estimates of
the future values of the exogenous variables, that is,
those variables which influence the other variables in
the model but which are not in turn influenced by the
model. An econometric model may have dozens of
exogenous variables. Each must be forecast before the
model can be used to predict. The source of the
forecasts for these variables may be other models, but
is usually the intuition and judgment of the modeler.
Ensuring consistency, much less correct forecasts for
the exogenous variables, is difficult.
Often the forecasts produced by the models don't
square with the modeler's intuition. Many modelers,
including those at the "big three" econometric
forecasting firms, Data Resources, Inc., Chase
Econometrics, and Wharton Econometric Forecasting
Associates, routinely adjust their forecasts whenever
they feel the model output is wrong. This fudging, or
"add-factoring," as they call it, is extensive: the
late Otto Eckstein of Data Resources admitted that
their forecasts were "60% model and 40% judgment" (Wall
Street Journal, 17 February 1983). "There is no way of
telling where the Wharton model leaves off and [model
developer] Larry Klein takes over" according to
another economist (Business Week, 30 March 1981).
Worse, the adjustments are often colored by the
personalities of the modelers:
Mr. Eckstein concedes that sometimes his forecasts
reflect an optimistic view. Data Resources ..."is
the most influential forecasting firm in the
country," he declares. "If it were in the hands
of a doom-and-gloomer, it would be bad for the
country." (Wall Street Journal, /7 February 1983)
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Add-factoring has been attacked by other economists as
unscientific. The mental models used to add-factor,
though they are the mental models of seasoned experts,
are subject to the sale cognitive limitations other
people face. And whether good or bad, the assumptions
behind add-factoring are unexaminable.
In a shocking experiment, the Joint Economic
Committee of Congress (through the politically neutral
General Accounting Office) asked the three leading
econometric forecasting firms (DRI, Chase, and
Wharton) to make a series of simulations with their
models. One set of forecasts was "managed" or add-
factored by the forecasters at each firm. The other
set consisted of pure forecasts, made by the GAO, to
examine the untainted results of the models. The
models were run under different assumptions about
monetary policy. As an illustration of the
inconsistencies revealed by the experiment, consider
the following. When the money supply was assumed to be
fixed, the DRI model forecast that after ten years, the
interest rate would be 34 percent, a result totally
contrary to both economic theory and historical
experience. The forecast was then add-factored down to
a more reasonable seven percent. The other models
fared little better, revealing both the inability of
the pure models to yield meaningful results and the
extensive ad hoc adjustments made by the forecasters to
render the results palatable.22
The failures of econometric models have not gone
unnoticed. A representative sampling of recent
articles in the business press on economics and
forecasting includes the following headlines:
"1980: The year the forecasters really blew it"
(Business Week, 14 July 1980);
"Where the big econometric models go wrong"
(Business Week, 30 March 1981);
"More or less oil will go up or down or maybe
it won't: Energy experts are gun-shy after forecasts
haven't turned out well"
(Wall Street Journal, 5 May 1982);
"Where have all the answers gone?
Economists seem bankrupt just when their ideas
are needed most"
(Time, 17 January 1983);
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"Economists, too, find themselves in disarray"
(US News & World Report, 7 February 1983);
"Forecasters overhaul models of economy
in wake of 1982 errors"
(Wall Street Journal, 17 February 1983);
"Economists missing the mark:
more tools, bigger errors"
The New York Times, 12 December 1984).
The result of these failures has been to erode the
credibility of all computer models no matter what their
purpose, not just econometric models designed for
prediction. This is unfortunate, for foresight does
not depend on the ability to predict the future. In
fact, there is substantial agreement among modelers of
global problems that exact, point prediction of the
future is neither possible nor necessary.
...at present we are far from being above to
predict social-system behavior, except perhaps for
carefully selected systems in the very short term.
Effort spent on attempts at precise prediction is
almost surely wasted, and results that purport to
be such predictions are certainly misleading. On
the other hand, much can be learned from models in
the form of broad, qualitative conditional
understanding -- and this kind of understanding is
useful (and typically the only basis) for policy
formulation.... If your doctor tells you that you
will have a heart attack if you do not stop
smoking, this advice is helpful, even if it does
not tell you exactly when a heart attack will
occur or how bad it will be.23
When to use econometrics. Econometric models do
not seem to be well suited to the types of problems of
concern in the foresight process. The prime purpose of
econometric models is short-term prediction of the
exact future state of the economy. Most of the
attributes of econometrics have evolved in response to
this need, including the reliance on regression
techniques to pick the "best" parameters from the
available numerical data, the extensive reliance on
exogenous variables, and add-factoring. Though in
practice, econometric models do not predict very well,
they are about as good as anything else for that
purpose.
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Though econometric models purport to simulate
human behavior, they in fact rely on unrealistic
assumptions about the motivations of real people and
the information available to make decisions. Though
they must represent the physical world, they commonly
ignore dynamic processes, disequilibrium, and the
physical basis for delays between actions and results.
Though they may incorporate hundreds of variables, they
ignore soft variables and unmeasured quantities.
Foresight is most often concerned with longer time
horizons than are common in econometrics. The feedback
relationships between environmental, social, and
demographic factors are usually as important as
economic influences. Often the numerical data needed
to model these effects are not available. The need to
consider the long term means the system is likely to
leave the historical region of behavior, making
historical correlations an unreliable basis for
analysis.
Systems Dynamics
Systems dynamics as a type of simulation modeling
has become so well known, particularly because of its
use in global projections, that it would perhaps be in
order to sketch out its characteristics in a few words,
by way of contrast with the econometric models
discussed above.
Systems dynamics is a widely used simulation
technique that emphasizes the feedback loop structures
of highly complex systems. Systems dynamics models are
typically highly nonlinear, emphasizing disequilibrium,
delays, and bounded rationality in decision making.
Systems dynamics was created by J. W. Forrester (1961)
and has been used to study a wide variety of systems.
It has been heavily criticized and analyzed elsewhere.8
Checklist for the Model Consumer
The preceding discussion has focused on the
limitations of various modeling approaches in order to
provide potential model consumers with a sense of what
to look out for when choosing a model. Despite the
limitations of the various modeling techniques, there
is no doubt that computer models can be and have been
extremely useful foresight tools. Well built models
offer significant advantages over the often faulty
mental models currently in use.
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To further assist the model consumer, the
following checklist presents key questions a model user
should ask to help evaluate the appropriateness of a
model for a particular purpose.
* What is the purpose of the study? What problem
does the model address?
* What is the boundary of the model? What factors
are endogenous? Exogenous? Excluded? Are soft
variables included? Are feedback effects
properly taken into account? Does the model
capture possible side effects, both harmful and
beneficial?
*What is the time horizon relevant to the
problem? Does the model include as endogenous
components factors that may change significantly
over the time horizon?
* Are people assumed to act rationally and to
optimize their performance? Does the model take
non-economic behavior into account
(organizational realities, non-economic motives,
political factors, cognitive limitations)?
* Does the model assume people have perfect
information about the future and about the way
the system works, or does it take into account
the limitations, delays, and errors in acquiring
information that plague decision makers in the
real world?
* Are appropriate time delays, constraints, and
possible bottlenecks taken into account?
* Is the model robust in the face of extreme
variations in input assumptions?
* Are the policy recommendations derived from the
model sensitive to plausible variations in its
assumptions?
* Are the results of the model reproducible? Or
are they adjusted ("add-factored") by the model
builder?
* Is the model documented, and is the
documentation publicly available?
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* Is the model being operated by its designers and
builders or by third parties?
* How much does a set of "runs" cost? Does the
budget permit adequate sensitivity testing?
* How long does it take to revise and update the
model to reflect new information and new
understandings of the system? Can the model
operator revise it in a timely fashion?
Conclusions
The arguments above have crucial implications for
the design of governmental foresight capabilities.
Foresight requires the intelligent use of different
models designed for specific purposes, not a single,
comprehensive model of the world. Foresight is not a
well-intentioned way to back into an Orwellian world of
centralized control. To repeat a dictum offered above,
"Beware the analyst who proposes to model an entire
social or economic system rather than a problem" It is
simply not possible to build a single, integrated model
of the world, into which mathematical inputs can be
inserted and out of which will flow a coherent and
useful understanding of world trends. To be used
responsibly, models must be subjected to review and
debate. To foster that process, a cross-disciplinary
approach is needed. Models designed by experts in
different fields and for different purposes must be
compared, contrasted, and criticized. The governmental
foresight process should foster such review.
The history of global modeling provides a good
example of such a process. The initial global
modeling efforts, published in World Dynamics
(Forrester 1971) and The Limits to Growth provoked a
storm of controversy. A number of critiques appeared,
and soon after, other global models were developed.
Over ten years, the International Institute for Applied
Systems Analysis (IIASA), near Vienna, conducted a
program of analysis and critical review designed to
bring the modelers together. Six major symposia were
held. Eight major global models were examined and
discussed. The models had different purposes, used a
range of modeling techniques, and were built by persons
with widely varying backgrounds. There remain large
areas of methodological and substantive disagreement.
Yet despite the enormous differences in perspective,
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consensus has emerged on a number of crucial issues.
These include:
1. The physical and technical resources exist to
satisfy the basic needs of all the world's
people into the foreseeable future.
2. Population and material growth cannot continue
forever on a finite planet.
3. Continuing "business as usual" policies in
the next decades will not result in a
desirable future, or even the satisfaction of
basic human needs.
4. Technical solutions alone are not sufficient
to satisfy basic needs or create a desirable
future. (Paraphrased from Groping in the
Dark. See footnote 4, Chapter VII.)
The IIASA program on global modeling represents the
most comprehensive effort to date to use computer
models as a way to bootstrap human understanding. It
has created agreement on crucial issues where none
existed. It has guided research and sped progress.
It offers a model for the effective conduct of
governmental foresight.
The primary function of modelbuilding should be
educational rather than predictive. No one should make
decisions on the basis of a computer model whose
results are simply presented, take 'em or leave 'em.
Towards that end, the role of modeling should be
redefined as a process rather than as a technology for
producing an answer. The common mode of computer-based
analysis, in which a study is commissioned by a client
who then waits for the final report, largely ignorant
of the methods, assumptions, and biases that go into
the conclusions, virtually guarantees failure. Such a
procedure places the policymaker in the role of a
supplicant before the oracle, awaiting the prophecy.
Like King Croesus before the Oracle at Delphi, there is
a nearly overwhelming temptation for policymakers to
interpret such pronouncements in accordance with their
preconceptions, or easier still, to simply ignore
unfavorable results.
Worse, the model-as-oracle attitude so prevalent
today rightfully alarms many who see blind acceptance
(or rejection) of models as an abdication to the
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computer of the responsibility for judgments that
should be human.24 Models should not be used as a
substitute for critical thought, but as a tool for
improving judgment and intuition.
But for all the pitfalls of formal modelbuilding,
it must be remembered that the alternative is continued
reliance on the mental models that have failed to
resolve the pressing problems with which foresight is
concerned. While far from perfect, the computer model
is often superior to the alternative mental models
currently in use.
Indeed much of the value of formal models derives
from the difference between the results of the formal
model and those of the mental model. By exploring the
reasons for the differences between the results of the
mental and formal models, both can be improved.
Improving the mental models upon which decisions are
ultimately based is the proper goal of computer
modeling. The success of such a dialectic, however,
depends on the ability to understand the assumptions of
the computer model. If systematic foresight is to
contribute to the national policy, it must foster that
dialectic and stimulate education, aided by the
computer, but ultimately relying on informed human
judgment, not computer printouts.
2tk C 1,41 Co W D E /s7 S
Many of the ideas expressed here emerged from
discussions with or were first formulated by, among
others, Jay Forrester, George Richardson, Peter Senge,
and especially Dana Meadows, whose book Groping in the
Dark was particularly helpful. I wish to thank Lindsey
Grant and the two anonymous reviewers of this book for
their helpful insights and suggestions.
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F?043a-1.10-rms
1. See, for instance, Martha E. Williams, "Electronic
Databases," Science, 26 April 1985, pp. 445-456.
2. (a) The World Growth Policy Group, a group sponsored
by organizations and individuals in the Research
Triangle, NC, has held a series of seminars addressing
these relationships. The seminars are reported in
monographs issued as Occasional Papers by the Center
for International Studies, Duke University, 2122
Campus Drive, Durham NC 27706. The papers are edited
by Gerald R. Stairs. See especially Global Modeling
and Discontinuous Change (1984) and Foresight
Planning: Realities and Resiliency at the Policy
Interface (1986).
(b) A Guide to Models in Government Planning and
Operations, Environmental Protection Agency (Office of
Research and Development), Washington, August 1974.
Chapters 1 and 2 on decision models and policy making
are particularly valuable concerning the
modeler/decision maker relationship.
(c) I refer the reader to the following works for
fuller discussions of the strengths and weaknesses of
computer models:
J. S. Armstrong, Long Range Forecasting from Crystal
Ball to Computer. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1985.
W. Ascher and W. Overholt, Strategic Planning and
Forecasting: Political Risk and Economic Opportunity.
New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1983.
W. Ascher, Forecasting: An Appraisal for Policy
Makers and Planners. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1978.
G. Richardson, The Evolution of the Feedback Concept
in the American Social Sciences. PhD dissertation,
Sloan School of Management, MIT, Cambridge, 1984.
3. Dennis Meadows et al, The Limits to Growth. New York:
Universe Books, 1972.
4. R. M. Hogarth, Judgement and Choice. New York:
Wiley, 1980.
5. H. Simon, Administrative Behavior. New York:
MacMillan, 1947, and "Rational Decisionmaking in
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Business Organizations," American Economic Review, 69,
1979, pp. 493-513.
6. H. Simon, Models of Man. New York: Wiley, 1957, p.
198.
7. J. W. Forrester, Urban Dynamics. Cambridge: The MIT
Press, 1969.
8. Greenberger et a/, Models in the Policy Process. New
York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1976.
9. R. Cyert and J. March, A Behavioral Theory of the
Firm. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1963.
10. U.S. Department of Energy, National Energy Plan II,
DOE/TIC-10203. Washington: DOE, May 1979.
11. J. W. Forrester, "Information Sources for Modeling the
National Economy," Journal of the American Statistical
Association, 75 (371), September 1980, pp. 555-574.
12. Federal Energy Administration, Project Independence
Report. Washington: FEA, 1974, p. 1.
13. U.S. Department of Energy, Energy Projections to the
Year 2000. Washington: DOE Office of Policy,
Planning and Analysis, 1983.
14. E. H. Phelps-Brown, "The Underdevelopment of
Economics," The Economic Journal, 82, March 1972, p.
4.
15. N. Kaldor, "The Irrelevance of Equilibrium Economics,"
The Economic Journal, 82, March 1972, p. 1237.
16. H. Simon, "Rational Decisionmaking in Business
Organizations," American Economic Review, 69, 1979, p.
510
17. J. Sterman, "The Energy Transition and the Economy: A
System Dynamics Approach," unpublished PhD
dissertation. Cambridge: MIT, 1981.
18. See, for example, R. Pindyck and D. Rubinfeld,
Econometric Models and Economic Forecasts. New York:
McGraw Hill, 1976.
19. E. H. Phelps-Brown, op cit, p. 6.
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20. L. Thurow, Dangerous Currents. New York: Random
House, 1983, pp. 107-108.
21. W. Leontief, "Academic Economics," Science, 9 July
1981, p. 107. See also his "Theoretical Assumptions
and Nonobserved Facts," the American Economic Review,
61, March 1971, pp. 1-7. Leontief has gone on to
suggest that with the improvement in data processing
capabilities it is possible to shift from analytical
approaches based on aggregative data to those that can
take advantage of detailed information. One can, for
instance, shift from econometric models with their
conceptual pitfalls to the more pragmatic approach
with which he has long been identified. (W. Leontief
et a/, "New Approaches in Economic Analysis, Science,
26 April 1985, pp. 419-422.)
22. U. S. Congress, Joint Economic Committee, Three Large
Scale Model Simulations of Four Money Growth
Scenarios. Subcommittee on Monetary and Fiscal
Policy, 97th Congress, 2nd Session, Washington, 1982.
23. D. H. Meadows et a/, Groping in the Dark. Somerset
NJ: Wiley, 1982, p. 279.
24. J. Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason: From
Judgment to Calculation. San Francisco: W. H.
Freeman, 1976.
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Th-
Wtit
1?01c,re /NTecl.efll'?
There is an old country proverb: "If it
ain't broke, don't fix it." As it presently
functions, the United States Government's system
very evidently falls short of what the foresight
proponent would suggest. But can one point to
ways in which the system, as it now functions,
fails to deal adequately with the problems it
faces? And are there practical ways to improve
it?
I will attempt to show that the system is
indeed "broke" -- that the narrowness of our
present decision processes has gotten the country
into serious trouble already and threatens to get
it into more trouble if the processes are not
broadened to address lateral and long term
implications of current and proposed policies.
Following that, I will undertake to describe
and evaluate current proposals for change, to
identify the obstacles to change with which any
proponent of change must wrestle, and finally to
propose a foresight machinery that would meet the
requirements that have been described.
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TATI-r5r Mcc,re. IFores3iLsa1a1=-.?
If your only tool is a hammer, every problem
is a nail.
Let me revert in this chapter to the cd-ichotibTr,
bstween_siriql-6--thifik-frig:_and7-foresi-grit-The
former assumes that problems have identifiable causes--
usually single causes--that issues can be treated in
isolation, and that objectives, to be achieved, must be
pursued singlemindedly. As a guide to action, it
offers clarity and simplicity at the expense of
subtlety.
Foresight is the effort to give substance and
formal structure to the ecologists' insight that
"everything is connected."
Single track thinking is as American as apple pie.
It can achieve remarkable things such as moon landings.
ForeS-i-grit,--on?tlie-dther hand; --wodl-d---remind?u-s--o-f------
murtiple cadsations consequence The
single track or linear thinker may underestimate a
problem because he fails to understand all its roots.
Moreover, government must pursue an extraordinarily
complex set of goals, and the single-minded pursuit of
one may imperil the pursuit of others. Finally, and
perhaps most important, the linear thinker looks within
the armory of his own expertise for the solutions to
his problems. Just as the roots of the problem may lie
outside his range of experience, so may the best
solutions.
War is the ultimate example of linear thinking.
It is hardly novel to observe that wars have regularly
failed to achieve the purposes intended by those who
started them, and instead have set consequences in
motion that the initiators did not foresee and would
not have wanted.
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Individuals who come to power usually have strong
wills and strong commitments to their agendas, which
predispose them to linear thinking. For President
Johnson, the issue became the Vietnam War to the
detriment of his earlier program, the Great Society.
For President Reagan, it is less government and lower
taxes, a program he has yet to reconcile with his view
of defense requirements or with other politicians'
views of the importance of social programs. The price
for achieving his goal, so far, has been a trillion
dollars of new deficit and the conversion of the United
States from the world's largest international creditor
to its principal debtor, and one wonderswhetherl
c-anybody--xe _Sketching out to- him the -15-otenti.4-1,
'-jmpl-loationsif-foTeigners-should-stop-taidetWriting the.
eennual-U,S,-budgetarydeficit,7-1
The long term is put aside, and the consultative
process is abbreviated, in direct proportion to the
urgency of immediate decisions that must be made.
The process, almost by definition, means that the
long view is excluded precisely when it is most
dangerous to exclude it. Urgency is generally
generated by crisis, and crisis results from increasing
difficulties in doing something one wants to do. The
tendency to try to jam something through is most
intense at just the time when policymakers should be
backing off for a broader view of the issue and its
context. Anybody who watched or participated in the
decision process on Vietnam will understand this
generalization.
The Chinese conqueror at the start of this book
had reached the top by a linear process of
subordinating everything else to the conquest of China,
but he recognized that thenceforth he would do well to
temper his administration with the best advice he could
get -- and his dynasty lasted for over 400 years.
Other kings have not always been so wise, and there are
adages about what happens to messengers who tell rulers
things they do not want to hear. This is a sobering
thought for a foresight advocate, but let us proceed.
The Costs of Demographic Illiteracy
I will leave it to others to undertake a survey
of errors into which the United States has been led by
the narrowness of its decision processes.' For the
present purposes let me take one issue -- demography,
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the most slighted of the great variables that shape our
lives -- and suggest how it is connected with several
other great issues and how we are paying for our
inattention to it.
I will move in rough order from world to domestic
issues, from the past to the present, and I will try to
show the connections among them. The descriptions will
necessarily be brief to avoid writing a book within
this book.
The third world. Let me start with that first
example from Chapter I: the assault on third world
mortality rates without considering the demographic
consequences. The United States, because of its
dominant post-World War II position, was a leader in
that decision -- or rather in that decision void -- but
others went along gladly. It seems eminently
reasonable to want people to be healthier and children
to live to maturity. Since it was a public health
problem, it was approached from the standpoint of the
public health officer, and there was no foresight
machinery to enlist the demographers who might have
asked "What if fertility doesn't fall...?"
The consequences are not just still with us; they
are still at their beginnings. The explosion of
population eroded the prospects for development. I
will leave the reader with the World Bank's 1984 Annual
Report to learn the statistics on the inverse
correlation between population growth and per capita
income in the third world.2 For one small, vivid
example, however, let me cite the Sahel.
Food production per capita in Africa has been
decreasing for years. For over a decade there have
been increasingly serious famine stories out of Africa,
culminating in 1984-1985 in the most serious situation
yet.
The current official U.S. view, expressed at
Mexico City (see footnotes at Chapter II) is that, if
poor countries suffer, it is because they practice
statism rather than embracing private enterprise and
enjoying the efficiencies. It would be hard to argue
against productivity, or to urge that Africa has
maximized its opportunities. But for a wandering
herdsman, the issue is not statism vs. private
enterprise; it is children to feed. One study in 1983
concluded that, before the Sahelian drought of the
early 1970s, there were 4.5 livestock units per person.
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The count dropped to 2.8 just after the drought. Total
herd size has returned to the 1970 level, but there are
now only 3.5 units per person, because population has
been increasing 2.5 per cent per year.3 Less milk for
each child.
When agricultural populations grow -- if they
don't have the technology and the capital to change
their practices -- they accommodate their expanded
numbers by over-grazing the land. Or they expand
acreage. Onto typhoon-vulnerable coastal sandbars;
into fragile semi-desert; onto hillsides. Slash-and-
burn farmers shorten their cycle, and the tropical
forests cannot recuperate.
It is a vicious circle, because at this point they
do not have the money or the margin above starvation to
experiment with better technologies.
Population growth is thus central to the problem
of desertification, and here is another vicious spiral:
population growth generates a problem that reduces the
resources to support the population growth.
The U. N. Conference on Desertification of 1977
was spurred by the Sahel drought. The United States
was a major participant. The Conference came up with a
"plan of action" including many technical
recommendations but nothing about population.
Similar engines drive the problem of tropical
deforestation, and it has somewhat similar results.
The problem is compound: third world governments
encourage the exploitation of tropical hardwood forests
to earn foreign exchange; peasants in search of land
follow the loggers into the jungle on the new roads the
loggers created; an increased population requires more
fuelwood to cook their meals; cities expand and require
more fuel, and fuelwood is converted into charcoal very
wastefully in order to ship it to the cities.
The problem is not simply one for the farmers
involved. Those of us in industrial societies are not
so distant; we share the same Earth, and we are
beginning to realize that such extensive changes
influence worldwide climate.
Tropical forests are the Earth's most species-rich
regions, and plant and animal species are being
depleted with the forests. Many of us are embarrassed
to be members of the species that has done most to
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destroy other species. The problem is not simply
aethetic or moral. We may need the varietal complexity
that we are destroying, to sustain the productivity of
existing cultivars, to provide genetic strains that can
resist the toxins that the industrial world is
unloading upon the environment in an unprecedented
variety and amount, or to adapt to the climate changes
that the human tribe is fostering.
With the advent of genetic engineering, some
Cornucopians are in a state of potentially terminal
hubris. The vision is that we don't need natural
species, that we can engineer the Earth. That is a
very big gamble, at very long odds. Technology has
raised yields of certain crops we want, but at a cost
in by-products that .-environmentalists are just
beginning to recognize. As a species, we have not yet
established a track record showing that we know how to
manage a planet.
