Creative Commons
Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale at the Democratic National Convention in New York City on July 15, 1976.
Early this year, the National Committee Against Segregation in Housing charged that for the past three decades, good intentions notwithstanding, various Federal programs had fostered racial segregation and consequently trapped Negroes in slum ghettos.
We know we are building new buildings, but what are we doing to people?
Their specific criticisms attacked a broad range of programs and policies, among them urban renewal, transportation, and public housing. Some of the programs the Committee cited sought to improve American society generally; others, such as public housing, aimed at improving the condition of the poor. Of urban renewal, the Committee charged that the programs “have consistently violated the rights of Negro Americans and other minorities by forcing their continuous upheaval and relocation in racially segregated areas to accommodate local community prejudices.”
Because the main target of the criticism was the Department of Housing and Urban Development, HUD Secretary Robert C. Weaver prepared an eight-page response which said, generally, that the Department was doing the best it could under current laws but stronger legislation was needed.
There the matter rests, and as a United States Senator who has voted for some of the programs, or supported others enacted before I came to the Senate, I am perplexed and troubled.
As the situation now stands, there is no prospect for an accurate and public accounting of the extent of racial segregation in the United States that would enable us to determine whether government programs are cures or contributors to the perpetuation of this social cancer.
The lack of verifiable, public information exists in a number of broad areas: physical health and mental illness, the quality of education, the effect upon society of a gradually deteriorating natural environment.
Unhappily, we have had a whole summer of unprecedented violence in our cities that revealed glaringly the shocking lack of knowledge of the nature and extent of the social ills that plague our rich nation. The proliferation of ad hoc committees at the national, state, and local levels to determine the causes of rioting in the urban ghettos is ample evidence of the need for an on-going, permanent coordination of these social indicators. In these cases violence serves as a measure of the lack of jobs, poor health care, inferior educational opportunity, de facto segregation, and the multitude of other burdens that grind upon the poor and those discriminated against by the majority.
There certainly must be more peaceful ways than riot, and hopefully more precise methods, too, to measure our failures and document the considerable successes of governmental efforts to improve the quality of American life. Obviously, we need better indicators. For America to approach the future unequipped to evaluate and plan effectively is to invite chaos.
One of the social sciences, economics, has proven that by carefully measuring and watching various indicators such as retail sales volume, amount of new investment, and levels of gross national product, we can take action to head off economic disaster. What do the social sciences have to offer in noneconomic areas of the human condition? Very little of a solid or continuous nature. We now have no comparative system that will alert us to social disaster—a system of social indicators, widely broadcast, by which we could keep watch in a general way on the social processes in our nation and plan for society’s orderly development.
Instead, we undertake ambitious and laudable programs, and watch in shocked amazement when the reaction is different from what we expected. Then we scramble to try to ascertain the facts, often with dubious success.
Take urban renewal, for example. For a decade, urban renewal has been held high as the salvation of our rotting cities, and damned as merely exporting the poor to new ghettos.
In my files are two magazine articles published within three months of each other in 1965. One of these, a critical article, cites a 1961 report that sixty per cent of the displaced poor were relocated in new slums while high-income families occupied the handsome new glass and steel towers. The other article, on the optimistic side, reported a 1964 finding that only eight per cent of displaced slum families remained afterward in substandard housing. The three-year time difference between the studies could account for at least some of the disparity—perhaps all. But in any case there are no clear, current, public, well-announced figures available to refute or support either claim. The two articles punctuate our ignorance about the real effects of one of^ the most ambitious and promising Federal programs. We know we are building new buildings, but what are we doing to people?
The absence of adequate, publicly announced indicators can also veil our successes and encourage mistaken exploitation of surface indications of failure, whether it be the testing of new educational techniques, methods of fighting crime, or the administration of welfare funds. As The Progressive noted in its June issue, White House aide Joseph Califano had performed the distinct service of coordinating welfare data revealing that only 50,000 of the 7.3 million persons receiving welfare throughout the nation are actually capable of being trained to hold jobs. This data, pulled together for the first time, effectively refutes the conservative bugaboo that, as The Progressive put it, “Americans on public welfare rolls are lazy bums leeching on society. . . .”
What I am suggesting is that as our present programs continue in their sometimes uncertain way, we must undertake to devise statistical and analytical methods to help us find out what we have done and what we ought to be doing. To say that our social programs may be imperfect and sometimes miss the mark is not to say, of course, that we should halt all attempts toward social betterment. But perhaps we can find ways to get more done at less cost and with less waste motion.
