Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin PV/78-16
TRENDS OF SOCIAL CHANGE IN THE U.S.:
TOWARDS AN INFORMATION-RICH SOCIETY by
Karl W. Deutsch
Publication series of the International Institute for Comparative Social Research
Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin
TRENDS OF SOCIAL CHANGE IN THE U.S.: TOWARDS AN INFORMATION-RICH SOCIETY
Our topic is "Trends towards Social Change in the United States", with the subtitle "Towards an Information-Rich Society". Our task is to put the discussion of the informa
tion-rich society into the context of other major changes - to find out what one of these changes does to the other.
This task requires a narrow specialization in generality, or a specialization in coherence.
First among the social trends in the United States are the changes in the scale problems of our country, that is to say, in the sheer size of the place. It always was a
continent but whan I came to the United States in 1938 it had far fewer people in it than now. We are now over 220 million. This is a much larger country that the United States of Herbert Hoover or of Franklin Roosevelt. And if we consider that the number of possible interactions among people goes up with the square of their number, we can see what an amount of potential traffic, even within the
United States, the American people can generate and to some extent do generate.
The United States is one of the four count-rips on earth which contain among them more than 1/2 of mankind. Three of them: China, India and Russia do this by keeping large parts of the population quiet. In India this is done by poverty, illiteracy and apathy. In China by a combination of poverty and dictatorship. In Russia there is less poverty but- certainly no less dictatorship than in China, and in
some respects possibly more. America is the only large country on a continental scale that in many ways lets people loose. It gives room for spontaneity for group organisation and for local self-government. This is not an unmixed blessing. Local autonomy also includes efforts
at enforcing local types of conformity, informally through local opinion or formally through state laws. Then eventually federal power may have to. interfere^ to prevent local pressure to conform from going too far-. No other country has
quite these problems. And these problems have increased, in terms of population, by at least 50% since the end of World War II and in terms of 'possible interactions, and probably also of actual interactions, by a factor of 2 or more.
The wealth factor is similarly involved. Compared to the United States of Herbert Hoover and the prosperity of 1928 our per capita income is about 4 times as high as it was then. There are countervailing processes in all these mat
ters. Side by side with the huge developments of interactions in the United States as a whole, the countervailing process has been the growth of local patterns and group patterns - of regions, ethnic groups and others that have increased their activities. In regard to wealth it is perfectly true that we are 4 times as endowed with material goods - in
cluding also the headaches they may generate - than people were half a century ago. But at the same time there has been a countervailing shift: our share of the world's goods has declined since the end of 1946 and the end of World War II This is often forgotten. In 1945-46 when the war was over the United States had more than one-half of the countable
economic assets of the world - the kind of assets counted up in the national income accounts. By 1962 we were down to 33%. Today we are slightly below 25%. Our own govern
ment has told the United Nations in no uncertain terms that we are not going to -contribute more than 25% to
international organizations, and those contributions are supposed to be roughly proportional to each country's share in world income. The Russians, our competitors, have approxi
mately 15% of the world income and the striking thing is that in 1946, when our income was large and the Russian's small, two so-called Super-Powers between them had more than half of the material tangible assets of the world. In 1962
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we had just about 1/2 - 33% for us, 16% for them. Today our joint incomes are somewhere between 40 - 42% of the world's.
The two giants have become minority stockholders in regard to the tangible assets of mankind. Not because we haven't grown - we have grown very much - or because the Russians haven't grown - they have grown, too - but because the rest of the world has grown more. And also, of course, other countries have recovered a good deal of the assets and
productive capacities which they had had before World War II and which had been knocked out temporarily by the devasta
tions of the w a r .
The result of this growth has been, inside our country, an explosion of domestic service loads. To take an example:
it has been argues- that on the''whole a system. becomes more
"highly centralized -when transport and' communication- • ' .speed increases- This is true. Between the late 194O's and today the speed of airplanes used in domestic travel within the United States has grown in several steps, going from propeller planes to turboprops and then to jets • We can average this out at a growth rate of roughly 5% per year. But the amount of air travel has grown at approximate
ly 7% per year. That is, the service load is growing faster than the service speed, not even counting the time it takes from downtown to the airport. That is, the actual time it takes to get from downtown Boston to downtown New York has not nearly as much improved as the speed of the jet planes:
Instead, even the time it takes to get from the ticket counter of an airport to the airplane is increasing as air
ports are getting bigger.
The net result is that we are under a growing pressure of communication overload, of overloaded channel capacities, overload of service facilities and, eventually, overload of decision capacities. Decision-overload is the nemesis of centralization and this nemesis is busily at work in our country. It is probably also at work in the Federal Republic of Germany - it is big enough to have a good deal
of these problems but imagine what its problems would, be if they were multiplied by 4.
At the same time that the United States is having these increases, ' it has greatly increased its committments in the world. Before World War II the United States was not trying to play a great power role in the world. After World War II we found ourselves in the position of Mr. Atlas on whose
shoulders a good part of the world had suddenly been dropped.
Sometimes we feel slight rheumatic pains but we can't very well drop our load. We moved up from a miniscule army com
pared to the size of the country in the late 193O's to 11 million people in uniform during World Warr II - roughly, almost 7% of our populations. This was a huge military participation rate. We are now back to approximately 1.0%
or roughly 2 million people in the service. Our weapon systems-have become a great deal more expensive and com
plicated than they ever were, and so have everybody else's.