There are several agencies attempting to arrest the
destruction of tropical forests, principal among them
FAO, U.S. Agency for International Development (AID),
and the new International Tropical Timber Organization
(ITTO). None of the official agencies, so far as I
know, has proposed control of population growth as a
way to stem the progressive destruction of tropical
forests.
Congress' Office of Technology Assessment (OTA)
has recently published a detailed study of genetic
depletion.4 At one point, it briefly mentioned acid
rain, carbon dioxide and marine pollution as threats to
genetic diversity, but it did not mention the growth of
human populations. Its ten "findings" were mostly
technical fixes and did not mention demographic or
human settlements policies as a part of the solution.
Economic progress. Desertification. Tropical
deforestation. Climate. Species extinction. Each
cluster of specialists and policy makers is trying to
solve its problem in isolation. Causes cross
disciplinary lines, and so do consequences, and so do
solutions.
Population growth has led to urbanization on an
astonishing scale. As urbanites, people use much more
infrastructure to support them than they did as
peasants. When the urban services cannot keep pace,
the ghettoes become appalling.
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Again, this has relevance to those of us in the
industrial world. The situation is an invitation to
epidemics, which sometimes do not respect national
frontiers. Moreover, urban crowds are traditionally
more volatile and dangerous to governments than
peasants. (Does the reader recall Shakespeare's
evocation of Brutus and Mark Antony competing to win
over the Roman mob?) Americans may differ as to
whether we have become obsessively afraid of
revolutions -- and whether they in turn are
automatically inclined to be hostile to the United
States -- but most of us would agree that orderly
government is essential to sustained human happiness.
The final act is migration. Those who can, get
out. They are attracted to the United States by the
reality of vastly higher wages and by the image of
wealth. For the American, this brings the remote
question of third world population growth directly into
U.S. domestic policy, and I shall treat it there. At
this point, be it said only that there is a vast
disparity between the numbers of people who would like
to escape the third world and the numbers that the
industrial world is prepared to accept.
Let us consider the strategic issues a bit
further. The government, in its perpetual search for
"stabilization," sometimes seems to resemble King
Canute on the beach ordering the tide to stop. In
Central America, we are obsessed with the conjectural
effects upon our own security of the struggles between
established interests and revolutionaries. This
struggle isn't taking place in an economic vacuum, as
U.S. Government pronouncements seem to suggest. In El
Salvador, for instance, the population per acre of
cultivated land has more than doubled since 1950, and
the ratio is getting rapidly worse. People are pouring
into urban slums,5 and some are migrating to the U.S.
A system that may be tolerable in one condition
may be made intolerable simply by crowding. Would our
government not be better advised to look at the
pressures that are generating tensions there, then
consider how much the United States can do to resolve
those tensions in the El Salvadors around the third
world and finally -- in the classic definition of good
diplomacy -- match its commitments to its resources?
In the Middle East, the strategic issues are
perceived to focus around petroleum. Yet (and not
altogether for foreign policy reasons) our Middle East
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policy is built upon two of the few countries there
that have little oil to export: Israel and Egypt. The
two countries are the major recipients of U.S.
bilateral aid. Their dependency appears to be
increasing. In Egypt, the population is doubling every
27 years at the current rate. Food imports have risen
729 per cent since 1950,6 and the prospect is for
further increase. Israel's population in the same
period has more than trebled, most of its current
increase is Arab, and its dependency upon the U.S.
Government has risen sharply since 1967.
Can we afford the increasing burden that the
economic and demographic data suggest is likely? Can
we ameliorate it, as President Carter was probably
trying unsuccessfully do at Camp David? If not, should
the government be asking itself whether its policies
are viable over the long term, or whether it should be
examining our national interests and how they might be
protected in the light of alternative possible futures?
To offer these examples is not to propose
alternatives, or to suggest that they would be easy.
The purpose is rather to suggest that key determinants
of our strategic calculations are shaped by demography
and the forces that arise from it, and that it is not
presently a component in our national security
thinking.
What would have happened if the government had
been quicker to bring demography into Agency for
International Development decisions? Most third world
countries are now struggling to bring population growth
under control. Their problems would have been simpler
by literally billions of people if foresight had led
them to approach both sides of the equation together.
Now that the problem is better understood, what
are we doing together about it? Nothing. The United
States has shifted its foreign aid increasingly away
from long-term efforts and into short-term tactical
programs. Population aid is now 1.5% per cent of U.S.
foreign aid and it is declining.7
To its credit, AID itself has become more
sensitive to demographic issues than any other policy
component of the U.S. Government, but still one wonders
why this awareness has not regularly been brought to
bear upon all our aid policies.
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What, for instance, has the U.S. Government done
to consider the effects of long-term food aid on
recipient countries and their ecological future? Has
it considered whether we might be driving those
countries deeper into a trap, as they strip their
forest cover to cook the food that we supply, thus
reducing their ability to produce food precisely when
population growth increases the requirements. Have
long-term projections been made of their food
requirements and of our ability to supply them?
In short, do present trends in supply and demand
pattern for food constitute a viable pattern for the
future? What are the alternatives, and what should we
be doing about it? (Early in the Carter
administration, an NSC report was being prepared on
U.S. relations with the third world. When I argued
that the population and food issues should be brought
into it, the compromise was to insert a preambular
sentence recognizing the issues but saying that they
would not be addressed because the study "dealt only
with the next 18 months." When, one may ask, does the
long term start?)
Population growth has probably closed certain
options off to most of the third world. One of these
is industrialization along the pattern of existing
industrial countries. At one time, this was the model;
it probably still is, for some emerging countries like
South Korea. However, as a general model, it would
probably be a disaster. On present patterns, total
world energy needs would rise five- to tenfold
(depending upon one's assumptions) if a world
population of ten billion were to be entirely
industrialized. Finding the capital and the sources
for so much energy is only part of the problem. There
are frightening environmental and climatic implications
if reliance is to be placed upon fossil and fission
fuels. There are immense questions in attempting to
visualize a more benign energy future. One must begin
to try to rethink the model. No automobile cultures;
no conspicuous consumption for all. There is no
evidence -- aside from some of the futures studies
described in Chapter VII -- that a serious effort is
being made to develop even a mental model of where the
third world may be heading. How can we give aid, or
others receive it, without any real plan or picture of
its intended use?
The people who have gotten into this situation are
not stupid. Many see what is happening to them. One
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thinks of the "tree huggers" in the Himalaya, peasants
who organized a movement to put themselves, physically,
between the chainsaws and the trees when commercial
logging began to strip their mountains.
The knowledge exists -- enough at least to justify
some decisions very different from the ones we are
making. The problem is that the people who understand
are disconnected from the people who decide. There is
no systematic process of bringing that knowledge to
bear upon decisions.8
The industrial world. We trade with, argue with,
and pollute with the other industrial countries. We
cause each other a number of problems, but demography
is not central to most of them.
There is at least one exception, and it is the
reverse of the demographic problems of the third world.
Natural population increase has stopped and
reversed in West Germany, Denmark and now Sweden and
Austria. At present fertility levels, populations in
most of Northern and Western Europe will soon begin to
decline (barring immigration at levels that most of the
countries oppose). The change affects not only the
totals; it also means more old people and fewer young
ones.
For each country domestically the change will have
multiple effects.9 On balance, they may be better off
with a smaller population for the post-fossil fuel era.
For us, the Europeans and the Soviets, however,
military and strategic thinking tends to be traditional
and to lag behind new realities.
Our key European allies will have shrinking
military-age cohorts in coming decades. The Soviets
will have more, but their young men increasingly will
be non-Russians.
There is a classic interaction here that foresight
should address. For eminently sane reasons, the United
States is endeavoring to reduce the nuclear component
of NATO defenses. By extension, given current
strategic assessments, this means greater reliance on
conventional forces. With fewer young men to fill
them.
There would seem to be here a considerable
opportunity, and an urgent need, to survey the
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strategic relationships in the light of present
demographic and other realities, rather than trying to
force the new objectives and new realities into a
conceptual framework that froze into place about forty
years ago.
The United States. One would assume, from its
official caution about the subject, that the United
States Government simply does not deal with demographic
issues. In fact, its policies -- undertaken under
whatever name -- regularly influence our demographic
future; and demographics intervene to lead other
policies to success or failure, whether or not we
intended it.
As one example, let us take the pursuit of a major
national goal, racial justice. Let us look at what
happened when we failed to connect the pursuit of two
very good goals a generation ago.
At that time, we embarked simultaneously upon one
of the nation's greatest moral crusades -- ending
racial discrimination -- and one of its greatest
engineering programs -- the construction of the
interstate highway system. Both thoroughly desirable.
One unanticipated by-product has, however, undone much
of what was intended. School busing, to achieve one of
those goals, precipitated white flight from the cities,
which was made feasible in part by the new highway
system being created. The result was resegregation in
cities impoverished by the loss of part of their tax
base. Would we have pursued both objectives in
somewhat different ways to avoid that result if we had
enlisted the advice of urban specialists and
demographers as to the probable results of this
combination of developments?
Time marches on, and reality sometimes changes
faster than our perceptions. Martin Luther King, Jr.,
had a dream, to which much of the nation subscribed, of
"one nation, black and white." That idea is becoming
simply an anachronism. Recent demographic studies have
suggested that California and Texas are becoming multi-
racial states, because of immigration and differential
fertility.10
The studies portray a doubling of both states'
populations in the next fifty years. Long before that,
both states will have become truly multi-racial.
Neither will have a white majority. They will consist
rather of two large minorities -- White (or "Anglos")
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and Hispanics (who in Texas will be on their way again
to a majority) -- and two smaller minorities of Asians
and Blacks. The Whites and Asians will be generally
affluent and well-educated, while most Hispanics and
Blacks will be poor, ill-educated and scrambling for
the less attractive jobs, in the face of an expansion
and qualitative decline in the labor force.
The demographers have done the nation a service.
The nation as a whole may be trending, more slowly, in
the direction in which California and Texas are moving
very quickly.
If we seriously thought about that future, it
seems to me that the present debate about "reverse
discrimination" would already have ended. We are
approaching the absurdity of trying to give special
consideration to a majority. Moreover, as positive
action programs have in some measure succeeded, some
portion of the minorities has reached the middle class
or the top of their professions. By its own success,
special favoritism becomes decreasingly effective as a
way of helping the truly disadvantaged. As we slowly
evolve toward a nation of minorities, we would do well
to choose consciously among the alternatives ahead. Do
we wish to perpetuate policies that encourage us all to
think as minorities and to seek competitive advantage
on racial grounds, with the nation becoming bilingual
as a result of growth of the Hispanic minority? Or
does nationhood itself require a sense of community and
shared identity? If the latter, perhaps we should
again put the "melting pot" ahead of the "salad bowl"
as a symbolic goal of social policy. Perhaps our
special programs should be directed toward the
economically disadvantaged as a group, rather than
toward specific races.
I offer these as conjectures, not as finished
conclusions. My purpose in this book is to promote the
process of foresight, not to become a one-man foresight
bureau. My point is that the demographic trends are
there, and they are the result in part of governmental
policies. Somebody in the government should be charged
with looking at the trends and their implications and
bringing them to bear on policy decisions. As of now,
there is nobody there.
Immigration policy or non-policy has been a factor
in the demographic trends described in California and
Texas. It provides another dramatic example of
policies at cross purposes. On the one hand, the
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nation has been engaged in a massive effort to get
Blacks and other minorities onto the economic ladder.
On the other, and in considerable degree out of
deference to some employers who wanted cheap and docile
labor, it was following what the New York Times called
the "policy of the wink": enforcing the laws against
illegal immigration in a very lackadaisical way, so as
not to cut off the flow of labor. (The California
study cites evidence of Black migration out of southern
California, probably a result of job competition from
Hispanic immigrants.) We cannot successfully have it
both ways, improving the conditions of our own poor
while acquiescing in an influx of labor that pre-empts
the jobs they should be getting, and that can only tend
to depress U.S. wages toward third world levels.
The Immigration Reform Act of 1986 was an attempt
to control the future flow of illegal immigration. It
was a compromise, and perhaps a flawed one. It
exchanged a prohibition against hiring illegal aliens
for an amnesty for many established illegals, with
additional concession in the form of broad loopholes
for agricultural workers, won by agricultural
employers. It will be several years before the country
knows whether the law has slowed or accelerated
immigration and U.S. population growth. This in turn
will have important but so far unexamined impacts upon
the future of employment and earnings, resource and
environmental issues in the United States. The
processes of foresight should be employed as the
country monitors the progress of that law.
The connected issues of immigration and the size
of the labor force go far beyond the question of
minorities' employment. The United States and the
industrial world are in the midst of a technological
revolution that is fundamentally changing jobs,
productivity and unemployment. The changes generate
some deep questions about equity and social policy, and
they are inseparably connected with demographics.
Accelerating computerization and automation are
resulting in astonishing labor productivity in
industries where sufficient capital can be accumulated
to equip the labor force, but parallel to that
phenomenon is the spread of unemployment and a two-
tiered labor force. Those without the capital attempt
to match it by lowering the wages for labor.
Sweatshops are reappearing in our cities, marginal
employment such as sidewalk stands is visibly
proliferating, and parts of the economy are taking on a
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distinctly third world look. Colorful, perhaps, but is
that the way we want to go?
Unemployment, despite cyclical swings, has been on
a secular rise for decades. Exacerbating that trend,
an increasing number of Americans have dropped below
the poverty line in this decade, median household real
income has dropped for more than a decade, and there
seems to be an increasing concentration of wealth at
the top.11
This widening disparity is in part a result of tax
and welfare policies. Whether we choose to do anything
about it depends upon national judgments about equity,
budgets, and the competing claims of different
objectives: economic motivation and capital
accumulation versus the social costs of unemployment
and a potentially alienated underclass. Demography
can, however, give advice as to the size of the
problem, the trends, and the interconnections among
immigration, fertility, the labor force, and the
effects upon them of proposed social and economic
policies.
As of now, the Bureau of Labor Statistics
approaches future labor projections from the opposite
end: it assumes population change as a parameter, and
it hypothesizes the distribution of the resulting labor
force among different industries and occupations on the
basis of present employment trends, while it holds the
unemployment projections to politically acceptable
levels. Real foresight is needed here, and a
systematic inspection of the real issues.
Let us turn to the question of energy.
The use of energy is a central pillar of
industrial societies, and it is also a central cause of
the ecological perturbations that we now recognize may
change the very conditions for life on Earth:
acidification of the environment; climate change; the
nuclear issues.
As a nation, we are addicted to our comfortable
habits: our automobiles; air conditioners; dispersed
settlements. The specialists tell us that we are
coming to the end of the petroleum era, and they do not
differ by much as to the timing. A fundamental
reordering of our energy system requires heavy capital
investments and very long lead times. It should
already be under way.
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What have we done? The first "oil shock" of 1973
led to a number of national measures to encourage
conversion to coal, practice better conservation, and
develop synthetic substitutes. Some were effective;
some were not. When OPEC failed to hold the line on
monopoly pricing, the Reagan administration apparently
decided not to worry. Many of the measures were
weakened, reversed or allowed to lapse: the synthetic
fuels program (which was in deep trouble); tax
incentives for home insulation; the schedule for
improved automobile fuel efficiency; the 55 mile speed
limit. (Congress has passed one useful measure --
efficiency standards for appliances -- and the
President signed it on the second passage, after pocket
vetoing the first.)
During this period, there was a notable
improvement in the nation's efficiency in using oil,
and a consequent slackening of demand growth. Much of
the improvement came from industry, not from
government, as industry adjusted to higher oil prices
in the 1970s.
Does this not argue for reliance upon the price
mechanism, and against formal efforts at governmental
foresight? Not necessarily. The two are not
necessarily in conflict. A system of foresight,
operating through this period, would have reminded the
decision makers that the price fluctuations have not
changed the underlying estimates as to the long-term
supply of the resource. It would have provided
arguments for greater fixity of policy. It would have
been assessing the effectiveness of the various
measures that were taken after 1973. It would perhaps
have provided guidance as to what price levels for oil
would be compatible with the development of oil
conserving strategies and alternative fuels, outlined
the different mechanisms for affecting oil prices, and
weighed their impact on the pursuit of other objectives
such as the control of inflation. Finally, it would
have begun to examine the ramifications of the energy
transition, such as the ways of accommodating higher
energy prices in agriculture, transportation and urban
planning.
How does demography fit in?
We have become so used to the words "per capita"
that we may forget their meaning. Economic well-being
is measured, not by gross figures, but by availability
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per capita. There is an energy component in each of
the goods and services we consume. It may be possible
to supply wants more efficiently through technical
change and conservation, but at any given level of
technology or of conservation, energy availability per
capita equals
total availability
population.
This equation would not be important if the
marginal cost of new energy were not rising and if
there were not environmental penalties to increased
energy consumption. Neither of these conditions holds
true.
The nation can, and should, explore the energy
alternatives and seek to conserve energy. The
demographic point is that, at any level of success in
these directions, the overall problems of developing
and financing benign alternative energy paths are
intensified by population growth.
Demography is concerned, not just with numbers,
but with other characteristics of people, such as where
they live. Americans apparently prefer a spread-out
life style. Witness the typical pattern of
city/suburb/exurb. It would be hard to visualize a
more energy-intensive settlement pattern. At present,
the nation subsidizes transportation, since (with the
partial exception of the interstate system) user fees
do not cover the costs of roads, traffic control,
highway emergency services, or urban transit. In most
places, the other costs of suburban sprawl are
subsidized by the more closely-grouped consumers, since
utility rates are seldom based on the cost of delivery
to a given location.
An energy policy must eventually look at such
questions as whether to subsidize suburban sprawl and
urban gridlock, and the demographers should play a
role.
There are energy studies in abundance, but none of
them (so far as I am aware) treats such demographic
patterns as an element of the problem or the solution.
At a more basic level, the energy planner would do well
to point to future fertility and immigration policy as
relevant to the scale of the problem. The most recent
Department of Energy (DOE) study12 touched briefly upon
population growth as an element of demand growth but
did not identify immigration, population, land use or
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transportation policies as possible elements in an
energy policy.
In part, this is a result of the DOE decision
(Chapter II) to limit its forecasts to short time
frames (in this case 1995), while population change is
a long-term process. This short-term mindset comes
home to roost in the basic perspective of the planners:
find "incentives to increase U.S. oil exploration.. .as
a means of enhancing U.S. energy security." In other
words, if we are admittedly heading into a transition
away from oil, the long perspective would say "conserve
the resource and save it for priority uses such as
chemical feedstocks -- and defense." The short
perspective says "find ways of pumping it faster, so
for the next few years we won't be entirely dependent
on imports."
DOE thus provides us with a splendid example of a
failure of foresight on both counts: failure to seek
causes and solutions outside of one's own area of
competence; and failure to look ahead.
Even the Brundtland Commission, in an impassioned
plea to address world energy problems, failed to make
the connection between energy and human numbers.
These
foresight.
are compelling arguments for better
What has been said of energy can also be said of
the related ecological issues of acid precipitation,
climate change, and the ecological by-products of
nuclear energy. With these, as with other
environmental problems such as toxic substances, one
can address the problems through conservation and by
seeking ecologically more benign ways of satisfying
human wants, but -- at any given level of success in
these endeavors -- the magnitude of the problem is
related to population size. The problems are not so
tame that the nation can afford to ignore any element
that would aid in their amelioration. (I assume that
readers are familiar in broad outline with the
principal environmental and resource issues facing the
world. For those seeking such an overview, I would
commend to them the Worldwatch Institute's annual State
of the World reports and the World Resources
Institute/International Institute for Environment and
Development's World Resources 1987.)
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Demographic and energy policies must be integrated
into these environmental policies. Since demography
and energy policies in turn have consequences for the
economy and society, foresight must be a web crossing
bureaucratic and disciplinary boundaries.
These vast issues of energy and the ecology
transcend national boundaries and underscore the
interconnections between domestic and foreign policy.
By examining them all, and by assessing the role that
demography plays in the the pursuit of other
objectives, we may come informally or formally to a
national consensus about population goals.
If we do, it will be time to recognize that the
connections run both ways. Population change is not
simply a factor in addressing other issues. Other
decisions in turn affect population change.
The connections can be pretty straightforward.
Most people can see the connection between immigration
policy and population growth, and it has been
quantified by demographers.13 Other connections may
initially be more obscure.
For example, national decisions about the
financing of education bear upon fertility, especially
in the middle class. In the United States, where
parents bear most of the responsibility, those who want
their children to have the best educational
opportunities will feel strong pressures to limit the
number of their children in order to be able to put
them through college. On the other hand, our welfare
laws (the AFDC) may reinforce the incentives for the
unmarried ghetto girl to have babies.
One cannot be very certain about either of these
statements, because the connections have not been
sufficiently studied. There is, however, at least a
rebuttable presumption that our educational and welfare
policies conspire to encourage fertility among those
least prepared to raise children and to discourage it
among the potentially most responsible parents. If
true, this has implications for the number and quality
of coming generations and for the pursuit of other
goals such as the current drive for national
"competitiveness."
Let me finish with that note. Other examples
could be given. Perhaps this sketchy survey of the
single issue of demography and its connection to
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several other goals and policies will make the point:
there is a seamless web of cause and effect, but as a
world and as a nation we are attempting to address
problems piecemeal.
I have mentioned that, in our foreign aid, the
government has no apparent sense of direction beyond
the tactical, and no real idea where we are trying to
help third world countries to go. More important, in
our domestic policy, we are equally rudderless. From
the scientific community, we have gotten very clear
warnings of the dangers of drifting in the direction
the nation is presently heading, but there has been no
sign of the political will needed to develop a coherent
strategy and a sense of direction to deal with the
issues. Lead times for these issues are very long.
When the problems have become so intense as to demand
political action, we may have lost our more attractive
options. An institutional foresight process, with
mandated periodic forecasts of issues that are becoming
critical, could help to mobilize government into
action, and a foresight network to examine the
potential consequences of different policy options
would provide the means to cross-check the policy
choices and to refine a coherent program to deal with
change.
The Brundtland Commission was right in saying (see
Chapter VII) that a unified approach is "simply beyond
the reach of present decision making structures and
institutional arrangements."
Slaying Dragons and Exorcising Taboos
We humans arrive at our conclusions by sometimes
mysterious routes. The population issue is an
excellent example. In the issues cited above, the
failure to include demographic policies as elements of
the solutions was not necessarily a product of
ignorance. Population growth was sometimes identified
as a cause of the problem, but limitation of that
growth mysteriously dropped out as an element of the
proposed solution.
There seems to be a very strong taboo about
manipulating fertility. People have done it for
centuries, but they don't talk about it.
The leaderships of developing countries, having
been faced with the consequences of population growth,
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have been growing increasingly explicit about the need
to control it. The taboo is not yet gone, however.
Even the Brundtland Report was much more circumspect
about population issues in the final version than in
the initial terms of reference.14
Similarly, any questioning of affirmative action
programs in the United States, or of U.S. Middle
Eastern aid policy, courts the danger of charges of
racism toward Blacks or Jews. Having as a society made
a tremendous commitment to extirpating racism, we seem
to have thrown a halo effect around it, and anything
that would seem to represent a backing away from that
commitment comes under a new taboo.
The systematic practice of foresight, by forcing
the examination of cross-disciplinary consequences,
could perhaps help to clarify our thinking processes,
somewhat as the scientific method has done for the
disciplines to which it is applied. Above all, it
would require the examination of proposed actions in
terms of their consequences, rather than from
preconceptions and conscious or unconscious biases.
Mobilizing the Public Interest
Policies may go wrong, not as a result of
ignorance, but because they are pulled by special
interests. The farm labor provisions of the
Immigration Reform Act of 1986, or the survival of oil
depletion allowances in the tax reforms of the same
year, are good examples.
An institutionalized foresight process,
particularly if it is accessible to the public,
provides a partial corrective to such distortions in
policy. At least, if the special interest is
accommodated, the costs to the general interest will be
explicit, clear to the decision makers, and -- wherever
possible -- in the public domain.
To Dispose of Some Doubts . .