Beyond the establishment of social measures, there should be persistent and perceptive and continuing high level analysis of our social processes, their problems and possibilities, such as is provided for the President by the Council of Economic Advisers in the economic field.
Man’s oldest method of self-education is trial and error, but it is also the least efficient. Try we must, but there are ways of reducing the margin of error.
Incessant trial and error and the absence of accurate measurement sap public confidence in otherwise highly desirable programs, and this perhaps is the core of disagreement about many programs designed to improve the public welfare: programs encompassing health, education, transportation. How do we measure success in terms that reflect impact on individuals? By amount of money spent? This may be a measure of effort, but not of effect.
To be sure, there are many surveys and abundant statistics. There are thousands of statisticians at work in Washington alone, and thousands more working for public and private agencies across the nation. And despite the fact that we do collect mountains of statistics, as the 1,000-plus pages of the Statistical Abstract of the United States attest, there remain frightening gaps in information essential for accurate evaluation. Much of the statistical information we now collect is incoherent; that is, it bears no readily apparent relationship to other data which, taken all together, would allow reasonable conclusions.
In other instances, the information is available from widely different agencies, but few people know where to get it. A social scientist doing some post-Watts research told me recently that all the statistical indicators warning of the impending explosion were available before the outbreak. Unfortunately, there was no one to gather and analyze them and no agency existing with the prestige and attention getting devices to warn the public and government officials.
It would be an oversimplification, of course, to imply that social indicators can magically reveal the “truth” in every case in which an effect is disputed, or alert us to every impending crisis. But it cannot be denied that a system of statistical indicators, measured regularly and watched constantly, and not the least important, available for easy public examination, can yield invaluable guidance for future action. Such a system might make it possible to avoid the risk of dangerous sociological backlash.
The riots in Watts have been partially blamed on the frustrations that arose because of the transportation success of the Los Angeles freeway system. When public transportation withered as automobile travel became more and more convenient, the impoverished Watts residents without cars were effectively isolated from job opportunities and from state and local facilities where they could receive aid.
Columnist Joseph Kraft blames unfortunate consequences like this on our “innocence.” Kraft laments that “Lack of regular information fosters an innocence and irresponsibility that is positively terrifying. City after city launches urban renewal drives only to discover —belatedly and with surprise—that poor people are being driven from their homes. County after county launches drives for new industry only to learn—also belatedly and with surprise— that it is polluting the atmosphere. State after state pushes highway projects, only to realize—with astonishment— that the result is impossible congestion in city streets.”
This may be “innocence.” It is also appalling ignorance.
We were once just as ignorant of the consequences of economic policy. We used to thrash around making decisions on the basis of untested theories and inadequate information, assuming that cyclical waves of boom and bust were inevitable.
But with the enactment of the Employment Act of 1946 establishing the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, the Council fostered the refinement of the abundant economic statistics into a reasonably accurate measurement of the nation’s economic health. These indicators provide the basis for analysis and planning that have been remarkably effective.
The valuable lessons learned over the past two decades regarding economic indicators suggests that if we had more and better data on social conditions, and if these could be molded into a coherent system of social indicators comparable to their economic counterparts, we would be able to do a far better job of decision-making regarding social programs.
The tantalizing prospect of social measurement was suggested by Gunnar Myrdal in his American Dilemma, written in 1944. He wrote, “We should . . . have liked to present in our study a general index, year by year or at least decade by decade, as a quantitative expression of the movement of the entire system we are studying: the status of the Negro in America.”
In 1962, the Behavioral Science subpanel of the President’s Science Advisory Committee acknowledged the benefits of systematic gathering of economic data, and commented: “We call attention to the great advance over the past generation in the quantity and quality of our information about the economy and the effective use that is now made of such information in formulating and administering national economic policy. Similar benefits would flow from a corresponding advance in the quantity and quality of information about non-economic aspects of behavior.”
Another appeal for a social accounting appears in “Technology and the American Economy," the report of the National Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress, submitted last year. In its chapter on “Improving Public Decision Making,” the Commission declared:
“The American commitment is not only to raise the standard of living, but to improve the quality of life. But we have too few yardsticks to tell us how we are doing. A system of social accounts would seek to set up ‘performance budgets’ in various areas to serve as such yardsticks. A series of community health indexes would tell us how well we are meeting the needs of our people in regard to adequate medical care. A national ‘housing budget’ would reflect our standing in regard to the goal of a ‘decent home for every American family.’ ”
A system of social auditing or accounting would serve five purposes:
- It would sharpen our quantitative knowledge of social needs.
- It would allow us to measure more precisely our progress toward our social objectives.