Our defense expenditures are in the general neighborhood of 6% of our national income. But it should be remembered that this is less than they were in the late 1 950's and the early 196O's. The people who warn us - rightly - about mounting expenditures and arms races sometimes omit to point out that the American vehicle of state has some braking facili
ties. So far, we have been able to slow down and to prevent the process of arms competition from becoming a blind, runaway process that we can no longer control. We now have fewer
bases and garrisons in the world abroad than we used to have. We no longer maintain large armed forces of major installations in Libya, Morocco, Iraq, Vietnam and Thailand.
Elsewhere the installations have been reduced and somewhat limited as in Turkey and Pakistan. If it is any comfort, there is also a list of places where the Russians no longer have bases: Bornholm in Denmark, Hungary, Finnland, most of northern Iran until 1946, more recently Alexandria in Egypt, Dirredawa in Somalia, not to mention the ports of China
which were open to the Soviet navy but aren't open to them now. To be sure, one can hear of a list from a patriotic
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American defense expert telling truthfully all the places where our influence has been reduced. But one also can hear a similar tale of woe from a Russian specialist on internationalist relations listing all the countries where Russia, has lost influence, such as China, Indonesia, India after Indira Ghandi, Bangladesh, Egypt, Ghana, and Mali.
The net result seems to be that power in the world these days is not a zero sum game and that usually the losses in control by one super-power are not equalled by the gains in control by the other, but that there is a net change in the whole world being somethwat less controlled by both of these centers. The two global figures with their declining share in world income can be translated in geographic terms as the places on the world's map that the two great contenders no longer control tightly.
We are shifting more and more from a zero sum game in World politics to a variable sum game where the two larger con
tenders - and now with China becoming more prominene, the 3 or no contenders, however many they may be - may jointly gain or lose something. For example, if we succeed in exterminating herring, then not only will we not eat mucho herring in the future - neither will the Russians nor the Germans . There are very many other similar, common problems that are becoming step by step prominent. The Club of Rome and the environmentalists and others are merely the first to point this out. We are moving toward a period where the world's definition of national security will have to be
analyzed in a more sophisticated manner. Then national and international security is seen to be threatened not only by political competitors in the world - but by the consequences of our own actions and by the problems of international, environmental and industrial processes.
The second major trend is the specific risks that come to the United States from the outside. We have told our
people - as other countries have - that there is a real risk of an international war, that there is a risk of nuclear war; moreover we have s'aid that in order to deter any country from doing anything rash we must make credible the threat of deterrents, and therefore the risk of nuclear war.
We have succeeded in keeping it credible. But if one keeps the risk of atomic war credible to foreign governments, we are also keeping it credible to our own children and to our university students and to the rest of our own people.
Internationally deterrence reduces the.motivation to
aggression - and that's a good thing. Domestically, this same deterrence reduces the motivation to work and study.
Modern industrial civilization in America, at least as much as in any country on earth, is based on deferring current gratifications, quick consumption, and the joys of current laziness for some long-term future goal that begins with the notion that one wants sometime to have a career, that one wants to found a family, that one wants to have children, that one wants to make a home. If we tell people there is an excellent, realistic chance that they will all be radioactive dust within a few years, the notion of the word "studying", the notion of saving, the notion of
working on a career, the notion of having children - even if one marries - all become less plausible and less attrac
tive. To that extent the great industrial nations, as they deter each other from war, deter their youth from the future And that means they are sawing vigorously upon the limb on which they are sitting. Because working for the future and
trusting in the future is one of the very bases of confi
dence in the future. Here we have two psychological processes on a very large scale which we have set into motion by one and the same set of decisions and which are getting into each other's way.
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We have also had another worry. That worry was that, in the highly developed countries such as the United States and also perhaps the Federal Republic of Germany, we will get long-term economic stagnation through the loss of expansion opportunities abroad. It has been argued that this welfare state with its trade union wages and welfare state expendi
tures is cutting down profit margins. The thing to do is therefore to invest more capital in some remote country, making sure that the investments are safe there and hoping that the profits from those countries will improve the
balance sheets. The theory is now, according to some people, that this is a necessity for the private enterprise system and this is a view shared, strikingly enough by an impor
tant school of radical Marxists Lenin would be a well- known example in his books on Imperialism and also by some neo-Marxist American writers such as Harry Magdoff.
But this is also the belief of a number of militant
anti-Marxists. A highly intelligent and learned economist, Walt Rostow, wrote a book along much the same lines that the United States could not function very well unless it had
a world environment which was favorable to private enterprise in general. in more popular form you can hear the same argement from time to time. Raymond Vernon at the Harvard Business School takes a more restrained view. As he puts it: Foreign investment in multi-national corporations are ä great convenience, for American private enterprise - but
they are by no means a necessity for its survival. And
since he has spent a good many years studying multi-national corporations' and business enterprise in general, I'm
inclined to give a good deal of weight to his opinion. I am also impressed by the fact that according to Lenin and other Marxists, British private enterprise couldn't possibly survive without colonies, and the same should have applied to France, the Netherlands, Belgium and other colony-owning countries. But now the colonies are gone and the French, British, Belgians and others still eat regularly. Indeed, if there is one major problem it is not so much hunger than overweight in many of these countries. Some paper has
published the statement that since the British people lost their empire on the average they have become one inch taller.