In all the cases above, there is or was solid
information available which, if brought into the policy
process, would force at least a reexamination of
strategy and which might lead to fundamental debates
and changes in our national view of the future -- to
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the exploration of "alternative futures." This short
list is only the beginning.
The opponent of foresight can differ with some of
the conclusions I have so casually stated, but that
does not help his case. He must make the argument that
demography is irrelevant to the issues I have
described, and that would be a tough assignment indeed.
In Chapter I, I attempted to answer some of the
frequently-heard doubts about foresight, by pointing
out what is not. It is not simply prediction. It is
not an effort to create a single, official perspective
on the future. It is not central planning. It does
not surrender human judgment to mathematical models.
There is a counter-argument particularly popular
in the Reagan administration with its predilection for
less government, to the effect that projections are
regularly wrong, and that it may be more harmful to
make major decisions based on faulty forecasts than it
would have been to muddle through without trying to see
into the future.
It is healthy to be reminded how wrong one can
regularly be about the future. However, that argument
itself impales its adherents on a dilemma, since any
decision making process -- beyond simply rolling dice
or drawing a card to make a decision -- involves an
effort at foresight. If proponents of "foresight" were
simply arguing that there should be a periodic
description of the world a generation or so hence, and
that governmental decisions should reflect an
acceptance of that portrait, the opponents of foresight
would have a better case.
In this book, however, the case will be made, not
for some such rigid approach, but for an ongoing
process to develop the best possible image of present
trends and where they may be leading, and to bring this
information into the pursuit of policy goals. This is
not a proposal to reverse current decision making
processes, but rather to extend them to encompass those
lateral and long-term considerations that are presently
missed, and to use the best available techniques for
handling the information available.
To foreswear the possibility of such an improved
approach is to choose to govern half-blinded.
Government will not go away -- whatever the preferences
of a portion of our populace -- because nobody has
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developed an alternative way of doing the things that
society must do as a group. There is no alternative.
That is why government is so durable, if not popular.
The rate of change in the world is faster than it
has ever been before, and the impacts of human
decisions on the future of mankind and of the Earth are
more fundamental than ever before, if only because of
the sheer numbers and the growth of human population
and the rate of technological change.
In such a world one cannot rationally argue
against improving our national ability to look ahead.
The legitimate question is: what will work best?
V 00 T /s11 OP S
1. Readers may be interested in a new scholarly study in
this area. The AAAS Population, Resources and
Environment Program (PERP; see Introduction Footnote 8)
is launching a project entitled "The Effects of
Technological Change on Population, Resources and the
Environment," which is to consist of a survey followed
by a series of case studies "selected to represent
development processes that, in retrospect, we recognize
were not sustainable... We will then try to develop a
set of 'counterfactual scenarios' of history to specify
what realistic alternative strategies might have been
undertaken that would have resulted in sustainable
development." The principal investigator is Harvey
Brooks.
2. The World Bank, World Development Report 1984 (London
& New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); see
especially Figure 4.4, p.70.
3. H. Breman and C. T. de Wit, "Rangeland Productivity and
Exploitation in the Sahel"; Science, September 30,
1983, p.1346.
4. "Technologies to Maintain Biological Diversity," OTA
March 1987 (Washington: USGPO).
5. "Central America: Population Growth, Instability,
Migration, and the U.S.," TEFData #5 (Washington: The
Environmental Fund, September 1982).
6. United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, FAO
Trade Yearbook, Vols. 14 and 34, Rome, 1960 and 1980.
The "doubling time" is from Population Reference
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Bureau, "1986 World Population Data Sheet" (Washington:
April 1986).
7. Lindsey Grant, "A Population Focus for U.S. Aid", NPG
Forum paper, June 1987. Available from Negative
Population Growth, Inc., 16 East 42nd Street - Suite
1042, New York, NY 10017.
8. This point is made with respect to ecological knowledge
in a recent National Research Council report:
Committee on Applications of Ecological Theory to
Environmental Problems, "Ecological Knowledge and
Environmental Problem Solving," March 1987. (National
Academy press, 2101 Constitution Avenue, NW, Washington
DC 20418.)
9. For a detailed discussion, see Kingsley Davis et al,
"Below-Replacement Fertility in Industrial Societies:
Causes, Consequences, Policies", Population and
Development Review Supplement to Vol. 12, 1986.
10. Leon F. Bouvier and Philip Martin, Population Change
and California's Future (Washington: Population
Reference Bureau, 1985). F. Ray Marshall and Leon F.
Bouvier, Population Change and the Future of Texas
(Washington: Population Reference Bureau, 1986.)
11. See Frank Levy, "Changes in the Distribution of
American Family Incomes, 1947 to 1984" in Science, 22
May 1987; Ravi Batra, "An Ominous Trend to Greater
Inequality" and Frank Levy, "Actually, We Are All
Getting Poorer," both in the New York Times, May 3,
1987, p. E2.
12. Department of Energy, Energy Security: A Report to the
President of the United States (Washington: USGPO,
1987).
13. The most accessible presentations on the demographic
impacts of different assumptions about immigration are
"The Impact of Immigration on U.S. Population Size" and
"Immigration and its Impact on U.S. Society," both by
Leon F. Bouvier and both published in 1981 as
occasional papers by the Population Reference Bureau,
Washington.
14. The Brundtland Commission's original workplan said "the
Commission will wish to consider strategies that offer
the prospect of (population) stabilization during the
next century." Compare the more cautious final
treatment cited in Chapter VII.
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_
1?3:70pCIDEZZI]LESI
There have been various foresight proposals,
some of them conflicting. Let us here attempt to
summarize some of the recommendations by various
commissions and individuals during the past few
years, then describe the current status of various
legislative proposals reflecting those
initiatives, and finally undertake to define some
broad criteria for evaluating these proposals.
Proposals to Congress and the President
As the reader may have noticed, there was an
upsurge of interest in dealing with long-term issues in
the years around 1970: the environmental legislation;
NEPA; the National Goals Staff; the Rockefeller
Commission; presidential attention to the population
issue; the creation of OTA. During those years, there
were proposals for improved foresight machinery (by
other names) that are still germane.
Senator Humphrey proposed that Congress address
the need for coordinated long-term assessment by
creating a "Joint Committee on Balanced National Growth
and Development. i1
In 1970, the Senior Executives Council of the
Conference Board developed a proposal for the creation
of a public-private Institute for National Objectives,
which would attempt to understand and interpret social
change, consider the choices before society, develop
criteria for choosing national goals, and suggest
strategies and policies. The Institute was to be
divided into a Center for Integrative Studies of
National Policies, Priorities and Alternatives (this
title may set some sort of world record) and an
Advisory Council. Major public and private leaders
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would be involved. This proposal was presented
personally to President Nixon, but nothing came of it.2
In 1973, the Smithsonian Institution's Woodrow
Wilson Center for Scholars convened a "Project on
Sustainable Growth" which eventuated in "A Proposal for
Developing a Capability at the National Level for
Strategic Policy Assessments." The Proposal called for
the creation of an Office of Strategic Policy
Assessment in the Executive branch, with a counterpart
in Congress. The purpose would be "to improve
national decision making as it relates to long-term
policies. More specifically, these groups should
endeavor to identify emerging long-term trends and
problems, formulate and evaluate alternative courses of
action to deal with them, and evaluate the effects of
actions that may have been put in train." In the
Executive, the Office would be lodged in the Executive
Office of the President, either as an independent
office or as part of OMB. In Congress, the parallel
capability would be lodged in OTA. (These
recommendations were developed by a Working Group
drawn mostly from government. In a dissenting view,
one member proposed instead that the "strategic choice
assessment" function be lodged in a permanent public-
private Commission on National Policy Choices. )3
These recommendations foreshadowed most of the
specific proposals that have subsequently been made
concerning national foresight machinery. They received
regrettably little attention and did not result in any
action.
During the 1970s, there was a torrent of
Congressionally-sponsored commissions, transient or
permanent. (In 1960, in all areas, the General
Services Administration counted nearly one thousand
advisory committees and commissions in the government,
689 of which were mandated or specifically authorized
by Congress.)4 Many of them addressed broad areas of
national growth policy, resource management and
economic futures. Several of them recognized that the
issues they addressed could not be dealt with in
isolation and they offered suggestions for what would
now be called foresight machinery.
The "Rockefeller commission" did not address the
broad question of foresight machinery, but it did
propose the creation of an Office of Population Growth
and Distribution within the Executive Office of the
President. Similarly, the National Commission on
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Materials Policy (1970) proposed the creation of a
Cabinet-level agency for materials, energy and the
environment, with a parallel Joint Committee of
Congress.
Three "Report[s] on National Growth Policy" (1972,
1974 and 1976) were sent to Congress by the Executive
branch in response to the Housing and Urban Development
Act of 1970. In passing, they mentioned the need to
develop ways to reconcile national growth objectives
with other national pursuits, the need to end the
fragmentation of federal support for state and local
growth planning, and the 1976 report for the first time
pointed out that the public must be brought
systematically into any governmental debate about
growth policies. The 1976 report also gave Senator
Humphrey an opportunity to remind the government that
it had not yet developed "the capacity to make public
policy decisions in a rational, informed, future-
oriented and coherent way."
Creation of the National Commission on Supplies
and Shortages (1974) resulted in two conflicting sets
of recommendations about foresight machinery. The
Commission simply recommended that a unit be created in
OMB manned by specialists who would monitor federal
activities in the area of minerals and materials, plus
a beefing up of the Council of Economic Advisers to
permit more detailed sectoral and industry analysis.
However, Senator Humphrey had appended to the
Commission an Advisory Committee on National Growth
Policy Processes with a broad mandate to make
recommendations about a policy making process to relate
resource and commodity issues to the "total problem of
balanced national growth and development." The
Advisory Committee recommended the creation of an
independent agency in the Executive branch called the
National Growth and Development Commission. It would
consist of independent, long-tenured appointees who
would make annual public reports identifying long-term
issues and suggesting ways to deal with them. The
President and Congress would be obligated to respond.
The Commission would have no administrative authority.
Separately, the Committee proposed an independent
Center for Statistical Policy and Analysis to
coordinate (without any executive authority) federal
statistical work.
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Finally, the Committee proposed that Congress
attach an impact analysis (apparently akin to an EIS)
to every legislative proposal.
The Commission dismissed its Advisory Committee's
proposals as impracticable. Nothing came of either
report.
Senator Humphrey's unflagging efforts to promote
the creation of a broad foresight capability in the
Executive did not bear fruit. In 1975 he and Senator
Javits introduced the Balanced Growth and Economic
Planning bill, which was intended to create an advisory
machinery in the Executive, but drew intense
conservative criticism because it contained the dread
word "planning." It failed. He did, however, succeed
(in the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment and Balanced
Growth Act of 1978) in requiring that the Executive set
goals, institute systematic planning procedures, and
report annually on efforts to lower unemployment,
reduce inflation and balance the budget.
The nation's recent history suggests how little
one piece of legislation can accomplish if its goals
are not the goals of the Executive branch.
At the close of the Carter administration, a group
chaired by CEQ published Global Future: Time to Act as
a follow-up to the Global 2000 Report. Aside from its
policy recommendations, it made a proposal for future
foresight machinery.
...a Federal Coordinating Unit...preferably
within the Executive Office of the President, with
the mandate to coordinate ongoing federal programs
concerning global population, resource and
environmental issues; to evaluate long-term trends
in these areas; and to report to the President
with recommendations for action. A staff of about
20 and an annual budget of about $6 million would
be adequate...
...A single government center should act as
coordinator for the federal government to insure
availability of adequate data and modeling
capability to carry out policy analysis on long-
term global population, resource and environmental
issues. To be most effective, this center should
be part of the Federal Coordinating Unit for
policy...
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The Global Population, Resources and
Environmental Analysis Institute, a hybrid public-
private institution, should be created...
Included...should be a Forum for Global Models.5
The report also recommended the adoption of new
administrative procedures and legislation forcing
federal agencies to address long-term global issues,
and it made several suggestions to promote greater
awareness of these issues among the business community
and general public. The Reagan administration has not
followed up on these proposals, except to create, under
the Chairman of CEQ, the Global Issues Work Group
described in Chapter III.
In May 1982, the oversight subcommittee of the
House Committee on Energy and Commerce held a workshop
on foresight proposals. In the summary of the workshop
proceedings, there is a very succinct statement of what
the various workshop participants (most of them
distinguished private individuals) said would improve
our foresight capability:
Creation of multiple "institutes of the future,"
publicly funded but insulated in an endowment
manner from year-to-year political considerations.
Creation of a federally-chartered institute
largely dependent on private sector financing
which would do global trend analysis and their
policy implications.
A "Report on Global Trends in Population,
Environment, and Natural Resources" by the
Executive branch to the Congress. Every other
two-year Congress would "respond to this report,"
via an unspecified "Joint Committee of Congress."
To encourage interaction with the private sector a
public/private advisory commission on global
problems would be created; an interdisciplinary
global modeling group also would be created to
review and critique the Executive branch report.
A "Future State of the Union Report" by the
Executive branch to the Congress. It would focus
on the U.S. with one or more chapters looking
outward to the global with a time perspective of
the next decade, the next two decades, and beyond
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the year 2000. Every other year the Joint
Economic Committee would respond to this report.
Establishment of an "Office of Research Analysis
on Global Population Resources, Energy, and the
Environment," which would work in cooperation with
the Office of Management and Budget's Office of
Regulatory and Information Policy, but would
report directly to the President.
Stimulation of government/private sector exchange
on data, modeling and use of projections as well
as analysis.6
These proposals, it will be noted, all emphasized
the creation of new structures to make periodic
reports, separate from and in various degrees insulated
from existing government agencies. They did not pick
up the Global 2000 Report suggestion that there be
better coordination of existing governmental foresight
work, and they did not suggest how the proposed
periodic reports would be brought into governmental
decision making.
The Global Tomorrow Coalition, a Washington-based
coalition of public interest groups mostly in
population/resource/environmental fields, from its
inception in 1981 has called for improved government
foresight capability in those fields. It has made
"the achievement of a stronger federal commitment to an
improved, integrated and permanent national foresight
capability" a focal point of its program, and
individual members of the coalition have sketched out
possible machinery for such a capability.
The Coalition has not endorsed specific
legislation, but it has recommended the following
actions:
(1) establish in the Executive Office of the
President an improved capacity to coordinate and
analyze data collected by federal agencies and
other pertinent sources on the long-term
interactions of trends in population, resources,
and environment--and their relationship to social
and economic development--and to provide
information relevant to current policy decisions
responsive to the needs of the national and global
future;
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(2) encourage and facilitate widespread
public participation in the discussion of choices
for a desirable national future; and
(3) invite other nations to expand their own
foresight capability and share in an international
exchange of relevant data and information.7
Another private group, the Year 2000 Committee,
existed for three years and disbanded in 1984. It was
composed of distinguished individuals under the
chairmanship of Robert O. Anderson (of Atlantic
Richfield) and Russell Train (former Chairman of CEQ
and Director of EPA). It undertook to focus attention
upon the need for improvement of information about
global trends. It drafted proposed legislation. This
group favored the creation of (a) a global trends
information office in the White House; (b) a
quadrennial report by the Executive branch to Congress
of the long-term global trends which affect global
economic and political stability, with Executive branch
policy proposals; (c) a response from Congress; and (d)
a public-private advisory group to comment on that
dialogue. The group did not take an explicit position,
on substantive population, resource or environment
issues.
In closing this survey of recent proposals about
foresight, let me remind the reader that I have
confined it to specific proposals as to the
governmental machinery for exercising foresight, at the
national level. There is a remarkable variety of
futures reports by governments, international
organizations and private groups. Many of these
contain generalized exhortations as to the need for
better statistics, better coordination, and a way of
bringing the projections into policy making, but there
is remarkably little about how those improvements
should be achieved.
Recent Legislative Proposals
Three bipartisan bills were introduced into the
98th Congress that bear directly on the foresight
process. They are generally known as the
Hatfield/Ottinger, the Gore/Gingrich and Scheuer bills.
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In addition, Rep. Mavroules sponsored House Joint
Resolution 248 calling upon the government to improve
its ability to project population, resource and
environmental trends.
Rep. Wirth and others introduced the "National
Economic Cooperation Act of 1983" which, although
focused on the better coordination of economic,
employment and international trade policies, was
treated within Congress as a form of foresight
legislation.
Let me describe the key features of these bills.
Hatfield/Ottinger. The Global Resources,
Environment and Population bill of 1983 (S.1025-
H.R.2491) was an outgrowth and a fusion of separate
bills submitted by the two sponsors to earlier sessions
of Congress. It was both a substantive and a process
bill. It stated the objective of population
stabilization in the United States and the rest of the
world. Its origins lie in the effort to bring Congress
to adopt a population policy. The foresight functions
appear to be an add-on, intended to provide the means
to make the population policy effective. No effort was
made to include issues other than population, resources
and the environment.
It would require that "the policies, regulations,
and public laws of the United States shall be
interpreted and administered in accordance with" its
population goal. It proposed to establish a Cabinet
level Council on Global Resources, the Environment and
Population, which would see to the preparation of
projections of those trends and would assure that they
are taken into account in federal, state and local
policies and programs relating to a wide range of
topics, from "education" to "service to senior
citizens." The Council would be chaired by the
Chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality.
All federal government agency heads would be
required to identify and remove any impediments "which
limit or prevent compliance with the purposes, policies
and provisions of this Act." The Council was
instructed to monitor that process and to recommend
administrative and statutory changes to the President
in order to bring it into effect.
The bill was clearly intended to do for population
what the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (see
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Chapter II) did for the environment in general. It
was, however, considerably stronger than that Act,
since it required compliance with, rather than
consideration of, the goals it set forth. As with
NEPA, the language quoted above presumably would open
federal actions and policies to judicial review for
compliance with the Act, and the basis for challenge
would be far broader.
The bill, in short, would make population
stabilization an absolute national target, to which all
other policies must conform.
No funds were proposed to carry out the bill, but
the expenses of the Council were to be paid out of
appropriations for the Executive Office of the
President. Moreover, "the head of each agency
represented on the Council shall promptly furnish
necessary services, equipment, personnel and facilities
to the Council" and would be obligated to furnish it
with any information requested, "to the extent
permitted by law."
The Council would make a periodic report to the
President on world population, resource and
environmental trends, and the President would report
annually to Congress.
Upon examination, perhaps the most unsettling
characteristic of this bill is the disparity between
its reach and its grasp. If it had been passed, it
would have promoted population policy -- which does not
presently even exist -- into the central element of
federal decision making. It would turn the Chairman of
CEQ into one of the most powerful figures in
Washington. It would open federal processes as never
before to judicial challenge, forcing the government to
pursue policies leading to population stabilization.
On the other hand, the instruments to achieve this
epochal change were frail indeed. A bureaucrat without
staff support is usually at an extreme disadvantage.
No Cabinet-level committee could itself possibly carry
out the technical functions assigned to this one. It
would need massive staff back-up, and for this the
Chairman would be at the mercy of the participating
agencies. It is hard to imagine that any line agency
would willingly turn over to this new entity the sorts
of power envisaged in the draft legislation. It would
be a super-agency far stronger, for instance, than the
NSC. Their instinct would be to starve it. Meanwhile,
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population groups -- if they are worth their salt --
could be expected to be instituting lawsuits
challenging each federal action that did not
demonstrably accord with the goal of population
stabilization. Congress would then come under mounting
pressure to get the courts off the government's back.
In short, one wonders whether the bill, laudably
intended as it was, could pass, or be signed by a
president, or work.
This bill had 50 co-sponsors. The House version
was referred to the Subcommittee on Census and
Population of the Committee on Post Office and Civil
Service, which held one hearing on it in July 1984.
The testimony at that hearing reflected heartening
progress in thinking about the nuts and bolts of how
one translates broad aspirations into real policy
making. While much of the testimony was directed
toward the implications of third world population
growth and of current immigration levels into the U.S.
(naturally enough for a population bill), some of it
was addressed to the workability of the proposed
foresight arrangements. Russell Peterson, an erstwhile
chairman of CEQ, speaking for the National Audubon
Society, questioned whether the proposed Cabinet-level
Council would be workable. He recommended that a
coordinating point for national foresight be placed in
the CEQ or elsewhere in the Executive Office of the
President. Aside from the usual requirement for a
periodic report, he suggested that such a group be
charged with recommending ways to improve the
coordination of foresight activities within the
government. He also urged a quick GAO study of the
Executive branch foresight capabilities--its data
gathering, analytical techniques, the compatibility of
assumptions used in different government models, the
coordination of foresight efforts, the communications
between governmental and private foresight work, and
the success or failure in bringing these efforts into
the decision process. The purpose would be to
inventory the available foresight resources, to see
what else may be needed, and to see how well the nation
uses its present resources.
Dr. Rupert Cutler of The Environmental Fund (since
renamed Population Environment Balance) made many of
the same points. Specifically, however, he would lodge
the task of statistical coordination in the Office of
Management and Budget (OMB). He would assign the
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primary responsibility for monitoring and interpreting
the data to Congress, through a periodic appraisal by
OTA and through the creation of a Joint Committee of
Congress on Population and the Environment.
If better foresight is to be achieved, it will be
through an informed consensus built upon the
examination of specific recommendations such as these.
It is worth noting that both speakers treated
foresight as if it were limited to trends in
population, resource availability and the environment.
We will return to the question of whether that is a
broad enough definition.
A somewhat less ambitious version of the bill, the
Global Resources, Environment and Population bill of
1987, was introduced into the 100th Congress in 1987 by
Rep. Kenneth MacKay and nine co-sponsors (as H.R.2212)
and Senator Hatfield (as S. 1171). The proposal for a
Council on Global Resources, the Environment and
Population was dropped, and along with it the charge to
develop a "national population policy" and the
extraordinary powers to call upon other government
agencies for support. Most references to planning and
coordination were dropped. The annual presidential
report was changed into a triennial report by the CEQ.
Agency heads are still charged with a one-time review
of their statutory authority, regulations and policies
to assure that they "are consistent with the attainment
of population stabilization in the United States as
soon as practicable," but the earlier proposal that the
Council oversee this process is reduced to an
obligation on CEQ to report what the agencies have
done.
The bill's sponsors obviously listened to the
comments in 1984. The bill has gained realism at the
expense of inter-agency involvement. With the demise
of the Council idea, agencies other than CEQ have no
responsibilities other than the one above for
"consistency." They must under Section 4
"coordinate...findings," but the meaning of this
injunction is unclear.
Neither the 1983 Hatfield-Ottinger nor the 1987
Hatfield-MacKay bill, be it noted, makes provision for
an ongoing process of reviewing policy proposals to
assure their consistency with the demographic purposes
of the bill.
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Gore/Gingrich. The Critical Trends Assessment
bill, (H.R.3070), introduced by a liberal Democrat and
a conservative Republican, was considerably more modest
in intent than H.R.2491. It mentioned demography and
the environment only once, in passing. It was solely a
process bill, directed toward the "need to supplement
existing capabilities to provide a systematic and
comprehensive use of . . . information to guide policy
makers concerning critical trends and alternative
futures . . . for use by the public and private sectors
of the United States economy."
To provide for that systematic process, it would
create an Office of Critical Trends Analysis in the
White House. One function of the Office would be to
prepare a Quadrennial Report on Critical Trends and
Alternative Futures, which would include an evaluation
of "the effects of existing and alternative government
policies on such trends." The Congress would respond
to this report with reports of its own, on a biennial
basis.
Second, the Office would also review federal laws,
regulations, programs and other activities to determine
their long-term effect.
Third, the Office would establish a public-private
Advisory Commission.
The bill authorized $5 million per year for the
Office.
Other than providing for comment on the office's
work by government agencies and private groups, the
bill does not involve the rest of the government in its
processes. It does not provide for coordination of
statistics and information as proposed in Global 2000.
Section 5, authorizing the Office to review
federal activities, is perhaps the sleeper. In the
hands of a powerful person with access to the
President, this could turn the Office into a powerful
presence. More likely, since no institutional
arrangement is provided to assure that it is involved
in the flow of policy documents, it would be seen by
the White House and department chiefs as an annoying
post-hoc critic of their policies and would be shunted
off to the sidelines.