- It would help us to evaluate efforts at all levels of government.
- It would help us determine priorities among competing social programs.
- It would encourage the development and assessment of alternative courses without waiting until some one solution had belatedly been proved a failure.
I have introduced legislation in the Senate designed to accomplish these aims. The Full Opportunity and Social Accounting Act (S. 843) is an attempt to elevate social evaluation to as influential a position as is now occupied by economic measurement.
Modeled after the Employment Act of 1946, the legislation contains four key sections:
- It establishes full social opportunity for all Americans as a national goal.
- It establishes a three-member President’s Council of Social Advisers and charges them with devising a system of social indicators, and with appraising governmental programs and advising the President on domestic social policy.
- It requires the President to submit an annual Social Report, comparable to the Economic Report, disclosing the indicators for public examination, and giving them wide exposure.
- It establishes a Joint Congressional Committee on the Social Report, which could hold hearings and subject the President’s Social Report to critical analysis.
When the nation’s population was widely dispersed on farms and small hamlets, the rate of social change was slow. Much of the social adjustment to sickness, unemployment, disability, old age, broken homes, poverty, and crime was handled within the local community. In 1890, half of our people lived on farms and many of the rest in small towns. Today, something like five per cent of our people live on farms and practically all population increase is taking place in the large metropolitan areas. With people so concentrated, social change can be rapid, the sense of responsibility for one’s neighbors is diminished, and the impact of a catastrophe is so overwhelmingly large that no neighborhood—however well-intentioned— can possibly cope with it.
Urban concentration has made necessary large technological projects in transportation, water, sewage and waste disposal, as well as housing construction and renewal. The pace of technological adaptation of man to his environment has certainly increased.
At the same time, we have—if anything— impaired our ability to identify and deal with the inescapable social dislocations that accompany new urban technology. The burgeoning growth of social programs at Federal, regional, state, county, and municipal levels has already created a cats-cradle of intergovernmental authorities. Partial data of varying quality are pouring out to confuse us. Large projects employing “systems” techniques are taking into account social impacts related to their own construction, but cannot hope to coordinate with similar social impact analysis of other projects.
Clearly, in the collection, management, and evaluation of sociological data, the qualitative evidence points without exception to our large and growing deficiency. William Gorham, Assistant Secretary for Program Coordination in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, said last year that, “When it comes to planning for the efficient allocation of national resources against competing social needs, the United States is an underdeveloped country. We have neither a planning board examining possible futures nor a central statistical agency gathering the data necessary to evaluate possible ways of getting there.”
Gorham’s chief, HEW Secretary John W. Gardner, has given this glum appraisal of past practice: “We have a great and honored tradition of stumbling into the future. In management of the present, our nation is—as nations go—fairly rational, systematic, and orderly. But when it comes to movement into the future, we are heedless and impulsive. We leap before we look. We act first and think later. We back into next year’s problems studying the solutions to last year’s problems. This has been true as long as I can remember.”
Two reasons are sometimes advanced for our past unwillingness to take the necessary steps to prevent future chaos. Long range social planning is supposed to be expensive, and to be restrictive of freedom. It can be both; I suggest that it need be neither.
Long ago, John Dewey pointed out the essential distinction between planning in a dictatorship and planning in a democracy. Dictatorial planning sets fixed time goals over long periods and rigidly programs actions to achieve them. Democratic societies must plan continuously, modifying programs and even objectives flexibly as circumstances change. Technology and the planning for its use become our servants, not our masters.
In a seminar late in June this year and formal hearings on “The Full Opportunity and Social Accounting Act” during July, forty-two witnesses were heard. They came from a wide array of posts in government, the academic world, and public and private efforts to deal with social change. They were unanimous in endorsing the principle on which this legislation is founded-the need for better information and coordinated efforts to improve the social health of the nation. Senator Fred Harris of Oklahoma, Chairman of the Subcommittee on Government Research which conducted the hearings, said at the close of the session, “It is perfectly clear that this Act, with refinements, should become law.”
Today our country is confronted with an issue that may be as dangerous to national stability as was the Civil War. As we attempt to face that issue we know too little about the causes of ghetto upheaval and the forces at play in the current crisis.
We would know more now if we had been working at it harder in the past. That is what the “Full Opportunity and Social Accounting Act” is all about. It could provide expert knowledge at the highest level of visibility. It could give the social state of the nation the kind of analysis it must have. Perhaps it could present alternatives to violence for the President, the Congress, and the American public to consider.
Unless we provide the government with new modern tools we are likely to waste more and more of our resources in crash programs without knowing what will result, a process both wasteful and dangerous.