In other words, it turns out that democracies, constitutional governments, market economies and welfare states have a
great deal more resilience in them than the textbooks and the ideological dogmas claim. The passionate defenders of private enterprise and the passionate enemies of private enterprise both are agreed in denying that resilience, and it is left to the pragmatists to say that, well, maybe
something can be done after empires are lost, and until now, at least experience has been on the side of the pragmatists.
But there is a third problem. We are not condemned to helpless stagnation, but we do have a tendency - from an international competition, from the tremendous experience of World War II in the United Sates, and later on from the experience of the■international power contest - toward building up arms and risk-promoting structures in many of the major industrial countries of the world. The economist Joseph Schumpeter pointed this out many years ago when he wrote his little book Imperialism in 1918 as a direct criticism of Lenin's theories. Schumpeter argued that if imperialism was objectless military expansion, if you had a number of n bases or territories your military experts would tell you that the n+1 district must be secure if the others were to be secure. When you have territory n+1, obviously you had then to get the next one, and he claimed that you could in history find this happening again and again from ancient Assyria and ancient Egypt on to ancient Rome and to our days. He argued, in other words, that military armament levels and efforts at territorial expan
sion have primarily a sociological basis rather than an economic one. Schumpeter was a professor of economics but he was also something of an expert sociologist, and the sociologists have recognized him as such.
It seems that there is something to Schumpeter's argument.
He predicted that the British would give up their empire without much difficulty because, as he said, the sociological
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roots of the empire were shallow in the social structure of the people of Great Britain. He pointed out - optimistically and erroneously - in 1929 that there was very little of a chance for any extremist party coming to power in Germany because, he said, there were so many people now in the
middle classes. That was quite wrong in 1929, and the poet D.H. Lawrence was right, to say in 1 926 that something
terrible was happening in Germany - a cultural change turning back to the Stone Age. But what was tragically wrong in Schumpeter's analysis in 1929, turned out to be much closer to the truth for the 195O's. In Adenauer's Germany and Erhard's Germany and even Kiesinger's Germany and Brandt's and Schmidt's Germany you do have the very
large middle groups as we have them in America, and there has been on the whole not much of a chance for the real rise and persistence of extremist parties. The NDP in Germany once got, I think, all of 6 or 7 % of the vote and in Bayreuth
10 %, but that was about, it. And where are they now? In the United States, Governor George Wallace got 13 % in 1 968;
in 1978 he announced his retirement from politics. It turns out that in the American system the tradition of Jefferson is more durable than the tradition of George Wallace.
We still have the large structures in the United States that make for greater risk of international conflict. When
President Eisenhower wrote his Farewell Address he put in a passage about the military-industrial complex with his own hand. I was told this by his then assistant, the later General Andrew Goodpaster later commander of NATO in
Europe. As he recalled it, President Eisenhower had just at that time been put under pressure by the lobbyists for a particular airplane, the TFX-1, which the President thought the armed forces didn't need but which some military and some industrial interests were pushing hard, and so he wrote the warning into his farewell address.
The problem is still with us today, but the interesting thing is that the military-industrial complex doesn't always
win in American politics. Back in 1 967 an assistant secretary- in the Defense Department, Adam Yarmolinsky - after he left office - wrote an article in which he pointed out the tre
mendous power of the linked interests that had been built up, and he pointed out that at that time the budget of the Defense Department was bigger than the entire rest of the budgets of all other departments in the government taken together. This was in 1967. Today the budget of HEW is
bigger than the budget of the Defense Department. To be sure there is a little bit of statistical good fortune in it -•
in America we have the education department and the health and welfare departments all together, whereas in Germany they are split into 3 ministries. But the net result is that Health, Education and Welfare now command more means in America than Defense.
We still have enough stuff to kill everybody in the world several times and so have the Russians. The fact that we can probably do the job 10 times and they only 2 or 3 or 4 times is of marginal importance under these conditions. But the fact is now that we do more for the expenditures of peace and that the share of defense expenditure in the American gross national product in the last dozen years before 1973 went down and not up. That also should not be forgotten.
In the great democracies we often have pairs countervailing processes, and some professors make their reputation by dis
covering one process, extrapolating it to the stars and writing a book about it. This makes them well-known and with luck
they get tenure. Then the next colleague finds the counter
vailing process and writes a book about that one. It would be much less exciting if somebody took the trouble to iden
tify both processes at the same time, because then it would turn out that trees do not grow into the sky - but such a more balanced view would get far less attention. Perhaps we are gradually getting a little over-supplied with atten
tion-getting inaccuracies or attention-getting distortions.
Perhaps we could use a little more accurate, a little bit more realistic pictures and we might even be willing to give
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attention to those as well.
The last problem that came up in connection, however, with this growth of our defense sectors - and, again, it was a serious problem in American democracy - was a tendency toward an increase in secrecy. Clearly in war time one cannot make many things, public. On the German side, I
think, the posters used to read: Feind hört mit - in America it used to be: The enemy is listening and everybody was
told that many, many things were hush-hush. After the war the cables were secret, and the governments turned around to the people and said: Don't criticize anything we do- how can you dare to ask questions - you haven't read the secret cables. And it was quite true that since they were secret, of course nobody had read them. This then included indeed many members of the legislature. And then suddenly we got into an application of Catch 22, applied to democracy.
You cannot make intelligent decisions about major national policies - certainly not in the foreign policy field, but, see, because of the interdependence of government and not even about the national budget - unless you know enough to make the decisions. And you can't possibly know enough if much of the essential information is secret. So eventually democracy would have been reduced to saying "Trust Uncle".