The bill died in the Government Operations
Committee in the House in the 98th Congress. Gore (now
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a Senator) introduced it in the Senate in April 1985
(S.1031), and Rep. Gingrich and Rep. Kenneth MacKay
reintroduced it in the House (H.R.2690). The bill died
again for lack of a constituency, and it has not been
reintroduced in the 100th Congress.
Scheuer bill. The "Environmental Monitoring
Improvement bill of 1984" (H.R.5958) was introduced by
Rep. Scheuer and five co-sponsors in the 98th Congress.
Under this bill
* the Administrator of the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) would prepare an annual
Environmental Monitoring Report describing and
evaluating programs to monitor the quality of
the physical environment in which the U.S.
participates, and summarizing the current state
of that environment.
* a public-private National Commission on
Environmental Monitoring would be created to
assist in the preparation of the first
Environmental Monitoring Report and to make
recommendations to the President and to Congress
for the improvement of national and
international environmental monitoring. The
Commission would then go out of existence.
The bill is narrowly focused on improving the
quality and coordination of national environmental
monitoring. It does not address population or
resources. It does not propose to evaluate the impact
upon the environment of trends in these areas or in
other parts of the economy. Environmental monitoring
for law enforcement purposes is specifically excluded
from its purview. No provision is suggested for giving
effect to the recommendations made by the National
Commission, and there is no provision made for bringing
environmental analysis more systematically into
national decision making. It is, in effect, a proposal
as to how to put a single brick into the edifice of
national foresight.
'Rep. Scheuer did not exclude all these other
elements of foresight because of ignorance. He has
been a leading figure in warning the nation of the
implications of population growth. He chaired the
Congressional Select Committee on Population (Chapter
IV) which in 1978 presented a detailed assessment of
the impacts of population growth upon the pursuit of
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other national objectives and which made sweeping
recommendations for a national population policy.8
The Scheuer bill should probably be viewed as one
veteran politician's conclusion that a national
foresight capability can be built only through a block-
by-block approach, and that better environmental
monitoring is one such block. A staffer on Rep.
Scheuer's Subcommittee has privately explained that the
narrowness of the bill is intended to improve its
chances of passage by narrowing jurisdictional
squabbles with other committees.
The bill has not been reintroduced since the 98th
Congress.
The Mavroules resolution (H.J.Res.248). With 23
co-sponsors, Rep. Mavroules introduced a resolution
stating "That it is the sense of Congress that the
executive branch take immediate action to
systematically coordinate and improve its projections
of world population, resource and environmental trends,
and their analysis, as outlined in Global 2000."
In the previous Congress, Senator Pell had
introduced a parallel resolution in the Senate, but he
did not do so in the 98th Session.
The Mavroules resolution is just what it seems to
be: a very general reminder to the President that
Congress would like to see the Executive improve its
foresight practices. In a way, the guidance is even
broader than it looks, since in fact Global 2000 did
not outline the ways in which the Executive might
systematically coordinate and improve its projections;
it simply stated the need.
The resolution was referred to the same committee
as the Hatfield/Ottinger bill. It was mentioned in
connection with the hearing on that bill, but it was
not reintroduced into the 99th or 100th Congress.
This recitation of proposed bills is hardly cause
for rejoicing. Thousands of bills are introduced in
each Congress. Few are ever reported out of committee.
In April 1985, Senators Mathias and Stafford held
a joint oversight meeting of the Committee on
Environment and Public Works and the Subcommittee on
Government Efficiency and the District of Columbia to
call attention to the need for better foresight
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machinery.9 Shortly thereafter, Senator Gore convened
an informal meeting of foresight proponents to learn
whether he could develop some effective advocacy for
his foresight bill. He did not get much help, and the
topic has since languished. (By way of example, a
legislative assistant in Congressman Gingrich's office
did not even realize that his Congressman had
reintroduced the Gore-Gingrich bill in the 99th
Congress.) It will take much more constituent pressure
before the subject is likely to move in Congress.
It is worth noting that the Hatfield-Ottinger-
MacKay bills have stayed alive while the others are at
least temporarily moribund. Perhaps this is because
they state a position about something "real"
population -- and it has a dedicated constituency: in
this case Zero Population Growth, Inc.
The others deal with the abstraction of process,
and it is hard to mobilize a committed constituency.
Unfortunately, the roles would probably be reversed if
it came to a Congressional vote. An improvement in
process would probably face much less opposition than
an effort to state a national position on population.
The "National Economic Cooperation" bill.
H.R.3443 was introduced by Rep. Wirth and 60 co-
sponsors as an amendment to the Employment Act of 1946
(the "Full Employment Act.") Its purpose was "to
improve the collection and use of economic data by the
Government, to promote economic cooperation between
labor, business and government, to develop consensus
economic policies. . ." in order to promote employment
and to make U.S. products competitive in international
trade.
From the environmentalists' point of view, the
bill is parochial in that it limits its foresight
activities to economic matters.
The bill would create a National Economic
Cooperation Council to "acknowledge that the
restoration and expansion of America's economy is a
national priority," to create public fora to develop
national and regional economic strategies, to improve
economic data collection, to monitor the economy, to
promote international trade and U.S. access to foreign
markets, and "to report to the President and the
Congress annually on the state of the national
economy."
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The Council would have staff, working committees,
subpoena powers and the right to require responses to
its suggestions from Executive branch departments. It
would cost $20 million annually. The President would
be required to designate a President's Special Adviser
for Economic Coordination, who would provide the
liaison between the Executive branch and the Council
and would "act as the principal official responsible
for the coordination of executive branch trade and
economic functions and activities" -- an economic czar.
It is not made clear what the Council could do
that an Economic Policy Council and the Council of
Economic Advisers could not do.
It is remarkable with what ease Congressional
bills would re-arrange the power structure and the
political landscape. This bill presumably was the
product of an urge among its co-sponsors to show
themselves ready and able to mend America's economic
problems, coupled with a Congressional urge to inject
Congress more deeply into the executive process (six of
the nine members of the Council would be, in effect,
appointed by Congress). But it is not the purpose of
this book to speculate about such things.
My purpose in reviewing this bill is to
* forewarn readers that H.R.3443 is not foresight
legislation as they would understand the term.
Another blindered Council is hardly the way to
widen the national perspective.
* remind them that other groups have their own
interests and priorities, and their own idea of
foresight, which they would be happy to promote
with their own governmental apparatus.
* illustrate the legislative penchant for
addressing any perceived problem with the
creation of another Committee or Council. If
organizations already exist with
responsibilities for the issues at point, this
is a recipe for territorial warfare rather than
improved decisions.
H.R.3443 was referred to the Committees on
Government Operations and on Banking, Finance and Urban
Affairs, where it died at the end of the 98th Congress.
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Evaluating Foresight Proposals
This brief review suggests that there is enough
Congressional interest in foresight to generate
legislative proposals, but not yet enough to get those
proposals very far down the legislative road.
Moreover, the confusion of H.R.3443 with foresight
legislation suggests how fuzzy the perception of
foresight remains.
I have commented on the particular characteristics
of the individual bills. Let me attempt to set forth,
more broadly, some criteria by which one may evaluate
the existing proposals and develop new ones.
In principle, most people concerned about the
environment could enthusiastically endorse
Hatfield/Ottinger, Gore/Gingrich, the Scheuer bill, or
the Mavroules resolution. Any of them would be better
than the present governmental inattention to foresight,
and any of them could provide the springboard from
which to develop a more systematic foresight process.
In specific terms, however, it is important that
the proponents of action come to some general agreement
as to what they want, so that differences about detail
do not undermine the shared purpose of introducing into
government the kind of foresight process described in
Chapter I.
There are five issues concerning machinery and
procedures apparent in the different proposals that
have been described.
First, substantive goals vs. procedure. Some of
the proposals stake out a position on substance, e.g.
that population should be stabilized. Others confine
themselves to procedure. It will be argued in the
closing part of this paper that any proposal will gain
more adherents if it does not require that Congress or
the President take a position on substantive goals.
The object is to create the process; the process itself
should help lead to the right conclusions on substance.
Second, scope. Most of the proposals emphasize
the triad of population/resources/environment. This is
natural enough, since much of the impetus for better
foresight has come from those who recognize the
deficiencies of the present system in dealing with
those issues. I will argue, however, that
environmentalists will gain more allies if they broaden
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the scope of proposals to cover other legitimate areas
of governmental concern. The economist will have no
more interest in Hatfield/Ottinger than the
environmentalist does in H.R.3443.
The list of issues could be long, but
environmentalists should see the advantage of looking
ahead at the whole array of interpenetrating issues.
It is hard, for instance, to imagine a serious analysis
of the food balance that does not make some reference
to balance of payments--the ability of food-deficit
nations to pay for imports or, alternately, the
willingness of food-exporting countries to provide the
food as aid.
Third, machinery. There is a wistfulness and an
underlying similarity about most of those proposals
from the 1970s. Almost all of them seek to create
councils of "wise men," undistracted by the duties of
administration, who would examine the portents and lead
us all from error.
What is missing? This Platonic process is
disconnected from the real world of policy choices.
The decisions that shape the future are made, very
practically, day by day, in juggling current problems,
weighing what is possible, and judging alternatives
against a sense (usually implicit and ill-defined) of
personal and national interest.
An avid reader could arm himself with a very
impressive collection of briefing materials -- well
selected, tightly edited -- from CSPA, from the
Clearing House, the World Future Society, and a host of
other sources. If he had the time, he would be wiser
for reading the six volumes of the Rockefeller Report.
There is much to be learned from the Global 2000
Report.
What is missing? People who are making decisions
don't have time to be avid readers.
Foresight to be meaningful must be delivered, very
succinctly, at the decision point, and it must explore
the ramifications of precisely the issue being
addressed.
There is another problem with that Platonic ideal.
Every choice, every description of alternatives, is
being tugged at and influenced by competing departments
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and agencies, each with its own perception of the
national interest, and each with a well-developed sense
of self-preservation.
Those departments are unlikely to welcome a new
player, insulated from them, with the authority to make
utterances about the national interest and the choices
available.
In this real Washington, any proposal for
foresight machinery would do well to enlist rather than
antagonize these present power centers.
This suggestion is not cynical. Fragmented and
ill-managed as they are, the specialists and analysts
around the government -- properly organized -- can
bring a wide range of useful perspectives into the
foresight process. And they are probably better
qualified to understand their constituents' needs than
would be true of a small band of thinkers sequestered
together in the rarified atmosphere of the Executive
Office Buildings.
Fourth, product. Descriptions of Hatfield/
Ottinger and Gore/Gingrich have emphasized the proposed
periodic "World in the Year XXXX" reports and have
tended to ignore the provisions for review of
governmental activities to analyze their long-term
implications. The periodic reports are a useful
adjunct to foresight, but that second point -- bringing
foresight into the regular decision making process --
is the heart of the issue. How that is done -- how the
foresight proponents propose to get foresight into the
decision makers' door -- will determine their success
or failure in getting the process adopted and in making
it work if it is adopted.
An office, even in the White House, is not enough
if it is not connected to policy. The object is not to
generate studies, but to broaden the decision making
process.
Fifth, the private role. Some recommendations
have called for a public-private advisory group.
Experience suggests that the public role can inhibit
the private one in such enterprises. Governments do
not particularly relish the idea of creating
organizations to second-guess and criticize the
administration's conclusions, and one might expect any
administration to endeavor to manipulate the membership
of any such group so that it would endorse the
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administration's views. Failing that, a politically-
sensitive administration would tend to play down any
"difficult" conclusions as the Nixon administration did
with the Rockefeller Commission report in 1972.
I will suggest another variant: a truly private
process paralleling the governmental one and keyed to
comment on the governmental projections. Let the "wise
men" be beyond the reach of government. Such a process
would sharpen the policy debate. It would also help to
enlist the electorate in the debate about national
goals and choices. This last point may be critical.
Without the support of an informed electorate,
Congress and the Executive are unlikely to face the
difficult choices that foresight may point out to them.
FOOT/402'ES
1. "A Proposal for Achieving Balanced National Growth and
Development," submitted by Senator Hubert Humphrey to
the Subcommittee on Economic Progress of the Joint
Economic Committee, Congress of the United States,
February 26, 1973. U.S. Government Printing Office,
1973.
2. Except as otherwise noted, the discussion of foresight
initiatives 1970-1978 is taken from the materials
assembled by the Congressional Research Service for the
Committee on Energy and Commerce, Strategic Issues:
Historical Experience, Institutional Structures and
Conceptual Framework, op cit, and from "Lessons from
the Past," Global 2000 Report to the President, Vol.
II, Appendix A.
3. The Working Group was chaired by Chester L. Cooper,
then a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center, now with
Resources for the Future. The proposals are succinctly
stated in "A Proposal for Developing a Capability at
the National Level for Strategic Policy Assessments,"
August 9, 1973, (Woodrow Wilson International Center
for Scholars, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC
20560; 10 pp. with Annexes; unpublished).
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4. Congressional Research Service, Congressional
Foresight: History, Recent Experiences, and
Implementation Strategies, op cit, p. 124.
5. Council on Environmental Quality and Department of
State, Global Future: Time to Act. Washington, 1981,
pp. 168, 160 and 179.
6. Congressional Research Service, Congressional
Foresight: History, Recent Experiences, and
Implementation Strategies, op cit, p.19.
7. Position Statement of the Global Tomorrow Coalition,
Washington, D. C., December 1981, The Need to Improve
National Foresight.
8. World Population: Myths and Realities, US Government
Printing Office, 1978.
9. The record of hearings was published in 1986 under the
title Global Foresight Capability of the United States
Government. (See footnote 23, Chapter III.)
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-
aq-le C3bE31=Exc.7.7Lee
An abstract model of foresight may be of
academic interest, but to achieve any real
results, any proposal must be constructed to
accommodate political and bureaucratic realities.
It must be accepted. Once in place, it must work.
In the ways of Congress and of the Executive
branch, there are certain patterns of behavior which
may initially dispose both branches against foresight
proposals. If recognized and properly used, however,
these same characteristics may be exploited to gain
support for the proposal.
Let me here offer an impressionistic description
of some of the characteristics that proponents of
foresight proposals should be considering.
I will touch first upon those matters specific to
Congress. Theoretically (see Chapter XII), foresight
processes could be introduced in the Executive without
a Congressional mandate, but proponents have focused on
Congress, and there are solid arguments for going the
legislative route. A statutory process is less likely
to be dissolved by a change in the administration than
is a solely Executive one. Moreover, there are reasons
for Congress itself to be involved in foresight.
Congress
These remarks are directed principally toward
getting legislation passed.
Dealing with the real Congress. The first
obstacle, for many proponents of better foresight, is
their own idealization of how Congress works. Among
those proponents, one regularly encounters the starry-
eyed misperception that all one need do is to convince
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Congress that there is a better way of making
decisions, and Congress will forthwith adopt it.
Congress doesn't work that way. There are
undoubtedly many Congressmen who hope, somehow, to
contribute to the nation's well-being. However, even
the most idealistic, if they are to remain Congressmen,
must respect the cynical old maxim: the politician's
first duty is to get elected. They must pay attention
to the powerful and the vocal in their own
constituencies, and they must trade votes within
Congress if they are to pass legislation they want
passed. Some Congressmen may even be opposed to
proposals that promise to clarify the implications of
decisions on which they must vote, if they suspect that
such a process may tend to advertize the cynicism of
the vote they plan to cast.
Moral: Don't just show that foresight is better.
Build a constituency, either by riding a popular idea
(e.g. "efficiency in government") or by enlisting those
to whom Congressmen listen, or both.
Building a constituency. Uncommitted legislators
will want to see that there is significant support for
any proposal, and that their own support would not only
be conceptually sound but likely to improve their
political position.
We have shown that there are groups interested in
improved foresight that do not necessarily share the
environmentalists' specific concerns. Business is
interested in the best available estimates of the
geographic and age distribution of populations in the
future. Investors and insurers are interested in
potential risks. The lumber and building industries
will be interested in projections of saw timber
resources. Labor and educators share with business an
interest in forecasts of the economy and the sectors of
growth and stagnation. Educators and local governments
are most interested in how large the coming school-age
cohorts will be. And so on.
These are all potential allies and represent a
very powerful constituency for improved foresight. In
earlier chapters, we have described business's interest
in better governmental data, the Grace Commission's
recommendation for their better management, and local
and state governments' need for better federal
statistics.
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Moral: Find allies in these groups, and define
"foresight" broadly enough to interest them.
Substantive goals vs. procedure. Many legislators
probably perceive that the system as it now works is
not performing adequately in foreseeing tomorrow's
critical issues. Not all of them are willing to
embrace specific views about demography or the
environment. There is also a widespread perception
that process bills, those that establish more or less
permanent techniques for dealing with issues, should in
principal be divorced from legislation stating a
substantive position. This perception is likely to be
shared even by some legislators who agree with
foresight proponents about the substantive issues.
Moral: To increase the chance of passage, go for
process legislation without mixing it with substantive
value judgments. The foresight proponents' purpose
will be adequately served if population, resources and
environment are included among the issues to be
addressed.
The Administration's role. Any bill will pass
more easily with the administration's support than
without it, since, after all, the bill must be signed.
Congress is hardly likely to override a veto on such an
issue, and the administration would be unlikely to make
effective use of machinery it didn't want anyway.
Moral: If proponents are aiming for legislation
during this administration, don't treat the
administration as an adversary. The same advice will
apply to the next -- or any -- administration.
The Committee system. Congress doesn't often
override its own committees. Before a bill reaches the
floor, it must be reported out of its committee. The
way a bill is drafted will influence the decision as to
which committee has primary jurisdiction. Committee
chairmen have varying records of support for this sort
of legislation.
The history of the Gore-Gingrich bill is
instructive. It kept dying in Rep. Brooks' Committee
on Government Operations. Rep. Brooks has not shown
himself interested in foresight. Rep. Dingell's
Committee on Energy and Commerce was much more
receptive to the need to find ways to improve the
process of governance, and his committee staffers
played an active role in developing the legislation.
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Perhaps, had the language in the bill included explicit
reference to the need for better ways to shape energy
policy, it might have been concurrently referred to
Dingell's committee, with better prospects for a
hearing.
Moral: Talk to those who know Congress, and
cooperate with the staff of friendly committees to
shape legislation to go to those committees.
The Executive Branch
The following observations apply principally to
the problem of making "foresight" work, but they also
bear upon the problem of gaining initial support for a
proposal.
The remarks under "Congress" concerning political
constituency and the role of the Administration, of
course, apply also to the Executive.
"Pull, don't push". By and large, presidents and
their advisers didn't get there by being weak willed.
It is easier to gain their support for a proposal that
can be shown to be consistent with their own position
than it is to force a proposal down their throats.
Moral: This chapter is being written during the
Reagan administration. If foresight proponents wish to
go ahead with legislative proposals now, they should be
talking with the administration to see whether there is
any basis for an approach acceptable to both sides.
Population, resource and environmental arguments are
unlikely to generate much interest in this White House.
The argument for more efficient government, coupled
with a broader constituency, seem the most likely
points of departure for such a dialogue. One approach
would be to organize a single-purpose coalition to
begin a dialogue with key staffers in the Office of the
Chief of Staff, the NSC, the Domestic and Economic
Policy Councils, the White House Office of Policy
Development and OMB.
Money: The gap between the government's
obligations and its resources -- the budget deficit --
has never been larger.
Moral: Proposals to use existing governmental
machinery will fare better than proposals to create
expensive new machinery.
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Manageability: To keep some sort of workable
decision making process going in an increasingly
complex world, the issues must be defined as explicitly
as possible, the policy choices kept few enough in
number to be graspable, and the potential implications
of each choice described in very broad-brush strokes.
Holism -- the recognition that everything is somehow
connected, but frequently in very arcane and vague ways
-- is perpetually at war with this need to limit, to
define, and to focus on a few key issues.
Moral: If foresight is to be brought into current
policy documents, a way must be found to be very brief
and dramatic. (Greater depth and length are permissible
in "World in XXXX" projections -- and there is a need
for such periodic in-depth surveys of developing trends
-- but the cost is likely to be exclusion from current
real-world decisions.)
Words: No President has time to read all that is
offered him, and they are all faced with bureaucracies
that won't believe that simple fact. Prolixity is
mistaken for profundity and, as any erstwhile staffer
knows, the White House staff substitutes a few pages of
summary for volumes of departmental briefing papers.
The departments have learned to live with this process,
but it poses an especial danger to foresight proposals.
The White House staffer may understand his own
specialty, but he will probably not understand what the
foresight people are saying about lateral implications.
Moral: If you want to reach the President, keep
it brief, or somebody else will garble your message.
The "clearance" process, The more broadly defined
an idea, the more departments and agencies will have a
right to "clear off" on the proposal, and each of them
will have its own specific projects and objectives
which it will attempt to insert into the proposal. The
proponent of an idea learns to define his project as
narrowly as possible to minimize the clearance process,
to keep the thing pointed in the direction he wants,
and simply to move it through government.
In the hypothetical example about biomass in
Chapter I, the policy debate would very likely bog down
in a contest between the Departments of Energy and
Agriculture to assert primary responsibility for
biomass/fuel decisions. The smart energy planner (if
not the wise one) would have obviated the problem by
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posing his initial question more narrowly: "What kinds
of support should be offered to biomass conversion
plants?" The ensuing debate would miss all the major
implications of a shift toward biomass for energy, but
it would become much simpler. It could be done intra-
agency, and only the OMB need approve it before it went
to the President. There is a natural conflict with the
foresight advocate's desire to explore all possible
ramifications.
Moral: If foresight is to work better, control
over who sees and "clears" -- or at /east comments on -
- a proposal must be vested in somebody whose exclusive
assigned responsibility is the foresight process, not
in the hands of those seeking action.
"Turf." As a principle, any organization will
resist any proposal which would shift away from it any
reponsibility which it now possesses. Proposals to
create super-agencies for planning or foresight run
head-on into this principle; proposals to strengthen
the agencies' own foresight capabilities do not.
Moral: Foresight proposals will encounter much
less resistance in the bureaucracy if they keep the
responsibility within the existing system rather than
creating new bureaucratic structures empowered to deal
with existing agencies' "turf."
Time. Clearances may take weeks or months,
particularly if the other agency is reluctant. Major
policy studies may take years. Some issues can wait
for such delays. Many cannot; and frequently the
government is forced to act by external events that do
not wait.
Moral: Any proposal for improved foresight --
which is inescapably a complicating addition -- must
avoid adding to those delays and would better show how
they might be shortened.
The "need to know." Leaks are endemic in
Washington, as each successive president learns to his
anger. The leaks may be generated simply by
indiscretion or self-puffery, but more frequently they
are a tactic by opponents of a proposal, to give the
opposition time to mobilize. Administrations
invariably react by restricting knowledge of policies
under consideration to those who "need to know."
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Nothing could be better calculated to frustrate an
improvement in foresight. Those who decide who "needs
to know" themselves do not know what an excluded
participant might have been able to tell them about the
potential results of proposed action. In the
hypothetical biomass example, the most intractable
problem might turn out to be maintenance of water
quality. But what bureaucrat would have thought of
inviting an EPA water specialist to comment on a
Department of Energy proposal about energy from
biomass?
Moral: The "leakage" problem cannot be completely
escaped. Any proposal to widen access to policy
documents should show how it will control access to
sensitive documents.
"Face." No administration is likely to welcome
post-hoc criticism of a decision once made, and such
criticism generates an interest in getting rid of the
offending voice.
Moral: Inject the foresight into the policy
process before the decision is made. Don't create a
machinery that will tend to second-guess completed
decisions.
The urgent vs. the important. The deferral of
long-term issues to address urgent ones is chronic in a
political system trying to keep up with the geometric
growth of the issues to be dealt with.
Moral: Tie foresight to current issues. Show the
long-range or lateral implications of currently
proposed actions. Don't prepare a general briefing
about "declining water tables in western aquifers."
Show "here's what your proposal for a slurry pipeline
will do to agricultural production, farm income and
exports."
The "black box" syndrome. Many officials are very
suspicious of complex computerized models. They.
suspect (rightly) that the results can be manufactured
by manipulating the equations and coefficients in the
computer program (the "black box" which they cannot see
inside). Global futures projections contain hundreds
of such variables, and even so, are too crude an
approximation of reality to predict with confidence.
The non-specialist asks "why address a problem that may
never exist?"
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Moral: Keep it simple. Begin, perhaps, with
projections "if other factors are held constant."
Emphasize that the central element of foresight is not
to introduce computer models but to bring the
appropriate human expertise to bear on policy
proposals.
Access to the President. Washington is a city of
courtiers. The name of the power game is access to the
President. There are a few glamorous agencies --
State, Defense, Treasury, the CIA -- that have such
access. Defense would certainly be heard from, for
example, if EPA wanted to do something about water
quality that might affect national security; but it is
much less certain that EPA would be heard (or even know
in advance) if Defense planned to do something that
affected water quality.
Most agencies seek access and chafe at their lack
of it. They may be expected to defend any system that
improves their access.
Moral: Broaden the number of agencies with a role
in foresight, and you gain support for the proposal.
Momentum: Governmental inertia is not altogether
a bad thing. It provides continuity and stability. It
is also a force more awesome than most people outside
of government can imagine. The force of inertia tends,
like the Juggernaut, to crush or brush aside anything
that might change its direction.
Moral: You need a well-placed friend in the White
House, if proposed institutional changes are in fact to
change the customary ways of doing business.
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2N. ENT2VP PFUDINDS2kL.
. . . the United States must improve its
ability to identify emerging problems and assess
alternative responses . . . the Study found
serious inconsistencies in the methods and
assumptions employed by the various agencies in
making their projections.
. . . the primary problem is one of
coordination. The U.S. Government needs a
mechanism for continuous review of the assumptions
and methods that the Federal agencies use in their
projection models and for assurance that the
agencies' models are sound, consistent and well-
documented. The improved analyses that could
result would provide not only a clearer sense of
emerging problems and opportunities, but also a
better means for evaluating alternative responses,
and a better basis for decisions of worldwide
significance . . ."
--Global 2000, "Conclusions,"
Vol. I, pp. 4-5.
Let me attempt to put together a concrete proposal
for foresight machinery that will utilize rather than
fall prey to the political and human forces among which
it must function.
Recall again the sad story of the President's
National Goals Research Staff. I have argued that the
creation of an independent office, even in the White
House, doing periodic projections of the future would
be largely irrelevant to the policy process in the real
world. Global 2000 described real problems, but it was
not brought into actual decision making. How does
foresight connect with decision making? The object
should not be simply to create "The World in XXXX"
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scenarios. The objective is to include in the
policymaking process the issues such as population,
resource and environmental impacts that are relevant to
the national well-being.
The proposals below will not deal with technical
tools such as computer models or academic models of how
one arrives at a perception of national interest.
The heart of the proposal is the creation of a
systematic machinery for getting decision making out of
the tunnel -- for forcing policy makers to consider the
lateral implications of what they propose to do, and
make their choice among alternatives with an awareness
of all the foreseeable implications of each potential
alternative. The very process of creating this
machinery will require that different parts of the
government learn to communicate -- that they develop
mutually understandable terminology, definitions and
computer programs so that they can make use of each
others' work. And this opening of communications
should make the federal government's work more
available, more useful, and more open to verification
or correction by others outside the government who are
pursuing their own foresight work.
Environmentalists, regularly frozen out of the
central policy processes, have tended to develop a
defensive reaction -- a longing for a mechanism of
their own, to force policymakers to address their
concerns. They would do better to figure how to create
a process and a mechanism which the policymakers will
come to think of as their own, as a desirable
improvement in their decision making process.
Inescapably, this will require that the proposed reform
permit the evaluation of the broadest possibly array of
lateral implications, not simply those of concern to
the environmentalists.
In Chapter I, I identified three ways in which the
foresight process should inform the policymakers: (a)
show how the lateral impacts of a proposed action may
affect other policy interests; (b) show how other
issues may affect the action proposal; (c) forewarn
government of issues potentially demanding its
attention.
The third of these functions would justify a
periodic "World in XXXX" survey, but that is only a
part of the total requirement.
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For the other two functions, go back to the
hypothetical example of the biomass energy specialist
and the foresight process in Chapter I.
The foresight process calls for an identifiable
list of offices
* with specific areas of expertise and
responsibility,
* known to each other,
* with technically compatible means for exchanging
and handling quantitative data,
* with mutual access to knowledge about policy or
action proposals that might impact upon their
area of responsibility,
* each with the opportunity to call attention to
that potential impact,
* with the chance to explore how changes in their
own agencies' policies might achieve an
objective under study.
The questions of course remain: How do you
structure the decision making process to achieve this
sort of interaction without foundering in a mountain of
paper and a welter of variables? How do you create an
institutional arrangement with the detachment to look
ahead, and yet still keep it connected to the decision
making process?
Let me describe such an institutional arrangement
and then show how it would relate to Congressional,
private, local, and international activities in the
same area.
The Federal Executive Foresight Machinery
I propose
* a two-tiered network among existing agencies,
* tied together by an Ombudsman in the White
House,
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* with an explicit public identification of the
offices and individuals in the government with
the primary working-level responsibility for
every identifiable issue of serious concern to
government.
To elaborate:
First, the "Ombudsman" should be created. This
unit (a very few substantive officers would be
sufficient) would be integrated into the White House
and interdepartmental decision processes. It would
have no substantive responsibilities, but would
* supervise the creation and maintenance of the
system described below,
* have access to the flow of all NSC and cabinet
level decision documents, for the sole purpose
of determining whether account has been taken of
all significant lateral implications of proposed
actions,
* contact appropriate members of the Policy or
Working Groups below (depending upon the
sensitivity of the matter) to assure that such
an input is made, and impose tight time limits
for comment so that "foresight" is not used as
an excuse to delay decisions (this is important
if foresight is to remain in the decision making
process),
* as issues emerge (such as chlorofluorocarbons or
acid rain), be responsible for designating a
lead agency and office and for assuring that
that office in turn mobilizes inputs from the
other interested agencies,
* supervise the Working Group's development of
common statistical data and terminology (see
below), and
* initiate periodic projections of world-wide
trends and developments (the "World in XXXX"
scenarios).
The chief of this "Ombudsman" unit would
necessarily be a strong person, with the President's
backing, to have access to the traffic, to avoid being
bypassed in the White House, and to command the
attention of the departments. A natural place for him
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to sit would be in the office of the White House Chief
of Staff, or perhaps as Director of the Office of
Policy Development.
It is important that the Ombudsman not have
substantive responsibilities, or he will soon come to
be seen as a partisan player in policy debates, to be
circumvented by opponents when possible. His job is
simply to make sure that the relevant perspectives and
implications are brought forth in decision packages.
We must go back to the Brownlow report (Chapter II) for
the model of this role.
Second, the government should create a functional
directory, which would
* identify the areas of policy importance that
must be scanned for relevance when decisions are
being made; and
* assign the responsibility for each such area to
an agency, an office in that agency and, one
might hope, a named individual.
This clarification of responsibilities is
essential to any proposal for better foresight (see
Chapter II). The uninitiated may legitimately wonder
why it does not already exist.
The functional directory would identify the
officers on the Foresight Working Group who hold the
"watching briefs" covering topics of national concern
such as balance of payments, full employment, a stable
currency, military security, technology and industrial
and agricultural productivity, environmental quality
and the preservation of renewable resources. This
would identify for the Ombudsman the offices he should
invite to comment on the lateral implications of
proposed policies, and it would provide a point of
contact on policy issues for others inside and outside
the government.
There is no need for a new organization and some
giant single functional directory. The department
directories could be upgraded and standardized to make
it possible to approach them by subject rather than by
title, as is presently done with the Country Officers
list in the Department of State directory.
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Figure 2
Proposed Role of the Foresight System
in Presidential Decision Making
EXISTING
? norosED
PRESIDENT
WHITE HOUSE
DEPARTMENT
OR AGENCY
SECRETARIAT
&
DEPAIDADO
OR AGENCY
SECRETARIAT
DEPARTMENT
ORACENCY
SIGUTAMAT
A
FORTS GNT POLICY CROUP
0 MEMBER MEMBER MEMBER
PORESICAT VI/CUING GROUP
I I I I
MEMSERS I I MEMBERS I I MEMBEIS
1 Policy originates and receives traditional clearances
(e.g. from Agency B).
2 Proposal goes to White House.
3 Ombudsman receives policy proposal and considers what
other agencies may have an input.
4 Ombudsman sends copies to those agencies (e.g. Agency C)
with a deadline for reply.
5 Working Croup member sends comments to his Policy Croup
member.
6 Policy Croup member transmits comments to Ombudsman,
clearing with his own front office according to whatever
internal guidelines agencies establish.
7 Comments are included in the final recommendations to the
President or White House Council.
8 President or Council makes decision. for action by
appropriate departments or agencies.
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Third, there should be a Foresight Policy Group
(Anybody who can help bring this proposal to reality is
entitled to improve on these names.)
* This group would be at the policy level. Each
department or major agency would have one
member, senior enough to participate in the
Secretary's regular staff meetings, and
presumably a person charged with planning or
overall executive/coordination responsibilities.
* The agencies would nominate their members who
would, in the first instance, be responsible for
those areas of concern to government that are
assigned to that agency.
* Individually, the Policy Group members would
nominate their agencies' members of the Working
Group, and would be available for consultation
with the Ombudsman and with other Policy Group
members concerning the coordination of policy
proposals.
* These Policy Group members would review proposed
foresight submissions from their agency and
would coordinate the foresight work with the
agency's participation in other policymaking
machinery.
* Collectively, the Foresight Policy Group would
(a) identify policy areas on which the Working
Group should be focusing,
(b) assure that the process is working, i.e.,
that agencies' comments on proposed
decisions are, in fact, being incorporated
in the decision document,
(c) referee Working Group disputes on technical
issues (e.g., what computer languages to
choose as standard; what geographic
divisions to use in assembling information;
how to define terms; how to reconcile or
present to policymakers any inter-agency
differences about the interpretation of
data), and
(d) provide general supervision for the periodic
"World in XXXX" reports discussed below.
They would not formally clear such reports.
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That point about clearance requires some
clarification. It will be discussed later in the
section titled "The Report."
High level policy groups have been established
before and have dissolved into impotence as Cabinet
officers devolve the task of participation to
progressively lower-ranking officers. The proposed
level of this proposed Foresight Policy Group reflects
that problem. It would be below the top few managerial
officers of an agency, but at a high enough level to
assure access to those managers. For most departments,
this would be an assistant secretary or chief of policy
planning. If further assurance is needed that the
Group not degenerate, there is an effective strategem
with precedents in the government: require
participation by principals only, not by their
designees. If issues are discussed important to an
agency, it will learn to be there to protect its
interests. (As a further refinement, one could allow
attendance by the Working Group members "along the
wall," without the right of participation, to keep
their agencies informed.)
Fourth, there should be Foresight Working Group,
nominated as above, consisting of planners or policy
officers in the respective agencies, each one
explicitly charged with keeping abreast of immediate
and long-term developments concerning one of the issues
identified in step two.
* These individual members would be the normal
contact point for the Ombudsman in seeking
lateral input into policy proposals.
* They would constitute an informal, interacting
net of experts, to carry out the ongoing give-
and-take process of policy formulation described
in Chapter I. (Foresight should not be limited
to decisions taken in the White House.) Is it
fanciful to envisage a day when these experts
will be linked through their mini-computers,
with access to computerized data banks (such as
already exist in private industry) and with a
computerized "bulletin board" to exchange
information about studies underway and to
solicit input?
* They would submit through their Policy Group
member brief comments on the relationship of
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proposed White House actions to their specific
fields of responsibility. (May one hope that a
limit of, say, 500 words would be put on such
submissions? It can be done.)
* They would sit as a body, in cooperation with
statisticians and other specialists, to develop
common definitions and procedures so as to
simplify the use of each other's statistical
data -- an important function in a time of rapid
computerization of information. (How did our
forefathers ever manage to standardize the
typewriter keyboard? Their descendants cannot
discipline themselves to make computers that can
communicate with each other, and as a result,
the "information revolution" threatens to become
a Tower of Babel. This would be a good early
project for the Working Group.)
* They would draft periodic reports on major,
long-term trends (the "World in XXXX" reports).
* Their names would be known, and they would be
accessible to non-governmental experts, to
educate each other about developments in fields
of common interest.
* They would be available to their own departments
in the planner's traditional roles.
Finally, the report. A few more words are in
order about the periodic "World in XXXX" report, and
the way in which the "look ahead" function would be
carried out.
These would be, in essence, shorter Global 2000
reports, pegged to a long time frame. The political
cycle being what it is, a quadrennial report would seem
sufficient. One might hope for a report at midpoint in
a Presidential term, when it might have some effect,
rather than at the end of a term when it can become
politically contentious or irrelevant to a new incoming
administration, or both.
The reports would focus on trends and, more
important, on the interaction of trends and the
discontinuities or "surprises" generated by that
interaction.
As a product, the periodic reports would be of
value in forewarning the government and the country of
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looming issues that, unresolved, portend trouble.
The reports also have an important function as a
process. They help to identify gaps in our information
and weaknesses in our thought processes. They make
possible the development of dynamic models with
feedback from one area of governmental concern to
another. This "feedback" is the heart of a
sophisticated foresight process, and it is something
that can be achieved only with a collegial group, not
within a single department. These feedbacks shape the
future, and they are best identified by periodic
futures reports bringing different specialists
together.
This very process has its own valuable by-
products. It forces the specialists to make their
assumptions clear, to develop mutually understood
terminology and definitions so that they can use each
others' product. The forecasting process requires that
each specialist identify the inputs and outputs from
his sector to the other parts of the economy --
including such undesirables as pollution. By
identifying these inputs and outputs, and by
establishing communication with each other, the
specialists engage in a process of mutual education
that should result in a much better understanding of
how the pursuit of different national activities and
objectives may influence each other. Eventually, the
different specialists may, as one participant in the
Global 2000 Report remarked, "stop expecting to use the
same water and the same capital."
The reports may help to provoke and inform a
national debate about developing trends and what they
may mean. If this debate leads to something
approaching consensus, it generates the political base
-- in the face of special interests that may be
formidable -- that politicians require if they are to
address the issues.
Departments would not be asked to clear or endorse
these reports. Departments are strongly inclined to
resist projections that seem to run counter to their
bureaucratic interests, and they will fight to delay or
change such projections. The Department of Defense,
for example, would probably resist formally endorsing a
study that suggested that the USSR was becoming less
threatening -- even if CIA, State and DOD's own
analysts agreed in such a projection -- because it
might weaken their case for a larger budget. The
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record does not show it, but publication of Global 2000
was delayed by the reluctance of Department of
Agriculture policy officials to clear projections by
their own analysts.
This sort of bias will never be eliminated. That
is a major reason for the existence of parallel private
analytical capability to be advocated later in this
chapter. The bias -- and the delays -- would be better
controlled if the Report is seen, not as a policy
document, but as a best effort by the technicians to
identify future directions.
Interdepartmental differences of interpretation
should not be artificially resolved or squelched. Such
differences may point to important conceptual issues.
No "party line" would be established through processes
other than the existing political ones, and agencies
would have their own participants in the process of
developing the report.
There would be no policy recommendations in these
"World in XXXX" reports, but the President, in
forewarding them to Congress, might well outline
policies or propose legislation.
Precursors of this system. The machinery is less
novel than it may seem. Its novelty is the proposal to
apply certain established techniques consistently
across the decision making process. Individual
precedents are relevant. I have mentioned the
Department of State's Country Desk Officers. They have
for years played a role somewhat similar to that
described here. They act as the central clearing point
concerning specific countries, and they function
smoothly within the system -- though unfortunately they
have not been called upon to look ahead as often or as
far as the proposed system would demand.
A somewhat loose precursor of the proposed system
of intercommunication was created for Global 2000, and
it made a real contribution to the government's
understanding both of itself and of world-wide trends.
That machinery was dissolved when the report was
complete.
The most important precursor is the Cabinet
Council system itself (see Chapter II). As we have
seen, it provided for inter-departmental review of
proposed decisions, on a more systematic basis than was
ever before attempted. If this machinery is revived in
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future administrations, it would clearly be desirable
to integrate the foresight machinery into it.
There is an important point to be made here. This
proposal calls for the input into decisions of a
broader range of perspectives. It does not necessarily
involve an expansion of the decision making group. Too
many cooks can wreck a coherent program. This may
indeed have been a fatal flaw in the Cabinet Council
system set up and then abandoned in the Reagan
administration. The survivors at least believe that
they now have a better system because it is smaller.
Advantages of the system. At the risk of
belaboring the obvious, let me detail some of the ways
in which this machinery would fit the needs of the
foresight process as they have been set forth in
earlier chapters.
* The strength of the system proposed here is that
it provides systematically for bringing lateral and
long-term implications to the attention of the
decision makers, without attempting to prejudge who
those decision makers will be. Every President
organizes the Presidency his way, from personal and
centralized (Johnson), to delegated (Eisenhower), to
collegial with a commanding central presence
(Roosevelt). The process proposed here would function
under any of those arrangements.
* The key to this structure is that it undertakes
to link people, not data banks. With the best data in
the world, organized to be available on request, an
individual cannot practice effective foresight. There
is simply too much information. The purpose here,
rather, is to identify and make use of the experts,
each of whom, in his own area, may hope to stay abreast
of the current state of knowledge.
* It would provide the linkages at the technical
level that would generate cross-communication, and it
would provide a forum and a means for adopting standard
definitions and terminology where possible, which in
turn would make it easier for different departments to
use each others' work.
In this instance, what is good for the government
would be good for those outside it. Accessibility,
clarity and uniformity would make it easier for
Congressional, private, local government, academic and
business people to use the statistics.
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* It would connect foresight with policy.
* The existing agencies, with their role assured
through their control of the appointment of Working and
Policy Group members, would probably support the new
machinery rather than opposing it.
* The public identification of specific offices
and individuals with specific issues of policy concern
would provide a useful key to the bureaucracy, whether
for businessmen or local governments developing their
own plans, environmentalists trying to get their point
into decision making, or private specialists attempting
to inform the government of important information it
may not have. This whole process of interchange should
help to correct the insularity of thinking in the
different components of our society.
* This is probably the least expensive of all the
foresight proposals that have been made.
* The proposal is focused upon bringing informed
human judgments to bear on current issues, not upon
constructing futures models; it puts computers where
they belong -- as tools rather than arbiters.
* The proposal emphasizes the role of the White
House in setting time limits for lateral comments on
proposals. The existing rather amorphous practice
usually requires originators of proposals to seek the
clearance of other interested departments before making
the proposal. The change could actually speed up the
decision process rather than delaying it.
Critics will argue that this system, by broadening
the number of people involved in decision making, will
lead to more "leaks." To a degree, the criticism is
valid. Any effort to broaden the perspective in
decision making will necessarily require the
participation of people not currently involved. In
amelioration, however, let me make two points:
This machinery rigorously controls the process by
limiting access to identifiable individuals who need to
know. The only additional people with access to the
entire range of pending decisions would be the small
Ombudsman staff close to the President, and this staff
might well replace rather than add to existing White
House positions.
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Among those of us who have watched the decision
making process from steerage class, there is the rather
cynical saying that "the ship of state is the only
vessel that leaks at the top." Veteran reporters would
probably agree that most of the leaks that embarrass
presidents come, not from the depths of the
bureaucracy, but from a small group at the top, and
this would not be significantly expanded. Bureaucrats
generally know that contact with the press is usually
only a source of trouble for them, personally. It is
the politically ambitious who feel the need to
cultivate the press.
Finally, as to the spectre that the new procedures
would add still more words to the decision making
process: Does the addition of perhaps 50 or more areas
mean the addition of 50 more enclosures to decision
documents? Perhaps. That is why they must be brief.
(Averill Harriman as Undersecretary of State refused to
read more than a 5" x 7" card summary of any document,
and he was very well-informed and effective.)
On most proposals, most foresight officers would
probably report "no significant impact." Moreover,
originators of policy memoranda naturally try to
minimize challenges to their proposals. If they know
that another agency will have the opportunity to
comment on the proposal, they are likely to consult
with that agency to adjust features of the proposal
that might cause problems. The foresight network would
provide a natural vehicle for such informal adjustment,
and the lateral issues would be more likely than at
present to be considered in the proposal itself.
The Role of Congress
Congress gets involved in foresight in two ways:
* What it asks the Executive to do; and
* What it does itself.
Since Congress is generally more accessible to
private citizens than the Executive bureaucracy,
environmentalists have tended to go to Congress more
than to the Executive branch, saying, in effect: "Make
the President do something about foresight."
Congress can only go so far in making the
President do things. If the President really wanted to
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improve foresight capability, he could do so with an
Executive Order. If he felt that he needed some
mandate from Congress to address population, resource
and environmental issues (an unlikely contingency) the
National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA)
provides the statutory authority.
The Washington landscape is littered with
vestigial commissions (each with its sinecured
Commissioner) that the incumbent President doesn't want
the bother of abolishing but doesn't want to use. If
the President chooses to guard the henhouses with
foxes, even Congress has only limited power to dissuade
him.
This gloomy observation notwithstanding, there are
things that Congress could well do to encourage the
Executive Branch to improve its foresight capability.
First, it could pass foresight legislation. Such
a bill might well
* state the need for broader foresight capability
than now exists, given the increasing complexity
of issues with which government is concerned,
* identify the issues that should be incorporated
in the foresight process,
* offer as much guidance as to the nature of the
foresight machinery as the Congressional
proponents consider desirable in light of the
intricacies of Congressional-Executive relations
and the need for delicacy in telling the
Executive how to organize itself,
* require that the administration attach to any
future administration-originated legislative
proposals a statement of the long-term impact of
that legislation on the issues identified,
* call for a quadrennial report to Congress by the
President, identifying long-range global issues
which may lead to a need for Congressional
attention (a means of giving focus and
importance to the periodic "World in XXXX"
reports),
* urge the President to encourage and increase
U.S. participation in international data-
gathering and foresight studies (see below).
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The Critical Trends Assessment bill (the "Gore-
Gingrich bill") is a good beginning at such
legislation.
Second, it could hold oversight hearings on the
operation of NEPA. Oversight hearings would dramatize
the need for more systematic foresight capability.
So far, I have discussed what Congress might do to
influence the Executive branch. It is not so easy to
propose what Congress might do to improve its own
foresight process, since it is aleady well ahead of the
Executive branch in this area. Here are a few
tentative thoughts.
First, it could expand its own system of "impact
statements" accompanying legislation -- the House and
Senate already have some such requirements -- to
address the broader list of issues identified in the
proposed foresight legislation.
Second, it might examine the existing processes of
oversight hearings and the multiple referrals of
proposed legislation to potentially interested
committees. Is this process itself sufficient
assurance that all the significant potential
implications of proposed legislation are considered?
One wonders whether broad surveys such as those
occasionally undertaken by the Congressional
Clearinghouse on the Future might usefully be referred
formally to the Congressional Committees to see if
Congressional activity is justified.
Third, Congress could usefully refer the proposed
quadrennial Presidential report to its committees for
hearings as to any proposals for Congressional action.
The Role of Private Groups in the Foresight Process
In earlier chapters, it should have become clear
that the federal government hardly has a monopoly on
foresight. State and local governments, business,
philanthropic organizations, scientific associations
and academia have thir own foresight processes, and
from time to time they have attempted to help shape the
federal government's practices. (State and local
government are here treated as "private" simply for
brevity.)
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The federal government should be asking
* what can it do for them? and
* what can they do for it?
What can it do for them? I have proposed a
regularization of data gathering and analysis, and a
way of making it clearer who in the government is
responsible for what. This is essential for the
government's own thinking processes; it would also be
very useful for local governments and businesses who
need to know where information can be found in the
federal government.
Given the importance to the national well-being of
good planning in these centers of decision making, the
federal government has an interest in making that
improvement.
What can they do for it? Government foresight
will not improve very much unless there is a broad base
of public support. Most of us tend to forget that.
Because the private role tends to be diffuse, one can
easily forget how pervasive it is.