Well, one can do this for a few years - during a war every democracy does it - but we've seen in Russia what happens when you have a government that demands to be trusted for half a century. The distortions become cumulative and rather terrible.
But we also find in the United States - and The European papers have not publicized this in its cumulative effect nearly as much - that we have again and again had major
countervailing processes. We have - since the late 60's - a Freedom of Information Act. We have systematic
declassification of much of the information. We have had investigative journalists. We have had a change in the morality of the big newspapers. When, in January 1961,
big maneuvers were held for the invasion of Cuba by Cuban refugees equipped with American weapons and trained by American government employees through the CIA, the New York Times was informed about the whole thing. Indeed, Life magazine brought out some photographs but did not pub
lish details - this is all roughly January 1961 - but the Times got much more detailed information. The Times was told that as good patriots they shouldn't publish it. As good patriots they didn't. The expedition set forth and landed at the Bay of Pigs. The result at the time was a serious set
back for the United States' prestige and the national interests and eventually an accumulation of risks that cumulated in
the October crisis of 1962. Eventually this was handled well. The missiles and nuclear warheads were removed from Cuba, the United States agreed not to support or tolerate armed actions against Cuba, and the Cubans have been left to enjoy Mr. Castro and his government, such as they are, without substantial American interference. It also has turned out that having Cuban Communists 90 miles off the coast of Florida has not had any major influence on Florida politics, except moving it somewhat to the right through the presence of over 400,000 Cuban refugees. The pressure of the early 60's could be absorbed, but in a climate of secrecy it had brought us and the world to the brink of serious danger.
After 1965, the climate of American opinion changed. When the Pentagon Papers came out of the government, the New York Times insisted on printing them. This means a reversal of major newspaper practice from 1961 to 1967-68. And the Supreme Court found for the New York Times. That is to say we have had in the United States processes which certainly have not opened all secrets of the government to the KGB.
The Russians still have to work pretty hard to get microphones into our embassies and they still find that there's a lot
they don't know and they shouldn't know. But the trees of secrecy have not grown into the sky. The American people are now better informed about what goes on in their govern-
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ment than they were 10 or 20 years ago. And this is something to be remembered.
There has been a vast underestimation in the world outside the United States of the countervailing processes in this continent-sized country - of the recuperative forces and the resiliency of the American political system. There has been a similar large underestimation of the resiliency of the American economic system, the learning•capacity of the society, its capacities to re-allocate time, attention, resources from one committment to another. Most people
think America is something like a stereotype of an old-world country where things go on very much as they did go on 5 or 10 years ago unless there is a revolution or a tremendous upheaval.' In fact, this is not true of most West European countries. But certainly the United States can make itself over in certain sectors.to a large degree without having a civil war or a revolution. It's something that is hard to grasp. Even our own civic textbooks don't usually say it, because to the radical anything that changes is not enough and therefore not important. And to the conservative, everything that changes is too much and should therefore
either be viewed with alarm or played down in its importance.
In this manner, we often misrepresent ourselves and are misperceived by our neighbors.
But noticed or not, there have been tremendous internal shifts in the United States. I am going now from the poli
tical system to the daily lives of the people. More than 1/2 of all Americans own their own home: 54 %. The notion that one could finance local and educational state budgets most easily through the property tax was based on a resolute
ignorance of that fact. Proposition 13 in California has remedied this to some extent. It turns out that you can probably get the means which government needs for its
finances from taxing consumption, in particular from taxing light luxury and all-out luxury consumption, of which there is a great deal in the United States, but that you cannot
do it from the necessities of life. For most families a roof over their heads is a necessity, and one should
remember that property taxes in rental properties are also passed on to the tenants, so there is a ready-made majority against very high property taxes in the American system.
And when a critical threshold is passed, the countervailing processes start operating and we have just seen them in action on this one issue. There are 80% of Americans with automobiles. You cannot completely persuade them to pay much more for the gasoline unless you have convinced them it is really necessary, although step by step this will come, but we have persuaded them of something the German Federal Republic has not succeeded. The Americans accept by and large now a speed limit of 55 miles per hour -
that's 90 km. You can't get them to stop even at 100 yet in many places. You will eventually. But the American learn
ing speed is not trivial in these matters. Ten per cent of Americans have second homes. Practically all American homes have television and many other of the light luxuries, let us say, of the home. This does not make for a mood of saying we have nothing to lose but our chains.
Whilst the material gains of the American people have increased, and some writers can get excellent publicity by accusing Americans of excessive materialism, there is also an increased shift toward non-mattebai or alternative values. A scholar at the University of Michigan, Ronald Ingelhart, has now published survey data under the title
''The Silent Revolution" where he finds that a shift to values of spontaneity and affection: values such as free speech and good human relations - is taking place, with these values getting priority over the old values of secure pensions and stable prices. And the interesting thing is that the shift occurs partly by social strata and partly by age groups in such a way that if one only analyzes the data either by strata or by age groups the change cannot be detected. That is to say, people in the professional managerial strata have the new values more strongly in the
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age groups under 45. On the middle income and skill
levels the new values are relatively strong only until 35.
Among working-class youth, the values are strong only up to 25. That is to say, the different strata take these new non-materialistic values from each other, but at a different tempo for different age groups.
All this is not as yet a major change, even though it got a good deal of publicity. I think one Yale Law School professor, Professor Howard Rich, wrote a book on The Greening of America, which, I think, was greatly exaggerated Ingelhart's data showed that a change occurs and has by
now taken hold of 5 - 10 % of the respondents. But 10 % of the respondents is not negligible, particularly if much of their concentration is in the highly educated strata.