Foresight, if it is used, involves trade-offs:
paying higher taxes or prices to preserve pure
groundwater; paying more for energy to avoid losing
forests to acid precipitation. These trade-offs become
politically feasible only when there is a broad
agreement that they are needed. This is another, and a
compelling, argument for opening government to a
broader information exchange with the private sector.
The government might even learn something from the
exchange. Without attempting a fine judgment, one can
safely assert that the technology that generates the
issues requiring foresight has come mostly from the
private sector, and that the private sector as well as
government has been deeply involved in studying the
ramifications of technological and economic change.
There is an explosion of knowledge underway, and
the private sector is probably ahead of government in
figuring how to keep up with it. Data banks and
information retrieval systems such as Lockheed's
"Dialogue" or Mead Data Central's "Lexis" and "Nexis"
services can be as useful to the governmental as to the
private analyst. (See Chapter VIII, footnote 1.)
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These examples all argue the generalized
desirability for more open governmental processes.
There are more explicit ways in which the private
sector could improve governmental foresight efforts.
First, it could organize itself to press for the
reform of governmental foresight.
For two generations, there has been a growth of
private "think tanks." Particularly for those around
Washington such as The Brookings Institution, Resources
for the Future, the World Resources Institute or the
American Enterprise Institute, an avowed purpose has
been to bring private scholarly perspectives to bear
upon issues with which the federal government is (or
perhaps should be) wrestling. Most of these droups
have some multidisciplinary capability. Some of them
undertake periodic cross-disciplinary surveys of
critical trends. If one defines foresight broadly,
there are probably hundreds of private organizations in
the Washington area alone that have an interest in
better governmental foresight.
The American Society for Public Administration
(ASPA) has existed for nearly fifty years, "dedicated
to better government." Over the years, its Review has
carried much of the national debate about governmental
decision making processes.
The National Academy of Public Administration is
interested in the way the White House organizes itself
and has sponsored a first rate study of the planning
function at that level.'
The National Planning Association was created to
address questions closely akin to foresight. It "was
founded during the Great Depression of the 1930s when
conflicts among the major economic groups -- business,
labor, agriculture -- threatened to paralyze national
decisionmaking on the critical issues confronting
American society. It was dedicated to the task of
getting these diverse groups to work together to narrow
areas of controversy and broaden areas of agreement and
to provide on specific problems concrete programs for
action. .."2 In a sense, it was thus setting up a
foresight process in microcosm. Moreover, it concerned
itself (as have few other private groups) with the
decision making machinery of the federal government
itself. It claims paternity for the post-World War II
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legislation creating the Council of Economic Advisers
and the Joint Economic Committee of Congress.
The Global Tomorrow Coalition was created in the
wake of the Global 2000 Report to seek action on the
problems identified in that report, including the need
for better foresight.
Improved governmental foresight machinery may
possibly come about because of an internal initiative
within some future administration, but it is more
likely to happen if organizations such as these make
common cause with the other private groups that use
federal government data and analyses, to press for
better and more open governmental decision machinery.
Advocacy, however, comes close to lobbying, which
is limited by law and organizational charters. No
group has arisen to spearhead such advocacy, and none
is presently in sight.
Until such a coalition is formed, there is not
likely to be much improvement in governmental
foresight.
Second, the private sector should systematically
second-guess the government's "looking ahead"
exercises. There are no present plans for a new Global
2000 Report, but there are plenty of sectoral or
single-issue forecasts. Private organizations already
critique such forecasts and sometimes issue their own
forecasts on the same topic. A good example is the
ongoing debate about the potential effects of nuclear
war, in which the Department of Defense and the Federal
Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) have been pitted
against a shifting coalition of non-governmental
scientists, with NOAA's National Center for Atmospheric
Research closer to the non-governmental scientists than
to the other two government agencies.3 On an issue
central to the survival of civilization, it is well
that the nation has not had to rely simply on the
official view, influenced as it is by massive
bureaucratic self-interest.
It would be valuable if some coalition or
organization were to undertake the responsibility of
systematically scanning new government studies and
either itself providing comment or identifying an
appropriate private respondent and encouraging it to do
so. The media would soon discover this source of
information about new government studies, and its
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existence would thereby provide a way of informing the
public of the range of viewpoints on the issues.
The very fact that a capable private group exists
and plans to comment on any governmental report is
itself a protection against government's shaping the
report for political convenience. If the private group
is in communication with the governmental specialists,
and if it can have access to the reports in draft form,
its influence will be greater. (This is another reason
for making public the names and responsibilities of the
Foresight Working Group.)
Private commentary on Global 2000 was hardly more
than peripheral praise mixed with a few potshots. No
private group was able to duplicate or comment in depth
on a study of that sort.
This argues for the creation of a private
Foresight Foundation, either as a new group, if
sufficient funding can be found, or through the
cooperation of existing groups. Its function would be
to influence and to comment on forecasts prepared by
the government, to mobilize other groups, and to offer
policy suggestions. It could make its own projections,
if the government did not. The private group would
need to be sufficiently sophisticated and well-financed
to analyze the government's computerized projections
and to do its own.
Even if the private Foundation's primary focus
were on the periodic long-term projections, it would
naturally come to play a role in the government's other
foresight functions, particularly through its
connections with Foresight Working Group members. It
would not be constrained from commenting after the fact
on governmental policy announcements.
The Foundation's sponsors should include business
and labor organizations and other functional groups, if
possible. The broader the spectrum it represented, the
more weight would be given to its voice, even though
this might be achieved at the expense of crispness in
its policy recommendations. These other groups are
natural allies. They need forward information in order
to do their own planning.
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International Cooperation
Many issues transcend national borders, and
cooperation with international organizations and other
sovereign governments is required if they are to be
resolved.
I have described some of the foresight efforts
elsewhere in the world and I have argued in some detail
why the United States should cooperate in those
efforts.
It is to our own national interest to pursue
international cooperation, not only in the exchange of
data but in ongoing cooperation to develop the
techniques of foresight and forecasting. This is the
groundwork for the consensus which will be essential if
we are to cooperate to address multinational problems.
In turn, this suggests:
* that Working Group members should participate in
relevant international studies.
* that environmentalists interested in the
foresight function should be making common cause
with the scientific community in arguing against
further U. S. withdrawals from international
data exchange and cooperation in futures
modeling.
* that this is a legitimate point for inclusion in
foresight legislation (see above).
Postcript
An observer of the present Washington scene, if
asked to identify the critical problems facing the
nation, might justifiably include -- somewhere near the
top of the list -- the question whether our thought
processes and institutions are adequate to deal with
the complex, accelerating and interactive world in
which we live.
Institutional changes alone will hardly guarantee
that the nation will make the right decisions. That
will continue to depend on the quality of the people
who make the decisions.
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Differences will persist as to what the trends are
and how important they are. Bureaucratic and political
self-interest will not go away, and they will continue
to shape decisions.
No analytical framework is more than a crude
simplification of reality, and we are unlikely ever to
know enough about all the variables to predict the
future.
Nevertheless, an effective institutional structure
can help to channel and organize the ways in which
decisions are approached. Advocates of better
foresight can legitimately claim that it will make the
system a lot better than it is now. By itself, that is
sufficient justification for reform.
The institution should become part of the
landscape, like the NSC. Each new administration
should not have to try to re-invent it.
Some commentators dismiss the importance of
institutional reform, on the grounds that the
individuals are crucial and that the system of
institutions in which they work is unimportant. If the
reader doubts the importance of the institutional
framework, I would suggest that he examine the past and
consider
* the impact of a single institutional concept --
representative democracy -- upon the evolution
of the political process; or
* what the concept of the limited liability
corporation has meant for the growth of modern
economies; or
* the evolution of the scientific method as a key
element in the present explosion of knowledge.
It would perhaps be grandiose to make a comparable
claim for this or any other foresight machinery, but
who knows? With a better system to help to accommodate
and direct the extraordinary burst of creative
invention amid which we now live, our society may even
succeed in riding this technological tiger that we have
so nonchalantly mounted.
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FOOTNOTE S
1. John E. Harr, "The Planning Function in the Executive
Office," prepared for the Presidential Management Panel
of the National Academy of Public Administration, April
1980. (Unpublished; contact the Academy at 1120 G Street
NW, Suite 540, Washington DC 20001; [phone].)
2. Description of purpose, p.1, "Publications 1985,"
National Planning Association, 1616 P Street NW, Suite
400, Washington DC 20036; [phone].
3. For the recent status of the debate, see "Nuclear Winter
Debate Heats Up," Science, 16 January 1987, "Armageddon
Revisited," Science, 12 June 1987, and "Economic
Collapse Tied to Atom War," New York Times, Sunday, June
21, 1987, pp. Al and A26.
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APPENDIX A
The Cabinet Council System in the White House
The Cabinet Council system lasted from
February 1981 until April 1985.
The creation of the system was announced in
the following press release from the White
House, dated February 26, 1981.
Statement by the Press Secretary
The membership of each Cabinet Council has been finalized.
The Cabinet Councils are designed to operate as subgroups of the full
Cabinet, with the President presiding. Full Cabinet meetings will con-
tinue to focus on broad issues affecting the entire government and
on overall budgetary and fiscal matters. Cabinet Council procedures
-haVe been developed and endorsed by the President. The procedures
are intended to create an orderly process for reviewing issues requir-
ing a decision by the President
The Cabinet Council procedures are:
? Each Cabinet Council will be chaired by the President.
? Each Cabinet Council has a designated chairman pro tempore
who will guide the direction of the Council and will serve as the
chairman of working sessions in which the President is not in at-
tendance.
? An executive secretary will be appointed for each Cabinet
Council from the Office of Policy Development. This in-
dividual, working with the Office of Cabinet Administration,
will coordinate the activities of each Cabinet Council, compos-
ed of the executive secretary, representatives of the member
departments, and other personnel as needed, to prepare
background materials, refine policy options and recommenda-
tions, and otherwise assist the Cabinet Council.
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? Issues will be sent to Cabinet Councils by the Office of Cabinet
Administration. Notification of such assignments will be com-
municated immediately to all Cabinet members to assure full
opportunity to participate in consideration of each issue.
? Presidential decisions, made in or after Cabinet Council
meetings, will follow full discussion by any Cabinet member
who wishes to participate. Council meetings are open to any
member of the Cabinet Decisions will be reported to the full
Cabinet as they occur. When full Cabinet review is required, the
matter will be set for a meeting of the full Cabinet
Cabinet Council on Commerce and Trade
Secretary of Commerce,
Chairman Pro Tempore
Secretary of State
Secretary of the Treasury
Attomey General
Secretary of Agriculture
Secretary of Energy
Secretary of Labor
Secretary of Transportation
U.S. Trade Representative
Chairman, Council of Economic
Advisors
The Vice President
*Counsellor to the President
*Chief of Staff
*Assistant to the President for
Policy Development
Cabinet Council on Human Resources
Secretary of Health and Human
Services, Chairman Pro
Tempore
Attorney General
Secretary of Agriculture
Secretary of Labor
Secretary of Housing and Urban
Development
Secretary of Education
Administrator, Veterans
Administration
*The Vice President
*Counsellor to the President
*Chief of Staff
*Assistant to the President for
Policy Development
Cabinet Council on Economic Affairs
Secretary of the Treasury,
Chairman Pro Ternpore
Secretary of State
Secretary of Defense
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Secretary of Commerce
Secretary of Agriculture
Secretary of Labor
Secretary of Transportation
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Director, Office of Management *The Vice President
and Budget *Counsellor to the President
U.S. Trade Representative *Chief of Staff
Chairman, Council of Economic *Assistant to the President for
Advisors Policy Development
Cabinet Council on Natural Resources and the Environment
Secretary of the Interior,
Chairman Pro Tempore
Secretary of State
Attorney General
Secretary of Agriculture
Secretary of Commerce
Secretary of Transportation
Secretary of Housing and Urban
Development
Secretary of Energy
Chairman, Council on
Environmental Quality
Chairman, Council of Economic
Advisors
Administrator, Environmental
Protection Agency
*The Vice President
*Counsellor to the President
*Chief of Staff
*Assistant to the President for
Policy Development
Cabinet Council on Food and Agriculture
Secretary of Agriculture,
Chairman Pro Tempore
Secretary of State
Secretary of the Interior
Secretary of Commerce
Secretary of Transportation
U.S. Trade Representative
The Vice President
*Counsellor to the President
*Chief of Staff
"Assistant to the President for
Policy Development
Cabinet Council on Legal Policy
Attorney General, Chairman
Pro Tempore
Secretary of State
Secretary of the Treasury
Secretary of the Interior
Secretary of Commerce
Secretary of Labor
Secretary of Health and Human
Services
Secretary of Housing and Urban
Development
Secretary of Transportation
Director, Office of Management
and Budget
Counsel to the President
Chairman, Administrative
Conference of the United
States
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?The Vice President
*Counsellor to the President
*Chief of Staff
*Assistant to the President for
Policy Development
Cabinet Council on Management and Administration
Counsellor to the President,
Chairman Pro Tempore
Secretary of the Treasury
Secretary of Commerce
Secretary of Defense
Secretary of Health and Human
Services
Secretary of Transportation
Secretary of Energy Director,
Office of Management and
Budget
? Ex officio member
Administrator, General Services
Administration
Chairman, Administrative
Conference of the United
States
Director, Office of Personnel
Management
'The Vice President
*Chief of Staff
*Assistant to the President for
Policy Development
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APPENDIX B
Abolition of the Cabinet Councils
THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
(Santa Barbara, California)
For Immediate Release April 11, 1985
STATEMENT BY THE PRESIDENT
Today I am announcing the creation of two cabinet-level bodies --
the Economic Policy Council and the Domestic Policy Council -- to
assist me in the formulation and execution of domestic and
economic policy. I will chair both Councils. These two Councils
will replace the seven existing Cabinet Councils and the Senior
Interagency Group-International Economic Policy. The new
entities will streamline policy development and decision making.
Together with the National Security Council, they will serve as
the primary channels for advising me on policy matters.
The Economic Policy Council will be composed of the Secretaries
of State, Treasury, Agriculture, Commerce and Labor, the Director
of Office of Management and Budget, the United States Trade
Representative and the Chairman of the Council of Economic
Advisors. It will provide advice to me concerning all aspects of
national and international economic policy. The heads of the
national security community departments and agencies and the
Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs will
participate in Council meetings whenever international policy or
budget matters are discussed. In my absence, the Secretary of
the Treasury will serve as Chairman Pro-Tempore.
The Domestic Policy Council will be composed of the Attorney
General, the Secretaries of the Interior, Health and Human
Services, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, Energy
and Education, and the Director of Office of Management and
Budget. It will provide advice to me on domestic and social
policy. In my absence the Attorney General will serve as
Chairman Pro Tempore.
The heads of non-member departments and agencies will be invited
to participate in either Council's deliberations whenever matters
affecting their organizations are on the agenda. The Vice
President and Chief of Staff will serve as ex-officio members of
both Councils.
The new, streamlined decision making process enhances my
commitment to cabinet government. It will provide for added
accountability and efficiency in formulating and implementing
policy.
# # #
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APPENDIX C
Federal Directories Relevant to Foresight
There are several directories that identify U.S.
Government offices and officers or provide guides to
federal data sources and modeling programs. Except for the
very broad language of the U.S. Government Manual, none of
these undertakes to define who has what policy
responsibility in the government -- the need for such a
guide being one of the four recommendations in Chapter XII.
Nevertheless, an awareness of these directories may be of
use to the researcher or the foresight advocate.
The broad governmental directories have been described
in the text: the U.S. Government Manual, the Congressional
Directory and the departmental directories for those
departments and agencies that publish them. All are
available from the Government Printing Office and listed in
its bibliography of "Directories and Lists of Persons and
Organizations" (Subject Bibliography SB-114, November 5,
1986, periodically updated.) Most of the individual
directories are simply listed by title down to the office
or division level. Some departments and major agencies are
not covered, whether from bureaucratic lethargy or
misplaced zeal for secrecy. (One wonders, for instance, if
it is necessary for CIA to protect its research and
estimates staff so completely from contact with the outside
world.)
The privately published Federal Executive Directory
covers about the same ground as those three sets of
sources, but does so more systematically and is updated
bimonthly. It is cross-indexed to a name list of several
thousand officers in Congress and the Executive, and the
Congressional section is cross-indexed by individual,
committee and district. There is a key word index,
confined almost entirely to an alphabetical listing of
office names. For the generalist, it is the best single
synoptic guide to Washington; it includes a number of semi-
governmental organizations such as the Smithsonian and the
National Academy of Sciences and, somewhat mysteriously,
one multilateral organization, the World Bank. (Carroll
Publishing Company, 1058 Thomas Jefferson Street NW,
Washington DC 20007; [phone]. Updated bimonthly;
sold by subscription for $140 per year. The company
publishes similar county, state, city and other
directories.)
Congressional Information Service (CIS) publishes a
much more ambitious set of directories keyed to data rather
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than to individuals. For our purposes, the relevant
publication is American Statistics Index, "a comprehensive
guide to the statistical publications of the U.S.
Government." It consists of an index volume and a volume
of abstracts, published monthly with cumulative annual
editions. One can search the index by subject, name,
title, type of data breakdown (e.g. regional and by age
group), and agency report number, and then look up the
appropriate abstract. A companion microfiche library makes
it possible to complete the search within the CIS system.
The service is aimed at libraries, and costs $770 to $2055
per annum (not including the microfiches), depending upon
the size of the library. A review of the index confirms
the publisher's claims for it. It is indeed a single,
comprehensive guide to federal statistics. It effectively
replaces the Federal Statistical Directory, which was
published until 1979 by the now-defunct Office of Federal
Statistical Policy and Standards.
CIS publishes comparable directories covering
international statistics, the U.S. Federal Register,
Presidential Executive Orders and Proclamations since 1789,
the Code of Federal Regulations, Congressional committee
hearings and other Congressional data, U.S. Supreme and
Appeals Court records, plus various state and urban
documents. (Congressional Information Service, Inc., 4520
East-West Highway, Suite 800, Bethesda MD 20814-3389;
[phone] or [phone].)
The private Bureau of National Affairs provides
somewhat similar services, but in more restricted areas:
environment; labor; legal; business and economics; and tax
management. (1231 5th Street NW, Washington DC 20037;
[phone].)
Two other private publishers specialize in publishing
guides to data and data sources. Let me call attention
particularly to Paul Wasserman et al, Statistics Sources
(8th Edition, 1983), a two-volume guide to U.S. statistical
publications (Gale Research Company, Book Tower, Detroit MI
48226). Facts on File Publications, of New York, offers a
Sourcebook of Global Statistics (1985).
The closest thing to an overall official directory of
data and sources is produced by the General Accounting
Office (GAO). It is entitled "Federal Information Sources
and Systems." Theoretically, it is limited to sources and
information systems covering "fiscal, budget and program-
related information." In fact, that is a lot of ground,
and this would already be a valuable source for a foresight
group. It is not well indexed for our purposes, but the
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format is excellent. For each entry, there is an OMB
funding code, a program title, a note on "Congressional
relevance," the statutory authority for the system, a note
whether it is available for public access, a description of
its geographic scope, and a brief characterization of the
system, with inputs and outputs. For each entry, an agency
contact and telephone number are given. The directory is
updated every four or five years.
Unfortunately, GAO no longer distributes the directory
through the Government Printing Office, relying instead on
its own much more restricted distribution. The author has
not found anybody in the bureaucracy who is aware of the
directory. This suggests that another problem for
foresight is the basic task of interesting different cells
of the government in what is going on elsewhere. ("Federal
Information Sources and Systems, A Directory Issued by the
Comptroller General, 1985." General Accounting Office,
stock number AFMD-55-3. Available from GAO at P.O. Box
6015, Gaithersburg MD 20760; [phone]; or at 700 4th
Street NW, Suite 1100, Washington DC; $24.00.)
There are a few other governmental publications of
historical interest or of more limited scope.
In 1978, the old Office of Federal Statistical Policy
and Standards published a Statistical Policy Handbook
including federal statistical directives and listing
various interagency committees with statistical
responsibilities. (U.S. Government Printing Office,
Publication Stock Number 003-005-00179-4; 85 pp; $5.50.)
On the specific question of foresight, the U.S.
Geological Survey (USGS) commissioned a small volume that
was intended to be the beginning of a computerized data
bank on federal organizations involved in strategic
planning. A brief First Edition was published for USGS by
Virginia Polytechnic Institute in 1981, but the funding
ceased and the principal author knows of no ongoing work on
the project. (Robert C. Stuart and David Weaver,
"Strategic Planning in Federal Agencies: A Directory," 59
pp; Division of Environmental and Urban Systems, College of
Architecture and Urban Studies, Virginia Polytechnic
Institute & State University, Blacksburg VA 24061.)
The GAO undertook a somewhat half-hearted attempt to
survey computer models in use in the Executive branch and
in 1982 published a "Survey to Identify Models Used by
Executive Agencies in the Policymaking Process." It is
limited to mathematical models, and it does not
characterize the models listed or give directions as to how
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to access them or make contact with the modelers, but it is
a start. (GAO/PAD-82-46, September 24, 1982; U.S. General
Accounting Office, Document Handling and Information
Services Facility, P.O. Box 6015, Gaithersburg MD 20760;
[phone].)
It would be imprudent in this short survey to try to
identify the more limited directories or guides to data
put out by government agencies covering one or another
sector of activity. Given the importance attached
throughout this book to environmental and resource
concerns, however, let me identify one or two in that area
that were or are of use.
In 1977 Federal Environmental Data: A Directory of
Selected Sources was assembled by a private contractor for
the National Science Foundation. The directory, dated
November 1977, was distributed through the National
Technical Information Service (NTIS), Department of
Commerce, 5285 Port Royal Road, Springfield VA 22151. The
format is clear and explicit and would provide a useful
model for future efforts.
More recently, and in response to business criticism
of the difficulty of finding information sources in
government, the U.S. Department of Energy and CEO have
jointly published a "Sourcebook: Gaining Access to U.S.
Government Information on the Environment and Natural
Resources." Within the limits of its title, this is a very
impressive contribution; it has helped to offset the
decline which had otherwise seemed to be taking place. It
describes data banks, lists individuals and organizations,
public and private, in the U.S. and abroad, has a subject
index, and gives advice as to how to pursue elusive
information. (DOE/PE-T1 (DE 84017419), November 1984.
Available from NTIS, U.S. Department of Commerce,
Springfield VA 22161.)
I apologize to the authors and the issuing
organizations if I have left any useful titles out of this
survey.
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APPENDIX D
Survey of Selected Citizens' Goals and Futures Projects
(@ 1987, Institute for Alternative Futures)
The Institute for Alternative Futures is in the
process of updating its 1981 survey of futures and goals
projects around the world. The listing below includes the
contacts for the active or recently completed projects as
of June 1987. If you know of other projects (now active or
completed) please send information on them to:
IAF
1405 King St.
Alexandria, VA 22314
Arkansas
Jobs for Arkansas Future
Craig Smith
Governor's Ofc. State Capital
Little Rock, AR 72201
501-371-2345
California
California Tomorrow
Debbie Wenzel
Fort Mason Center
Building B
San Francisco, CA
415-441-7631
Colorado
Blue Print for Colorado
Ms. Mary Pat Wilson
1860 Lincoln Street
Suite 560
Denver, CO 80295-0501
303-831-7411
Citizens' Goals for the Colorado
Springs Community
Ms. Tweed Kezziah
P. O. Box 128
Colorado Springs, CO 80901
94123 303-632-2618
Pasadena Renaissance: Planning
for the Year 2000
Judith Weiss
Pasadena City Hall
100 N. Garfield Avenue
Pasadena, CA 91109
818-405-4222
Placentia 2000 Project
Roger Kemp
437 Kiolstad Drive
Placentia, CA 92670
714 993-8117
The Economic Renewal Project,
Carbondale
Michael Kinsley
Rocky Mountain Institute
Drawer 248
Old Snowmass, CO 81654
303-927-3128
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Connecticut
Commission on Connecticut's
Future
Dr. Gary Yohe
80 Washington Street
Hartford, CT 06106
203-566-8344
Fairfield 2000
Lynn Laitman
Regional Plan Association
500 Summer Street
5th Floor
Stamford, CT 06901-1306
203-255-1011
Florida
Beacon Council: Strategic
Proposal for Dade County's
Economic Future
Tom Ferguson
80 S.W. 8th Street
Suite 2400
Miami, FL 33130
305-536-8000
Goals 2000, Orlando
Fred Kittinger
Post Box 1234
Orlando, FL 32802
305-425-1234 ext. 226
House Advisory Committee on
the Future
Gail Albritton
324 The Capital
Tallahassee, FL 32399-1300
904-488-0710
Vision 2020, Ocala
Dr. Cash Peeler
2130 NE 8th Street
Ocala, FL 32670
904-854-2322
Visions 2000, Gainesville
John Hotaling
618 N.W. 13th Ave
Gainesville, FL 32601
904-377-7635
Idaho
Boise Future Foundation
Gary Lyman
1910 University Drive
University Research Ctr.8-139
Boise, ID 83728
208-385-3576
Illinois
Tri County Tomorrow, Peoria
Richard Neumiller
CILCO
300 Liberty Street
Peoria, IL 61602
309-672-5439
Illinois 2000 Foundation
David Baker
Suite 1960 North Wacker Dr.
Chicago, IL 60606
312-372-7373
Indiana
The Futures of Indiana
Indiana Economic Development
Council, Inc.
Brian Bosworth
One N. Capital
Suite 425
Indianapolis, IN 46204
317-631-0871
Iowa
Grinnell 2000
Ben Webb
Grinnell 2000 Foundation
P. O. Box 771
Grinnell, Iowa 50112
515-236-6311
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Kentucky
Project 21
John Clark
P. 0. Box 817
Frankfort, Kentucky 40602
505-695-4700
Kentucky Tomorrow: The
Commission on
Kentucky's Future
Kris Kimel
Chief Administrative Asst.
Office of the Lt. Governor
The Capitol
Frankfort, KY 40601
502-564-7562
Louisiana
Baton Rouge 2000
Robert Dolese, Director
City Parrish Planning
and Zoning Commission
P. O. Box 1471
Baton Rouge, LA 70821
504-389-3144
Maryland
Commission on the Future of
Montgomery County Govt.
Justine Ferber
100 Maryland Avenue
Rockville, MD 20850
301-251-7926
Toward the Year 2000
Michael E. Hickey
Howard County Public
School System
10910 Route 108
Ellicott City, MD 21044
301-992-0500
Massachusetts
Special Senate Committee on
Long Range Policy and
Planning
Cynthia Costas
State House
Room 416B
Boston, MA 02133
617-727-7200
Blue Print 2000
Chris Scott
State House
Room 259
Boston, MA 02133
Mississppi
Mississippi 2020
Bob Kochtitsky
P. O. Box 31292
Jackson, Mississippi 39206
601-366-8467
Missouri
Missouri Opportunity 2000
Commission
Gregg Hartley
830 Truman Bldg.
Jefferson City, MO 65102
314-751-5154
New Jersey
General Assembly Task Force
on the 21st Century
Robert Larson
6 Fairview Place
Montclair, NJ 07043
201-746-8788
The Regional Forum
Dianne Brake
621 Alexander Road
Princeton, NJ 08540
1-609-452-1717
2 6 1
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Morris County 2000
Theodore Goodman
230 Madison Avenue
P. 0. Box 197c
Convent Station, NJ 07961
201-984-2000
New York
Oklahoma
Oklahoma 2000, Inc.
Judith Evans
9020 Lincoln Blvd.
Oklahoma City, OK 73072
405-424-4003
Oregon
Commission on the Year 2000,
N.Y.C. Oregon Commission on Futures
Robert Leitman Research
New York City Commission on Scott Bassett
the Future Executive Department
100 Church St., 20th Floor 155 Cottage Street N.E.
New York, NY 10007 Salem, OR 97310
212-566-0047 503-378-3119
Project 2000
Dr. Jeryl Mumpower
The Nelson A. Rockefeller
Institute of Government
411 State Street
Albany, NY 12211
518-472-1300
Westchester 2000
Dr. Sal J. Prezioso
County Office Bldg.
Room 707
148 Martine Avenue
White Plains, NY 10601
914-285-2882
North Carolina
Greensboro Visions
Ed Kitchen
City of Greensboro
P. O. Box 3588
Greensboro, NC 27402
919-373-2002
Western North Carolina
Tomorrow
Edgar P. Israel
P. O. Box 222
Cullowhee, NC 28779
704-277-7492
Pennsylvania
Berks 2000
Bill Vitale
1242 Hill Road
Reading, PA 19602
215-373-1725
Choices for Pennsylvanians
Harold Miller
506 Finance Building
Harrisburg, PA 17105
717-787-1954
Lehigh Valley Futures Forum
Charles E. Anderson
P.O. 3053
Allentown, PA 18106
215-481-9110
York 2000
Carol A. Murphy
York Area Chamber of Commerce
P. O. Box 1229
York, PA 17405
717-848-4000
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Tennessee
Directons 2000,
Johnson City
James Pierce
P. 0. Box 180
Johnson City, TN 37605
615-926-2141
Vision 2000
Jim Hassinger
Chattanooga Venture
606 Georgia Avenue
Chattanooga, TN 36402
615-267-8687
Texas
Goals for Dallas, Inc.
John Lewis
500 S. Ervay - Suite 410-C
Dallas, Texas 75201
214/741-1738
Target '90, San Antonio
Ms. Maria Toralda
Project Cyprus Tower
1222 N. Maine Ave.
San Antonio, Texas 78212
512-224-1292
Virginia
Fairfax County Goals
Advisory Commission
Theodore Austell III
The Office of the
County Executive
4100 Chainbridge Rd
Fairfax, VA 22030
703-691-2531
Future Horizons: Virginia
in the 21st Century,
League of Women Voters
Jean McCart
610 N. Main Street
Suite 224
Blacksburg, VA 24060
703-552-5625
Governor's Commission on
Virginia's Future
Bob DeVoursney
Institute of Government
University of Virginia
207 Minor Hall
Charlottesville, VA 22903
804-924-3396
Norton 2000
Charles R. Brown
P. O. Box 618
Norton, VA 24273
703-679-0961
Southwestern Virginia
Economic Development
Commission
Bob Stuart
College of Architecture and
Urban Studies
Arch Annex, Virginia Tech.
Blacksburg, VA 24061
703-961-7660
Williamsburg Commission on
Growth
Judy Knudson
P. O. Box 78
Williamsburg, VA 23187-0078
804-220-1556
The Williamsburg Project
Jack Hobbs
James City County Planning
Dept.
400 North Boundary
City of Williamsburg
Williamsburg, VA 23185
804-229-4821
Virginia Beach Tomorrow
Dr. Joe Buchanon
Tidewater Community College
Virginia Beach, VA 234356
804-427-7244
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Washington REGIONS
Future Spokane The 1986 Commission on the
Elenor Magnusen Future of the South
S. 2224 Rockwood Blvd. Southern Growth Policies Board
Spokane, WA 99203 P.O. Box 12293
509-624-0036 Research Triangle Park,
NC 27709
King County 2000 919-549-8169
Anne Bugge
2505 3rd Ave NABC III/Bioregional Project
Suite 300 David Haenke
King County, WA 98121 NCR 3, Box 3
206-728-6100 Brixey, Missouri 65618
417-679-4773
Vision 2000
Clark County
Gil Malory
P. O. Box 5000
Vancouver, WA 988668
206-696-2000
Regional Plan Association
William Shore
1040 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10018
212-398-1140
ASSOCIATIONS OF PUBLIC OFFICIALS
Council of State Governments
Keon S. Chi
Iron Works Pike
P.O. Box 11910
Lexington, KY 40578
606-252-2291
Council of State Planning Agencies
Jim Souby
Hall of the States. Suite 291
400 N. Capital St.
Washington, D.C., 20001
624-5386
International City Managers Association
Jim Hansell
1120 G St., NW
Washington,D.C. 20005
202-626-4600
National Association of Counties
John Thomas
440 1st St. NW
Washington, D.C., 20001
202-393-6226
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APPENDIX E
"Corporate Use of Information Regarding Natural Resources
and Environmental Quality"
Russell E. Train, World Wildlife Fund
for the Council on Environmental Quality
May 16, 1984
Chapter VI summarizes the findings of an intensive
study, financed by a CEQ grant, conducted through personal
interviews at 30 of the largest corporations in America.
These corporations make significant resource allocation
decisions in the U.S. and abroad. They represent a wide
range of industries, including: agribusiness, commercial
and investment banking, chemicals, resource extraction,
manufacturing, forest products, petroleum refining, food
retailing, and electrical power generation. In addition to
these 30 corporations, seven trade associations and eight
private information companies participated in the study.
In total, 229 middle-to-top managers and analysts were
interviewed. Among these participants were presidents,
vice presidents, chief economists, directors of strategic'
planning, directors of marketing research, environmental
managers, materials purchasers, engineers, and many others.
In addition to the 229 personal interviews at 45
organizations, 110 individuals at 20 of the participating
corporations were asked to respond to a written survey.
The purposes of the survey were (1) to identify the types
and sources of resource reports used by analysts, (2) to
determine the users' opinions of these reports, and (3) to
discover what characteristics (e.g., timeliness, clarity,
accuracy) are most important in determining user
satisfaction with these reports. Furthermore, the survey
yielded insights as to how well information providers
(e.g., government, trade associations, publishing
companies) perform on these characteristics.
Upon completion of the interviews and the written
survey, the interviewers distilled the results into six
draft recommendations. Those recommendations were then
sent to the participating business executives for their
comments. Of those who responded (58 percent), 72 percent
agreed with the recommendations, 24 percent agreed with
qualifications, and only 4 percent disagreed. Those
recommendations, modified to reflect the comments, appear
in Chapter VI.
The results of the study are summarized in a 72-page
report to the Council on Environmental Quality, (CEQ), with
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a short appendix reporting the very mixed corporate views
of the desirability and importance of electronic
information systems. In addition, the World Wildlife Fund
delivered the following products to the CEQ:
1. Participant guide listing the names and titles of the
229 study participants.
2. A 500-page document detailing interviews conducted for
this study.
3. A document containing the 124 evaluations of this
study's recommendations.
4. Computer printouts including the factor and regression
analyses of the survey responses.
5. The 877 report listings and publication sources
submitted by corporate survey respondents as their 10
most important resource reports.
,6. List of the top five ranked reports categorized by
rank, overall rating, type of source, and frequency of
use.
7. List of environmental quality related reports cited by
survey respondents.
The report is unpublished. Further inquiries
concerning this report or the other products should be
addressed to Council on Environmental Quality, Executive
Office of the President, 722 Jackson Place NW, Washington,
DC 20006. Copies of the report, while they last, may be
purchased at $8.50 from the World Wildlife Fund, 1601
Connecticut Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20009.
The study was conducted by Joel Horn, who at the time
was Special Assistant to Russell Train, responsible for
coordinating the World Wildlife Fund's long range planning,
and Executive Director of The Year 2000 Committee.
Organizations Participating in the Study
AMAX
American Express
Armco
Atlantic Richfield
Bank of America
Boeing
Corporations
266
Cargill
Conoco
Du Pont
Exxon
Firemen's Fund
Ford Motor Company
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Frito-Lay Phibro-Salomon
General Motors Reynolds Metals
Hewlett-Packard Shearson/American Express
Kroger Southern California Edison
Mead Standard Oil of California
3M Tenneco
Monsanto Union Carbide
Occidental Petroleum U.S. Steel
PepsiCo Weyerhaeuser
Trade Associations
American Iron & Steel Institute
American Paper Institute
American Petroleum Institute
Chemical Manufacturers Association
Edison Electric Institute
Information Industry Association
Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Association
Private Information Companies
Chase Econometrics
Conrad Leslie
Data Resources, Inc.
DIALOG
I.P. Sharp Associates
McGraw-Hill, Inc.
Mead Data Central
National Planning Data Corporation
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APPENDIX F
21st Century Studies
April 21, 1987
As the year 2000 approaches, increasing numbers of nations are undertaking long-term
multisectoral studies of their development and security. These "21st Century studies" are
multisectoral studies typically covering economics, demography, resources and the environment.
They look ahead at least to the year 2000, and in many cases, well into the 21st century.
The Global Studies Center maintains a list of the 21st Century study projects. The following
is our most recently updated compilation. We welcome suggestions for additions, corrections and
improvements.*
AFRICA 2008. Completed. The published report is entitled: ECA and Africa's Development 1983-
2008, Economic Commission for Africa, Addis Ababa, 1983. The 103-page report is very readable
and consists of four major sections: An Overview of Africa's Present Conditions; The African
Region by the Year 2008 Under a Historical Trends Scenario: Perspectives of the African Region by
the Year 2008: a Normative Development Scenario: and the Way to a Willed Future: Some
Concluding Remarks. This report is unique and important in that it presents the Africans' own vision
as well as reflections on the possibilities for achieving the African vision. Contact M.W.
Makramalla, Chief. Socio-Economic Research and Planning Division, U.N. Economic Commission
for Africa. Africa Hall, P.O. Box 3001, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, TEL 447000 or 447200.
AFRICA 2020. This project is just beginning. Contact Mr. T. Gedamu, Director, Planning and
Research Department, African Development Bank, Abidjan, Ivory Coast
AUSTRALIA. Just beginning. Contact Honorable Barry 0. Jones, Minister of Science. Canberra,
Australia. or Dr. Keith D. Sater, Dean, Wesley College, P.O. Box 84, Camperdown. NSW, 2050.
Australia.
BRAZIL 2000. As of this writing, we know little about this study except that it was prepared by Prof.
HICHOINplaribe. Instituto de Estudios. Politicos y Sociales, Rua Baras de
Oliveira. Carto 22. Rio de Janeiro 22460 Brazil.
CANADA. Completed. Report of the Royal Commission on the Economic Union and Development
Prospects for Canada, The Canadian Government Publishing Center. Supply and Services Canada,
Ottawa, Ontario, KIA 0S9. Contact Donald S. MacDonald, Royal Commission on the Economic
Union and Development Prospects for Canada. P.O. Box/CP 1268. Ottawa, Canada KIP 5R3. The
Commission woked for three years to produce this large three-volume report which is available to the
public for $45.00. Summary reports are available in both English and French. The topics addressed
include the global outlook for Canada, trade relations, industrial policy, natural resources and the
environment, human resources and social support, and the institutional setting of the Canadian
government Also see D. Drache and D. Cameron. eds., The Other MacDonald Report, Toronto:
James Lorimer and Company, 1985: and G.O. Barney, P.H. Freeman. and CA. Ulinsky, Global 2000:
Implications for Canada, Oxford: Pergamon. 1981
? Send suggestions to Dr. G.O. Barney, Global Studies Center, 1611 N. Kent St., Suite 610,
Arlington, VA 22209,USA. Copyright 1987. Clonal Studies Center.
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CARIBBEAN. Nearing completion of the second phase. Contacts: Sir Philip Sherlock, Executive
Vice President. Caribbean Resources Foundation, 7855 NW 12th St., Suite 217, Miami, FL 33126,
and Dr. Eddie Green, Director. Institute of Social and Economic Research. University of the West
Indies, Mona, Kingston, Jamaica.
CHINA. The first phase, prepared by Mr. Lin Zixin, now Editor in Chief of Science and Technology
Daily, 18 Xisanhuan Zhonglu, Beijing, China, has been completed and published. The purpose of the
study is to envision and structure a uniquely Chinese socialist nation. An English translation has
been made by the Joint Publications Research Service and is available through the National
Technical Information Service (NTIS), Springfield, VA 22161, TEL [phone]. To order, ask for
China Report - Economic Affairs, China in the Year 2000, JPRS-CEA-86-023, March 6, 1986, Foreign
Broadcast Information Service. Premier Zhao has endorsed the first phase, and a much more
ambitious second phase has been conducted at his request. For further information on the second
phase project, contact Mr. Wang Huijiung, Research Center for Economic, Technological, and
Social Development, Beijing, China. The second phase China 2000 is in draft form (13 volumes) and
consists of three parts: forecasting, analysis, and strategies for directing the future through
government policies. The second phase report is regarded as sensitive information and is not
scheduled for open publication or translation.
EUROPE am Completed. Europe 2000, Peter Hall, ed., c/o Gerald Duckworth & Co., Ltd., 43
Gloucester Crescent, London NW 1,1977.
EUROPE 2050. Just beginning. Contact William M. Stigliani, IIASA. Environment Program, A-
2361 Luxemburg, Austria. TEL [phone]. Telex 079137 EASA A.
EUROPE (WESTERN) IN THE YEAR 2000. Contact J.0 Britton or George F. Ray, National
Institute of Economic and Social Research, 2 Dean Trench Street, London SWIP 3HE, England.
ICELAND 2000. Completed. Iceland 2000: Production, Population and Prosperity, by Dr. Agust
Valfells, Box 5073. Reykjavik, Iceland, August 1979.
ICELAND. Nearing completion. Iceland in 25 Years: A Future Study, presented at the Workshop on
Mexico 2010, Mexico Qty. Mexico, August 1985 by Steingrimur Hermannsson, Prime Minister of
Iceland and Vilhjaimur Ludviksson. Director, The National Research Council, Iceland. Summary of
the entire project now available in Icelandic and English from the Project Director: Dr. Jon
Sigurdsson, Executive Director, National Economic Institute, Raudararstig 25,105 ReMavik. Simi
23133, Iceland.
INDONESIA 2000. Completed, but not openly published. Contact Mr. Peter D. Duncan. J1.
Pagangsaan Barat 18, Jakarta Pusat, Indonesia, TEL 355741, Telex 45019 INDIA.
IRELAND. Completed. Ireland in the Year 2000: Towards a National Strategy, The National
Institute for Physical Planning & Construction Research, Ireland, February 1983. Contact G.
Walker. Director, Planning Division, Anforas Forbartha, National Institute for Physical Planning and
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Construction Research. National Board for Science and Technology. She!bourne House. Shelboume
Road, Dublin 4. Ireland. TEL 683311. Telex 30327 NBSTEL
JAPAN. Completed. Japan in the Year 2000, The Japan Times. Ltd., 5-4. Shibara 4-Chome. Minato-
ku. Tokyo 108. January1983. Contact Hon. Saburo Okita, Government Representative for External
Economic Relations, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2-2-1 ICasurnigaselci. Shiyoda-Ku, Tokyo. Japan.
KOREA. Completed and published. Contact Mr. Ki-Hoo Lee, Economic Planning Bureau,
Economic Planning Board, Seoul. 82-1 Sejung-vo, Chorigro-ku, Korea.
LADAICH 2000. Well along. Contact: Ms. Helena Norberg-Hodge, Ladakh Ecological
Development Group, Leh-194101. Ladakh. India.
MAURTIIUS. Continuing. Contact Professor J. Manrakhan, Vice-Chancellor, The University of
Mauritius, Reduit, Mauritius.
MEXICO 2010. In progress. Preliminary resuls have been reported at various conferences. Papers
available in Spanish and English. Contact Dr. Antonio Alonso Concheiro. Director, Fundacion
Javier Barros Sierra: APDO. Postal 20061, 01000 Mexico D.F. Mexico.
NETHERLANDS IN 25 YEARS. Completed. The Nos Twenty-five Years. Contact Professor IS.
Kramer. Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy. 2 Plein 18U. P.O. Box 20004, 2500
EA. The Hague, The Netherlands. 1978.
NETHERLANDS. Completed. Published as a book. Dutch only. This study is based on a new
model and a revised system of economic accounts. The new system of economic accounts measures
adverse economic impacts of resource depletion and environmental pollution. Contact Dr. Roefie
Hueting, Central Bureau of Statistics. Department of Environmental Statistics. Prinses Betrttiaan
428. Boorburg (The Hague), The Netherlands. TEL [phone].
PERU. In progress. Contact Francisco R. Sagasti. Director, Group of Analysis for Development
(GRADE), Apartado 5316 Miraflores, Lima 18. Peru. A number of reports and papers are available.
PHILIPPINES. Completed about 1975. Contains an enormous collection of data in many volumes
of appendices. Contact the Ford Foundation archives, New York. The Global Studies Center has
donated its copy to the Library of the World Bank. 1818 H Street, N.W., Washington. D.C. USA.
POLAND. Continuing. Contact Prot Z. ICacxmarek. Chaiman 'Poland 2000" Committee. Polish
Academy of Sciences, MIN. Box No. 24. 00-901. Warsaw, Poland. Several papers are available.
SOUTH AFRICA. In progress. Contact Elisabeth Dostal, Institute of Futures Research.
University of Stellenbosch. Stellenbosch 7600, South Africa. Several reports are available.
273.
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SWEDEN 2000. Just being organized. Contact: Hon. Briggitta Hambraeus, M.P., Riksdagen. S-100
12 Stockholm, Sweden. TEL [phone].
TAIWAN. In progress. Contact: Prof. Chang-Yi David Chang, Chairman, The Taiwan 2000 Study.
do Department of Geography, National Taiwan University, Taipei 107, Taiwan, Republich of China.
Also Mr. Allerd Stikker. 76 Denbigh St., London, SW1 V2.EX. United Kingdom, TEL [phone]-
9126. A prospectus and study plan are available. Study should be completed in the fall, 1987.
TANZANIA. In progress. Contact: Sibusiso M. Bengu. The Lutheran World Federation, P.O. Box
No. 66, Route de Femey 150, 1211 Geneva 20. Switzerland. TEL 98-9400. A project description is
available. The study focuses primarily on sisal and the impact of foreign governments and
corporations on the global sisal market.
UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS. Continuing. Contact Mr. Victor Gelovani.
Institute for Systems Studies, 9 Prospekt 60-Letija Oktiabria, Moscow, U.S.S.R. A number of reports
have been published.
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. Only a small report has been prepared on the future of the
USA to the year 2000. The title is U.S. Canying Capacity: An Intnxtuction. Contact Maryla Webb
and Judith Jacobsen, Carrying Capacity, Inc.. 1325 G St- N.W., Suite 1003, Washington. D.C. 20005.
TEL [phone].
VENEZUELA. Contact Gonzalo Martner, PNUD, Apartado 69005, Caracas 1062-A, Venezuela.
WORLD (BUDDHIST PERSPECTIVE). This project is well advanced. A book manuscript is in
draft form. Contact Ms. Nancy Nash. 5H Bowen Road, 1st Floor, Hong Kong. TEL [phone], Telex
72149 S1DAN HX.
WORLD (METHODIST PERSPECITVE). The Global 2000 Project: The Churches' Social Witness
for 21st Century. Just beginning. Contact Dr. Ned Dewire, The Methodist Theological School in
Ohio, 3081 Columbus nice, Delaware. Ohio 43015.
WORLD (WORLD COMMISSION ON ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT). This
independent commission has been working for several years now under the leadership of Dr. Gro
Harlem Brundtland, Prime Minister of Norway, and is about to present its report. Contact Mr. Jim
MacNeil. Secretary General, WCED. Palais Wilson. 52, rue des Paquis, CH-1201 Geneva,
Switzerland. TEL [phone], Telex 27910 CSEN CH.
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APPENDIX G
The Authors
Clement Bezold is the Executive Director of the
Institute for Alternative Futures, which he established
with Alvin Toffler to encourage "anticipatory democracy."
He has worked with a number of state and local governments
to involve the public in strategic planning. He has
developed concepts for describing the evolution of health
care and has been consultant to a number of hospitals and
health care associations. He received his PhD in Political
Science from the University of Florida, where he was also
the Assistant Director of the Center for Governmental
Responsibility. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the
Brookings Institution and he teaches a course on the future
at American University.
Lindsey Grant, a retired Foreign Service Officer, was
a China specialist for years, and his concern about
population/resource/environment issues reflects that
experience as well as his service in India. At retirement,
he was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Environment
and Population Affairs. His interest in the problem of
foresight in governmental decision making stems from
service on the National Security Council Staff and on the
Department of State's Policy Planning Staff. He was the
Department of State Coordinator for the Global 2000 Report.
John D. Sterman is Assistant Professor of Management,
Sloan School of Management, MIT. He received his PhD from
the Sloan School. He has been associated with the U.S.
Department of Energy and with the International Institute
for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). He has been a
consultant on systems dynamics models to the governments of
the U.S., China and Mexico and to the State of California.