It is not decisive but by no means negligible. And we see, then, that the material process of gains has, other than merely material or materialistic consequences.
There is a well-known point: There was a shift to the
suburban rings around the central cities in America. People wanted to move out where there was some green grass and
where it seemed, at least for a time, that the commuting burdens, the traffic loads and the time one takes to come back to the work place or the place of shopping or the place of entertainment were not prohibitive. The federal government subsidized this by building superhighways to the suburbs .and then blamed the central cities for losing middle-class taxpayers and reproached the central city for
its lack of thrift, having first taxed the people also in the central city to build the highways that would take the taxpayers away. But after we had here, again, a nice one
way street - and a lot of people have written books about it - we get a new surprise: By now the SPIEGEL has dis
covered it. The young people are moving back into the central cities. We discovered that on our own; living in the center of Washington, D.C. near Capitol Hill and not out in the suburbs in Maryland or Virginia. But by now
it's a mass phenomenon and it comes out in real estate values.
Whenever you are about to do an assessment of America, ask for the countervailing processes. If they aren't there they will come. But usually they are there already and right at work. There is a shift to the Sun Belt which is moderate: The people move to the South and West, but as energy costs rise, the cost - not of heating, but of air conditioning in the summer - will put a brake on what you can affort to do in Arizona, too. And if you add to this the transport costs and the overloadings of systems, it will come once again that there will be a moderate
redistribution but the east coast of the United States will not become a new empty area like North Dakota - this is quite unlikely.
What we have had, rather, is a shift-both in Germany and in America - of labor costs from the account books of the
private enterprise. If you can borrow enough money, build and run an automatic machine and hope that inflation will be a little bit faster than the rate of interest so that you can. write off the machine - or else you can call it an investment credit - then you have made a net saving very clearly. But what you really have done, since you can't very well shoot the workers you've dismissed, is to
shift : the cost of their maintenance and their families' from the sector of your private account books to that of the public accounts where taxes have to pay for their
support. Only, luckily, the taxes for unemployment compen
sation and welfare do not come only from you but also from your competitors and your compatriots at large. You've essentially carried out what in Germany is called "Kosten
überwälzung" - you have shifted costs to some degree rather than really saving them. Of course, this will increase then the taxes in the public sector.
Here we have a problem about how one can guide this process
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so as to get genuine technological benefits but minimize simple cost-shifting dodges that do not save anything to the society as a whole. This is related to a problem in economics in general: the whole problem of external costs, so long resolutely neglected by the economic textbooks, may have to be moved more nearly into the center of attention.
This aspect of automation and its external costs is becoming more important in the United States as well as perhaps in West Germany.
The next major internal shift I want to call your attention to is the shift in the Lorenz curve of inequality. You can measure in general inequality of income distribution by
making yourself a square where the percentages of income are on the verticle axis and the percent of population are on the horizontal axis. You put the poorest one percent of the left-hand end and the richest to the right-hand end.
Then in a society where everybody got exactly the same income, the income curve for all - every percentile of the population - would be a straight line going from the south
west corner to the northeast corner of this square. In the real societies the poorest people have less than an equal share of the income and the richest have more, and this results in a curve. It looks like a bow and you could say the more bent the bow the greater the tension in the society. This curve is called the Lorenz curve.
The Italian economist Gini then said that if you took the area under the Lorenz curve, double it and subtract it from the area of the square, which you set equal to 1, you get a single number, called the Gini Index, which measures the degree of inequality in the society. For Germany this Gini
Index is in per cent in the 4 0 1s and for the United States in the 30's. For Bolivian landholdings it's 94 % and
Bolivia has overthrown its government on the average every 18 months during the last one-and-a-half centuries.
The Gini curve could have its point of strongest inflection fairly high up in the northeast direction. That is to say, you'could have a few rich people, a small rich minority, and then there might not be very much inequality among the rest of the population. This is the classic image of Marie
Antoinette and the court of Versailles: the French nobles, who were very well-off and the mass of the French people, the peasants, who were not. This is the kind of distribu
tion which brings joy to the heart of a would-be revolu
tionary, because he can think if there is a revolution he will have safely the majority of the people on his side.
And this has happened from time to time in history.
But you could also find a Gini-Curve where the point of greatest inflection is pretty far down to the bottom left- hand corner. In this case differences among the middle and top groups are not all too big. And the middle groups are also quite well off. But near the bottom you may have 20 or 30 % of poor devils who have a miserable time of it, but who are a solid minority who can't hope to win an elec
tion, let alone a civil war. And in that case you find that your poor become marginal in the society and stay poor.
Just this seems to have happened in the last 30 years both in the United States and in the Federal Republic of Germany.
If you read the literature of the 1930's - writers such as Bertolt Brecht in Germany,or Clifford Odetts Waiting for Lefty, and other writers of the 193O's in the United States • it seemed clear to those writers and to the people who
filled the theaters to see their plays that the majority of people were poor or were more nearly poor and not well off. Today we find that poverty is an exception. Even in
1935 President Roosevelt estimated poverty at 1/3 of the nation. In the 1 960's President Lyndon Johnson put it at about 1/5. Today we are somewhere between 1/7 - 1/8 of real poverty in the United States. Now in part you can argue that these statistics can be stretched a little bit and you can, if you want to make the country look good,
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reduce what we admit is poverty to 10 % or if you want to strengthen the accusation you can expand the poverty
sector back to 17 or 18 %, and if you work hard at it, back to 30. But nothing will make the poor a majority of the American people. And nothing will make the poor a majority of the German people.