He has published a number of papers particularly in the
fields of energy resources and macro-economics.
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INDEX
abortion, 45
access to the President, 224
acid precipitation, 7, 11, 29-31, 38, 72, 115, 118,
143, 177, 185, 188, 228, 241
"add-factoring", 159
Advisory Commission on the Future, Florida, 85
Advisory Committee on National Growth Policy Processes,
197
advisory committees and commissions, 196
Africa, 175
Agency for International Development (AID), 34, 45, 58,
77, 177, 179
agricultural employers, 184
agricultural populations, 176
agricultural workers, 184
Agriculture, Department of, 10, 30, 41, 186, 221, 235
Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), 189
Alternatives for Washington (state), 89
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 121
American Association for the Advancement of Science
(AAAS), xiii
American Enterprise Institute, 242
American Society for Public Administration (ASPA), 242
American Statistics Index, 36
Anderson, Robert 0., 201
Antarctica, 124
anti-trust policy, 27
anticipatory democracy, 85, 88
Anticipatory Democracy, 85
Arabia, 6
Argentina, 120
Artertan, Professor Christopher, 88
Asian minority, 183
Assistant for National Security, 23, 27
Assistant Secretary of State, OES, 29
Austria, 181
automobile fuel efficiency, 186
Baker, James A. III, 25, 26
balance of payments, 212
Balanced Growth and Economic Planning bill, 198
bank lending and business planning, 104
Bariloche world model, 120, 125
Barney, Dr. Gerald 0., 126
Beal, Richard, 32
Bilateral Advisory Consultative Group (BACG), 29, 30
biotechnology, 27
birth control, 43
"black box" syndrome, 223
275
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Blacks, 181ff
Bledsoe, Dr. Ralph E., 27, 28
Boggs, Deputy Secretary Danny, 43
Brandt Commission, 121
Brazil, 35, 120
Brookhaven National Laboratory, 142
Brookings Institution, 242
Brooks, Congressman Jack, 219
Brown, Congressman George E., Jr., 77
Brownlow committee, 22, 26, 31, 229
Brundtland Commission, 69, 123, 188, 190, 191
Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 23
Buchanan, Patrick, 23
Bucharest World Population Plan of Action, 37
budget, 4, 7, 21, 30, 33, 45, 53, 85, 86, 87, 88, 93,
108, 111, 124, 164, 174, 185, 198, 220, 234
building a constituency, 218
Bureau of Conservation and Renewable Energy, DOE, 41
Bureau of International Security Affairs, DOD, 21
Bureau of Labor Statistics, Department of Labor, 185
Bureau of Land Management, Department of the Interior,
41
Bureau of Mines, Department of the Interior, 41
Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs, Department of
State, 21
Bureau of the Budget, 23
Bureau of the Census, 36, 38
business, 99ff
Business Round Table, 127
Cabinet Council, 19, 23-25, 27, 28, 63-66, 69, 71, 72,
235, 236
Cabinet Council on Natural Resources and the
Environment , 57, 64
Cabinet, U.S., 23
California, 182, 183
Camp David, 179
Canada, 29-72, 117
carbon dioxide, 118, 128, 177
Carlucci, Frank, 26, 30
Carter, President Jimmy, administration, 30, 45-48, 52,
146, 179, 180, 198
causal relationships and correlations, 155
Central America, 178
central planning, 13, 192
Chase Econometrics, 159, 160
Checklist for the model consumer, 162
Chemical Information System, 43
Chief of Staff, White House, 29, 31, 220, 229
"China 2000", 125
Chlorofluorocarbons, 119, 228
276
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CIA, 224, 234
Civil Service Commission, 23
civil service simplification, 27
Clean Air Act, 103
Clean Air Amendments, 42
Clean Water Act, 103
"clearance" process, 221
Clearinghouse on the Future, 78
climate, 176-177, 185, 188
climate change, 185, 188
Club of Rome, 120
coastal oil-drilling rights, 52
Columbia University, 46
Commerce, Department of, 21, 29, 30, 35, 39, 41
Commerce and Trade, Cabinet Council on, 23
Commission for a National Future, 46
Commission on Hawaii's Future, 89
Commission on Minnesota's Future, 85, 89
Commission on National Goals, 46
Commission on Population Growth and the American
Future, viii, 45
committee chairmen, Congress, 80
Committee on Energy and Commerce, House, 78, 199, 219
Committee on Environment and Public Works, Senate, 63,
78, 208
Committee on Foreign Affairs, House, 63
Committee on Government Operations, House, 210, 219
Committee on Management in the Federal Government, 22
Committee on Natural Resources, NAS, 40
Committee on Post Office and Civil Service, House, 204
committee system, 219
Committee on Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs, House,
210
compatible data, 38
computerized mathematical models, 133ff
concentration of wealth, 185
Conference Board, 195
conflicts between economic and environmental policy,
management of, 117
Congressional Clearinghouse
Congressional
Congressional
Congressional
Congressional
on the Future, 77, 240
Directory, 34
Information Service, Inc., 126
Research Service (CRS), 76, 78
role in foresight, 75-82, 201-210, 217,
220, 238-240
Congressional Select Committee on Population, 207
connection of foresight to policy, 48ff
Conservation Reserve Program, 7
conventional forces, Europe, 181
coordination at the working level, 33
Cornucopians, 177
277
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"Corporate Use of Information Regarding Natural
Resources," 62, 100
Council of Economic Advisers, 197, 243
Council of State Governments, 84, 88, 92
Council of State Policy and Planning Agencies (CSPA),
84, 85, 91, 110
Council on Environmental Quality (CEO), 25, 28, 29, 41,
47, 49ff, 57-72, 100, 125, 198-205
Country Desk Officers, Department of State, 235
Critical Trends Assessment bill, (see Gore-Gingrich
bill)
Cutler, Dr. Rupert, 204
Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, 89
data analysis and interpretation, business evaluation
of governmental, 105
data compatability, 5, 38, 39, 231, 233
Data Resources, Inc., (DRI), 159, 160
decision rules, 147
Defense, Department of, 8, 21, 23, 120, 224, 234, 243
Denmark, 181
Deputy Secretary Danny Boggs, 43
desertification, 176
development, third world, 175ff
"Dialogue", 241
differential fertility, 182
Dingell, Congressman John D., 78, 219
directories, U.S. federal, 34-36
directories, U.N., 36, 126
discontinuities, 233
Domestic Council, 23
Domestic Policy Council, 20, 25ff, 28, 29, 31
Duncan, Joseph, 39
Dust Bowl, 40
dynamic models, 142, 182, 234
Eckstein, Otto, 159
econometrics, 150ff
Economic Affairs, Cabinet Council on, 23
Economic Commission for Europe (ECE), 69
Economic Policy Council, 20, 25ff, 32, 210, 220
education, cost and fertility, 189
efficiency standards for appliances, 186
Egypt, 179
Eisenhower, President Dwight, 26, 43, 46, 236
El Salvador, 178
Emergency Management, Working Group on, 27
Employment Act of 1946, 209
Endangered Species Preservation Act, 42
endogenous and exogenous variables, 141
278
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Energy, Department of, 9, 28, 29, 41, 43, 69, 146, 148,
185, 187, 221, 223
energy models, 150, 187
Energy, Environment and Natural Resources, Working
Group on, 28, 29
environment, ix, xvi, 13, 20, 41-43, 117, 118, 188
Environmental and Energy Study Conference, 77, 78
environmental compliance, business, 103
environmental impact statement (EIS), 51, 52, 240
Environmental Monitoring Improvement bill of 1984, 207
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 24, 25, 28-31,
42, 47, 64, 201, 207, 223, 224
Environmental Quality 1982, 70
Environmental Quality Improvement Act, 42
epidemics, 178
equilibrium theory, 152
"Europe 2000", 126
Europe-U.S. strategic relations, 181
European Cultural Foundation, 126
evaluating foresight proposals, 211
Executive Office of the President (EOP), 22, 23, 26,
39, 47, 51, 70, 75
Executive privilege, 64
family planning, 44, 45, 124
FAO, 177
Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), 243
Federal Environmental Pesticide Control Act, 42
Federal Executive Directory, 36
Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act, 42
Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments, 42
federalism, 27
feedback, 141, 148, 234
Fish and Wildlife Service, 41
Florida, foresight activities, 85
Food and Agriculture, Cabinet Council on, 23
Foresight Foundation, 244
foresight, legislative proposals, 201ff
Foresight Paper, GIWG, 66, 67, 69
Foresight Policy Group, 231, 232
Foresight Working Group, 229, 232
Forest Service, U.S., 40, 41, 142
Forrester, J. W., 120, 162, 164, 166
Forrester/Meadows World Model, 120
Frito-Lay Corp., 101, 104
Fugi world model, 120
Full Employment Act, 87
Future Shock, 85
Futures Research Quarterly, xiv
279
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General Accounting Office (GAO), 76, 160, 204
General Services Administration (GSA), 28, 196
genetic engineering, 177
Geological Survey, U.S. (USGS), 41
Germany, West, 181
Gingrich, Congressman Newt, 78, 93, 95, 207, 209
Global 2000 Report to the President, viii, 10, 11,
38,
45, 47, 48, 57, 58,
59,
60, 62,
63,
64, 65, 69,
70,
71, 121, 125, 149,
198,
200,
206,
208, 212,
225,
233, 234, 235, 243,
244
"Global Change", 116
Global Environmental Monitoring System (GEMS), 127
Global Environmental Principles, 60
Global Foresight Roundtable, xiv
Global Future: Time to Act, 58, 198
Global Issues Work Group (GIWG), 32, 48, 57-73, 199
Global Resource Information Database (GRID), 127
Global Resources, Environment and Population bill, (see
Hatfield/Ottinger bill)
Global studies, (see "World in the Year XXXX" studies)
Global Studies Center, 125
Global Tomorrow Coalition, 64, 200, 243
Goal setting, 14, 15, 87-90, 92, 101, 111, 123, 138,
211, 229
Goals and Futures Programs, 88
Goals for Americans, 46
Goals for Dallas, 89
Gore, Senator Albert, Jr., 78, 93, 95, 209
Gore/Gingrich bill, 93, 201, 206-207, 213, 219, 240
Gorsuch, EPA Administrator, 70
Government Operations, Administration and Management,
Working Group on, 27
Government Operations Committee, 206
Government Printing Office, 34
Grace Commission, 39, 218
great depression, 21, 242
Great Society, 174
Green, Congressman Bill, 78
Grenada, 128
Groping in the Dark, 166
Haig, Alexander, 22
Hamburg, Dr. David A., xi
Harriman, Averill, 238
Harrison, Dr. Anna J., xii
Hatfield/MacKay bill, 205
Hatfield/Ottinger bill, 78, 201-205, 208, 213
Hawaii Legislature, 84
Hawaii State Association of Counties, 85
Health and Human Services, Department of, 34
Heinz, Senator John, 78
280
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highway construction, 52
Hill, A. Alan, 57-72
Hispanics, 183
home insulation, 186
House Joint Resolution 248, (see Mavroules resolution)
Housing and Urban Development, Department of, 30
Housing and Urban Development Act of 1970, 197
Human Resources, Cabinet Council on, 23
Humphrey, Senator Hubert, 195, 197, 198
Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment and Balanced Growth
bill, 198
immigration policy, 8, 30, 178, 182-184, 187, 189
Immigration Reform Act of 1986, 184, 191
industrial world, 181
industrialization, third world, 180
"Information Systems and Data Bases", UN, 126
"Information Systems in Countries", UN, 126
Institute for Alternative Futures, 84, 88
Integrated foresight studies, 46
Interagency Ad Hoc Committee on Population, 36
interagency coordination, 6ff, 19ff, 227-233
Interfutures: Facing the Future, 122-123, 128
Interior, Department of, 21, 28, 29, 41
International Biological Program, 116
International Chamber of Commerce, 127
International City Managers Association, 84
International Conference on the Global Possible, 126
International Convention on International Trade in
Endangered Species (CITES), 118
international convention on radio frequencies, 118
international cooperation, 115-131, 245
international data-gathering and foresight, 239
International Environmental Bureau, 127
International Geophysical Year, 116
International Geosphere-Biosphere Program (IGBP) 116,
119
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis,
(IIASA), 120, 121, 164, 165
International Institute for Environment and Development
(IIED), 188
International Postal Union (IPU), 118
international scientific cooperation, 116
International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO), 177
interstate highway system, 182
inventory of the nation's bilateral and multilateral
agreements, 62
investment recommendations, 104
investors, 218
Iran/contra affair, 20, 26, 33
Israel, 179
281
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Issue Papers, 66, 67, 69
Issues Management Association (IMA), xiii
Japan, 117, 120, 122
jobs, productivity and unemployment, 184
Johnson, President Lyndon, 80, 174, 236
Joint Committee of Congress on Population and the, 205
Joint Economic Committee, Congress, 94, 160, 243
judicial review, 51
Justice, Department of, 29
Kahn, Herman, 70
Kaldor, Nicholas, 153
Keon Chi, 88
King, Martin Luther,
Jr.,
182
Kissinger, Dr. Henry,
22,
26
Klein, Lawrence, 150,
159
Korea, South, 180
"Korea 2000", 125
Kuznets, Simon, 154
Labor, Department of,
labor force, 184
218
Law of the Sea Treaty, 124
Legal Policy, Cabinet Council on, 23
Lehigh Valley Futures Forum, 89
Leontief, Wassily, 120, 158
"Lexis", 241
Libertarian, 13
Limits to Growth, 120, 134
Lincoln, President Abraham, vii
linearity, 140
Lockheed Corp., 241
lumber and building industries, 218
MacKay, Congressman Kenneth, 78, 93, 95, 125, 207
Management and Administration, Cabinet Council on, 23,
27
Marine Mammal Protection Act, 42
Marine Mammals Commission, 41
marine pollution, 177
MARKAL model, 142
market research, 101
Materials Policy Commission, 40
mathematical models, 5, 12, 120, 133-169, 192
Mathias, Senator Charles, 78, 208
Mavroules resolution, 202, 208
Mead Data Central, 241
Meadows, Dana, 166
median household real income, 185
Meese, Attorney General Edwin III, 25, 26, 27
282
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Megatrends, 85
"melting pot", 183
mental models, 135
Mesarovic/Pestel model, 120
"Mexico 2010", 125
Mexico City International Conference on Population, 45,
175
Middle East, 178
migration, 178
Minnesota, 85
MOIRA world model, 120
momentum and inertia, 224
moon landings, 173
multi-racial states, 182
Naisbitt, John, 85, 96
National Academy of Public Administration, 242
National Academy of Science, 40
National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program (NAPAP),
30
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA),
28, 134
National Association of Manufacturers, 58
National Audubon Society, 204
National Bureau of Standards, 38
National Center for Atmospheric Research, 243
National Commission on Materials Policy, 40, 197
National Commission on Supplies and Shortages, 197
National Conference of State Legislatures, 84
National Conservation Commission, 40
National Economic Cooperation bill of 1983, 202, 209
National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), 20, 42, 49,
53, 75, 202, 203, 239, 240
National Goals Research Staff, viii, 46, 57, 70, 195,
225
National Governors Association, xiii, 84, 94, 95
national income and product accounts, 154
national indicators, 32
National Marine Fisheries Service, 41
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA),
29, 30, 47, 243
National Park Service, 41
National Planning Association, 93, 242
National Planning Board, 21
National Research Council, 30
National Resources Board, 21, 23
National Resources Planning Board, 22, 46, 75
National Scanning Board, 91
National Science Foundation (NSF) , xii, 47, 67
national security, 7, 20, 25, 179, 224
283
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National Security Assistant (Adviser) to the President,
24, 26, 30
National Security Council (NSC), xiii, 20, 23-27, 29,
31, 32, 33, 38, 68, 112, 180, 203, 220, 228, 246
National Security Planning Group, 26
NATO, 181
Natural Gas Act, 52
Natural Resources and the Environment, Cabinet Council
on, 23
"need to know", 222
neoclassical economic theory, 151
Netherlands, 120, 128
New International Economic Order, 125
"Nexis", 241
Nixon, President Richard, 23, 44, 45, 46, 70, 196, 214
Noise Control Act, 42
North Pacific Fur Seal Convention, 117
Norway, 123
nuclear weapons, 181
nuclear energy, 188
nuclear issues, 185
OECD environment activities, 117-119
OECD Interfutures project, 122, 123
Office of Food and Natural Resources, OES, Department
of State, 62
Office of Management and Budget (OMB), 25, 29, 39, 109,
196, 200, 204, 220, 222
Office of Personnel Management (OPM), 28
Office of Planning and Evaluation, White House, 32
Office of Policy Development, White House, 29, 32, 220,
229
Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), 28, 29
Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), 76, 177, 195,
196, 205
Ogallala aquifer, 10
oil depletion allowances, 191
"oil shock" of 1973", 186
Ombudsman, 227, 228, 229, 231, 232
OPEC, 186
optimization models, 138
Options Paper, GIWG, 63, 64
Oregon Commission on Futures Research, 85
Our Common Future, 123
Paley Commission, 40, 48, 57
Patent and Trademark Office, 35
patent law, 27
Perlman, Professor Janice, 88
Perspectives Paper, GIWG, 65-67, 69
Peterson, Russell, 204
284
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petroleum era, 185
Phelps-Brown, E. H., 153, 158
Phillips curve, 151, 154, 155, 157
PIES model (Project Independence Evaluation System,
148-150
Pinchot, Gifford, 40
planned society, 13
plant design, 102
plant siting, 102
"Poland 2000", 125
policy responsibility, assignment of, 33, 36
Policy Review Group, NSC, 29
"polluter pays principle", 117
population, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 13, 14, 19, 20, 30, 36, 37,
40, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 53, 59, 62, 77, 93,
95, 101, 103, 117, 122, 123, 124, 126, 127, 134,
137, 139, 140, 141, 145, 150, 155, 174, 175, 176,
177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 184, 185, 187, 188,
189, 190, 191, 193, 195, 198, 200, 201, 202, 203,
204, 205, 207, 208, 209, 211, 218, 219, 226, 239
Population Affairs, HHS Deputy Assistant Secretary for,
36-37
Population Affairs, Department of State Coordinator, 36
Population Environment Balance, 204
population conferences at Bucharest (1974) and Mexico
City, 125
prediction and foresight, 10, 192
predictive power of econometric models, 159
price mechanism, 186
privatization, 27, 36
production and materials purchasing, 103
production capacity, 102
productivity, 27, 184
Project on Sustainable Growth, Woodrow Wilson
Institute, 196
public health, 175
public participation in foresight, 8, 11, 31, 71, 83,
86ff, 99, 213, 218, 233, 234, 236, 237, 240-244
racial justice, 182
racism, 191
"rational expectations" school, 151
Reagan, President Ronald, administration, 23-33, 39,
43, 45, 49, 52, 57-73, 174, 186, 192, 199, 236
Regan, Donald, 23
"Register of UN Serial Publications", 126
Regulatory impact assessments, Congressional, 79
Reorganization Act of 1939, 23
Report to the Governors, CSPA, 92
"Reports on National Growth Policy", 197
research and development, business, 104
285
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resource acquisition, business, 101
Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, 42, 103
resources, ix, xvi, 13, 40, 117
Resources for the Future, 10, 242
reverse discrimination, 183
Richardson, George, 166
Rockefeller Commission, 46, 57, 195, 196, 212, 214
Rockefeller, John D. III, 45
Roosevelt, President Franklin, 21, 40, 75, 236
Roosevelt, President Theodore, 40
Rusk, Secretary of State Dean, 80
Russia, 117
Safe Drinking Water Act, 42
Sahel, 175
"salad bowl", 183
SARUM model, 120
Scheuer, Congressman James, 78, 201, 207, 208
Scheuer Committee, 77
school busing, 182
scope of foresight, 6, 13, 211, 226, 228
Scowcroft, Brent, 24
Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy, 77
Select Committee on Population, House, 77
Senge, Peter, 166
Senior Interagency Groups, NSC, (SIGs), 26, 27
Simon, Herbert, 144, 153
Simon, Julian, 70
simulation models, 145
single track thinking, 173
Small Business Administration (SBA), 28
smog, 42
soft variables, 148
Soil and Water Resources Conservation Act, 75
Soil Conservation Service (SCS), 40
Sourcebook: Gaining access to US Government
Information, 69
sovereignty, 128
Soviets, 181
species extinction, 176
Stafford, Senator Robert, 78, 208
State, Department of, 21, 23, 29, 34, 35, 38, 47, 62,
224, 229, 234
State Futures Commissions, 88
State of the World, 188
State Scanning Network (CSPA), 91, 92
statistical parameter, 154
Statistical Policy Branch, 38
statistical significance, 157
Stockholm Conference, 60
strategic direction, 101
286
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strategic issues, 178ff
strategic planning, business, 110
Subcommittee on Agriculture, Research
House, 77
Subcommittee on Census and Population,
Subcommittee on Government Efficiency,
Subcommittee on Human Rights and
Organizations, House, 78
substantive goals vs. procedure, 219
suburban sprawl, 187
Supreme Court, 27
sustainable development, 123
Sweden, 181
synthetic fuels program, 186
systems dynamics, 145, 162
and Environment,
House, 204
Senate, 78, 208
International
Taboos, 190
tax and welfare policies, 185
technological trends, 46
Teledemocracy, 88
Texas, 182, 183
The Environmental Fund, 204
The Future: A Guide to Information Sources, xiv
The Futurist, 88
The Game Plan: Governance with Foresight, 110
The Global Possible, 126
The Heritage Foundation, 70
The Resourceful Earth, 70
The Unfinished Agenda, 126
Thinking Strategically: A Primer for Public Leaders,
110
Thurow, Lester, 158
third world, 3, 175, 178, 179
time constraints, 222, 237
Tinbergen, Jan, 150
Toffler, Alvin, 85, 95
Torts, Working Group on, 27
toxic chemicals, 117
toxic substances, 188
Toxic Substances Control Act, 42
Train, Russell, 201
Transportation, Department of, 30, 186
Treasury, Department of, 21, 30, 224
Treaties in Force, 128
"tree huggers", 181
Tri County Tomorrow, 92
tropical deforestation, 176
Truman, President Harry, 40
"turf", 222
287
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U.S. Government Manual, 34
"U.S. Government Participation in International
Treaties, Agreements, Organizations and Programs in
the Fields of Environment, Natural Resources and
Population", 62
unemployment, 184, 185
United Kingdom, 120
United Nations, 36, 126
United Nations Bookstore, 36
United Nations Conference on Desertification, 176
United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), 60, 69, 126,
127
United Nations General Assembly, 123, 125
United Nations Global Model, 120
United Nations Session of a Special Character, 60
United Way Environmental Scanning Committee, 91
United Way of America, xiii
urban gridlock, 187
urban planning, 186
urbanization, 177
urgent vs. the important, 223
US/Canada Convention for the Protection of Migratory
Birds, 117
USX Corporation, 127
Veterans Administration, 28
Vietnam war, 80, 174
Water Quality Act, 42
Watt, Secretary of Interior James, 24
weather forecasting, 115
welfare laws, 189
western timbering, 52
wetlands, 52
Weyerhaeuser Company, 103
Wharton Econometric Forecasting Associates, 159
Wharton model, 159, 160
Wise, Congressman Robert, 78
Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, 196
Working Groups, Cabinet policy councils, 26-28, 31, 109
WORLD 2 and WORLD 3 models, (see Forrester/Meadows
model)
World Bank, 120, 122, 175
World Climate Program, 116
World Commission on Environment and Development, (see
Brundtland Commission)
World Dynamics, 164
world energy needs, 180
World Future Society, xiv, xvii, 88, 212
"World in the Year XXXX" studies, 11, 38, 121, 122,
213, 221, 225, 226, 228, 231, 233, 235, 239
288
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World Integrated Model (WIM), (see Mesarovic/Pestel
model)
World Resources 1987, 188
World Resources Institute, 126, 188, 242
World Wildlife Fund, 62, 100
Worldwatch Institute, 10, 188
Yankelovich, 96
Year 2000 Committee, 100, 201
Zero Population Growth, Inc., 209
289
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BOOKS
Thomas
=CD
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