This changes, on the one hand, problems of social policy and welfare policy. It changes problems of democracy
because it risks making compassion unpopular. Or at least it risks making compassion depend more on cultural and moral considerations and less on immediate, direct self-interest.
And it does another thing. Supposing you had an eager and angry young counter-elite - and all countries have them from time to time: Young people who'd like to lead the
country; to be spokesmen and tribunes for a new constituency that will bring them to leadership and as they sincerely may believe and hope, to a better and more just society.
Some of them may be out and out opportunists and may say:
I want to get into power and I don't care what kind, of society we get, just so long as I am on top of it. But most of them'are perfectly sincere.
If the middle groups are tolerably well-off but begin to fear that they have too much to lose: house, car, refri
gerator, color television set and all the rest, they may react in a conservative direction. What then will happen to the poor counter-elite? They have to look for marginal constituencies. In part this may be to the good. At
least the Turkish guest workers will have somebody who will give them some legal advice, or who will go and demonstrate for them if necessary. Somebody will come and become an ally of the Puerto Ricans in New York, or of the southern newly-arrived blacks in New Jersey. But on the whole it means also a marginalization of protest. There is, there
fore, a problem that democracy might lose some of the forces of criticism and change from the more central sectors of its electorate and from the more central sectors of atten-
tion and opinion, that it may relegate them to the marginal sectors. And this is not an automatic, necessary proof of the moral degeneration of the great democracies as they become economically successful - and they are economically successful. Nor does it mean that one must wait for a great depression or catastrophe for further change. But it means that there is .a, problem here. As political scien
tists or sociologists - or even as students of literature - we must try to see what really is happening to the majority of people and to the mass of the people. One cannot liberate the masses without the masses. And many radical and critical writers recently have spoken for minorities, not for masses.
Another problem common to the United States and the Federal Republic of Germany is that of bureaucratization. Every
body talks about the growth of public bureaucracy. But what is the ratio of manufacturing workers to office and executive manpower at General Motors? Or in the Ford Motor Company? I greatly suspect that the ratio of blue collars to white collars - or if you wish, to rolled collars
in Germany - is declining. We may end up some day having more people at desks than at machines. And this is true of the private sector not much less than of the public sector.
Part of it is, of course, the growth of interactions. If you have more automobiles, the budget for traffic regulation must increase because the potential number of two-car
collisions has gone up like the square of the automobiles.
This is a general law for all potential transactions in society. But then we will need more and more people to cope with these transactions.
This leads us to the question of the distribution of parti
cipation. It turns out that as society gets more compli
cated, it gets harder to participate meaningfully and in
telligently in its decisions. Very broadly speaking, this might be treated as a question of the ratio of participa-
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tion costs and participation gains. Participation costs here are mainly those which the individual perceives, such as his costs in time, in mental effort, in what does it take to inform oneself, to know what it takes to decide right and so on, and also the psychic costs of anxiety that one might have done it wrong. Against this stand each
individual's perceived participation gains. Is he or she materially better off or can he or she feel better psycho
logically? Today there is reason to think that in many sect
ors of life the balance between participation costs and participation gains - or decision costs and decision gains - is declining, getting worse.
This is possibly true, at least for some strata in simple voting. Sidney Verba and Norman Nie had found that in the top third of American income-receivers the voting probabi
lity is 85 % or higher, at the middle third it's around 75 % or a little less, at the bottom third it is less than 45 %. As a result, the pivotal voter, the voter who
decides whether the side with which he votes will be a
minority or a majority, is at the 33rd percentile of income- receivers, not at the 50th percentile. If you do anything that's unpopular with the 33rd percentile of voters and those above him, you lose.
I don't know the corresponding figures for the German poli
tical system but I think they can be found out. In Germany there is a much higher frequency of voting, but there are also many of the other forms of political participation - telephoning someone in City Hall, collecting signatures, giving money to a party, attending meetings and similar activities. I also suspect that the more highly educated and the better off participate in politics more regularly, often without calling it even politics, than the others.
But I would like to know where the pivotal participant in German politics is located on the income scale.
The same balances occur elsewhere. Bruce Russett has found from an international comparison that in general political participation increases with per capita income. But he also found that at the top levels of income the relation
ship reverses again. When people are very well off, let us say $ 2,000. at 1960 prices or about 3 5,000 at present prices, participation again goes down. Perhaps this is to some extent fairly normal human behavior. If your family doctor seems to take care of your family, and no
body is badly sick, then you will not be interested in choosing another doctor. If by and large life is livable, why spend an hour worrying about the coalition in Bonn
instead of the world championship in soccer? If you felt that things are very bad you might get busy agitating and voting for a change. If you have an ache that won't go away you may change your doctor. If your political and economic life seems to be severely out of order you may go back to activity and change your politician. But the greater the level of contentment, the less the interest in making decisions about political change. This was already pre
dicted by Edmund Burke late in the 18th century. To some extent, it seems, the man was right.
It may even be true that this balance between participation and decision costs and decision gains may by now be begin
ning to spread into the families. Should we have children?
If you have a child you have to make many decisions all the time. Should you let him play in the street or not? Should you let him do this or that? By the time he gets to High School, should you let him smoke or not? And smoke what?
You will have to face decision after decision. And what do you get for all your troubles? It might be that that bal
ance, too, at least in the view of some people, is less favorable now than it used to be. It may be harder and harder to make the decisions. The first danger is that the youngsters may not obey you and you will be frustrated by being defied. A second danger is that they may obey you and you then have a bad conscience because you told them
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the wrong things. An army of psychiatrists and psychiatric social workers will tell you all the things you did wrong- and to some extent they may be right, for we are all likely to make some mistakes when we try to do a good job as
parents. But the net result is that the cost-gain balances of having children may be shifting.
It is useful to keep in' mind the cost-gain balance as a general analytical tool. We can even use as such a tool the cost-gain balance at the margin. Should you take one more decision or not? And will you be better or worse off
if you do?
Some Basic Economic Shifts
These recent shifts in various cost-gain balances have occurred within the framework of a set of broader shifts at the economic basis'of American society. Perhaps to a lesser degree but in the same direction, they may have occurred in West German society. The first of these econo
mic and social shifts has been the decline of the agricul
tural sector. By now agriculture employs only 4 % of the work'force in the United States. The whole notion that agriculture is normal, that manufacturing is derived from it, and that agriculture is the basis of everything makes no sense in demographic terms any more. The persons who really are working on the land and producing food are a small minority, and if they are really efficient, they are probably handling a good many machines. This is not agric
ulture as we used to know it. Food production is getting too serious a business to be left to peasants. In the United States the word "peasant" is not used as a term of socio
logy for Americans, only as a term of abuse in literature or in the streets. We define a' peasant as someone whose ancestors were serfs, or whose ancestors were at least deeply involved in traditional agriculture. American farmers for 200 years were neither serfs nor engaged in traditonal agriculture. They were mostly recruited from emigrees from urban England in the 17th and 18th century, and hence they are a very different kind of people. Even
so, agriculture has declined as an occupation. In terms of residence, we have a somewhat larger rural sector, about 20 % of our population. But even this sector is declining. The rural sector is now being invaded by suburbs and people working in cities and so it is much less rural than it used to be. And television, again is not "rural" in this sense. To some extent, we underplay this change in our media reports and our statistics. By now we have come in America to counting small towns as rural. We look upon them as if they were villages, but of course they aren't villages and everybody knows it.
The second change is relative decline of the manufacturing sector. This has gone together with the increase in the average capitalization of work places. It takes something like $ 20,000 to $ 50,000. - more nearly the latter
figure - to employ somebody in industry. Now America produces a good deal of capital but the number of people you can employ at those capitalization ratios is limited.
This is a world-wide problem. So we might tend to employ more people in hairdressing and in laundries and in similar
service industries. But even the laundries get mechanized and the hairdrying machines are getting more expensive.
Hence we find, on the whole, that more people are pushed into marginal occupations. We are told that the manufac
turing sector in general is now down in the United Sates to something like 30 % or less of the work force. There could be some debate about the most accurate, recent figures, but the tendency is clear. We are getting an increase in what's left over in the work force - in the residual category. Colin Clark in the late 30's coined a name for those people as the tertiary sector and put all the left-overs into that one. But residual categories are very dangerous tools for analysis.
In the I 960's another economist, Fritz Machlup, came up with something more interesting. He wrote an important
25
book called the Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States. And he counted.out very carefully all the occupations where people primarily manipulate informa
tion rather than matter or energy. To be sure, one can not print a book unless one has some paper, but the paper is not the most important thing in the book. One needs for a telephone system some' wires - or at least some device for broadcasting or for sending and receiving microwave
beams - but again the hardware is not what is decisive. What is decisive are the messages that get across. In general, we are now getting a shift to information-rich artifacts, to information-rich production processes and to information- rich patterns of employment. Machlup counted all the people who are mainly occupied with processing bits of inform
ation. We can measure a bit of information as a yes or no decision, such as a dark or bright point on a black and white television screen. For color television we have to multiply this with one of these dark or bright spots for every one of the color filters that are being used but it's the same principle. Information is a material reality. It is produced by material processes but it is not subject to the law of the conservation: Information may be created from nothing, and it can be wiped out. It is in this
respect really very different from other things, but it is measurable. It has quantitative laws. A certain channel of communication has the capacity to carry so and so much information, not more. Information in transmission can be lost. We can only get different information mixed ink but we can't - in the transmission itself - regain the original information p.er fectly. It may be even very difficult to come close to that. There are some ways of restoring ori
ginal signals but they are complicated.
It turns out that the information-rich - or the informa
tion-processing occupations are growing. Now this includes typographers and professors of mathematics and people who work in universities and people who work in the mass media and publication and the telephone systems and the tele-
graphs and the mails and many other occupations. But one can add them all. up: Machlup found that in the United States between the 1920's and the late 195O's the share of these occupations in the work force was increasing by
1/2 of 1 % per year or by one whole percent every two years. He finds that, if we continue at this rate, by the end of the century we will have more people in the United States pushing around information than people who push iron or kilowatts or anything else. I think he is right. The development from the late 1 950's to the 1 970's has been in the same direction. Already today we have more people employed full time in the universities than in agri
culture. I doubt whether Germany is this far yet, but on the whole the number of people who farm knowledge grows
faster than the number of people who farm grain and potatoes This change is continuing and perhaps accelerating, partly because there is more need of research and more need of knowledge.
We are moving toward the information-rich society. There are at least five ways in which we can measure how fast we are moving. Machlup measured one thing: He measured the information-rich occupations against total work force and we can do this both for the country as a whole and for particular industries. As a chemical factory gets automated
they may have fewer people stirring the stuff in some big kettle and more people programming the computers. But Machlup would say: See what I mean?
There is a second ratio we can measure, that of information to materials. A kilogram of steel worked into knives con
tains a certain number of decisions. This same kilogram of steel worked into Swiss watches contains more decisions.
And the products of modern industry become more and more like Swiss watches and less and less like knives. To take another example in kilograms: How many words or how many decisions per kilogram of material? We can take words: An English word is on the average 5 letters of information,
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and a letter is 5 bits of information;hence a word is on the average, about 25 bits of information. How many words per kilogram of paper do we get in the Brockhaus Encyclopedia?
Now we can put the Brockhaus Encyclopedia on microfilm:
We then have the same number of words but we have many, many fewer pounds of gross material. Now let us put the whole thing on a microdot: And we can do it. The infor
mation ratio of information decisions to gross pounds of matter is going up. And it is going up at factors of 10 and of 100 in our time. Let us think of electronic chips, the micro-processors, the little pocket calculators you can carry in your pocket, and which do the things which a typewriter-sized think on your desk would have done 20 years earlier.
These information ratios keep going up, and that is not a small thing. We get, on the one hand, capital saving and material-saving processes, information-increasing processes.
In part this may be a countervailing process for the prob
lems of the Club of Rome. If we have less copper for our electronic installations maybe we are lucky to get printed circuits that use very little metal. And it may be that
' we cannot enrich everybody with a big, loud outboard motor for his motor boat because if literally every family
in the country had one a lot of the lakes of the country would become almost uninhabitable. It might be better if everybody gets a high fidelity music set or - even better yet - a ticket to the new municipal symphony orchestra, with
live performances of good quality music. This may come.
In this respect Germany today is ahead of the United States.
What is called so loosely the quality of life is partly
also the information content of life: The difference between the hifi reproduction of music and the old gramaphones, or the television screens that give the fine shadings of pig
ments and not only the comic strip quality of the first color television screens.
There is also a ratio of information to time. How many decisions per second can we give people? And, by the way, there is a limit how many bits per second the human mind can process - but we are not near that limit yet.
Earlier the budget was mentioned.. How much money can be spent for information in our budget as part of the total expenditures? And how much of the value added to our out
put is information-based rather than material-based?
There is also a ratio of information per kilowatt of energy.
Information technology is low energy technology, as distinct from the 100,000 volt transformers of the high-energy
technology. All these ratios now seem to have a long-term trend towards moving u p .
This is correlated to our changes in education. In an infor mation-rich society not only the illiterates are unemploy
able. The functionally illiterates also become unemployable And we begin to define a functional illiterate as someone who can't fill out an application for an automobile license or a job, or an income tax form. To be sure, the bureau
cracy sometimes will tend to make such forms harder to fill out, and we might want to get better systems for reducing their complexity from time to time. But the net result will be that something like "Obersekundareife " or high school graduation in America, and eventually junior college in the United States or "Abitur11 in Germany will become the new elementary education.
In part this is beginning even with university education now. Very many occupations today have a life expectancy of about 20 years. Think of the people who learned
harness-making when Mr. Ford began to make automobiles in large numbers. And there are many other occupations of that sort. At the university - with luck - people can learn to learn. This is second-order learning. Learning to learn is the most important thing a university could
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give to anyone - and this will give us some very serious questions about what we should teach and how we should
teach at the universities. If universities only taught how to know more and more about less and less of one narrowly defined subject and to have only disdain for everything else, the poor man may be set up to become a victim of some coming technological or social change. But if the society teaches people also to be adaptable - to learn how to learn quickly and widely we may be able to cope with an information-rich society.
There is one thing, however, we may have to abandon. We may have to abandon the promise strongly implied in the
traditional German educational system, but also present in the old American system, that university education implies a promise of privilege. When I came to the United States in 1938, Harvard students thought in terms of the "gentle
men's C" - that is to say, a 7o - 75 % grade. Since there were then very few people who could afford to go to Harvard anyway, it was well-known that if you went through Harvard, people would rarely ask what grades you got there.
Usually the fact that you managed to get through at all was enough. You would always be highly respected and you would usually do very well with some stock-brokers firm, or
in the government or with some law firm, or you would be happily accepted by any graduate school you wanted to go to.
Where are those days? Today, of course, in the United States we have among the age groups in the North 30 and 40 % people who go to college , between 20 and 30 % who graduate. In Germany, I think, at the moment you have
10 % people who go through universities and you're moving toward 20 %. Whatever these people will be later, I hope they will certainly be more knowledgeable, I hope they
will be happier, I hope they will have jobs. But one thing they won't be: they won't be particularly privileged.
The whole notion of knowledge as a privilege is disappearing And in an information-rich society it's almost inevitable
that it will disappear. That means a change in schemes of value prestige.
In the meantime, however, we are getting some very, very severe transition problems. I mentioned earlier the balance between the decision cost and the decision gain in being a voter and actively participating in politics or partici
pating in elections in one's labor union or in being even a parent - undertaking the risky business of parenthood.
But what about the young? When a student went to the uni
versity and sat down to study for an exam back in the 1920's or 30's, there was a good deal of displeasure involved in the process. The English and German language are rich in expressive verbs for the mood. "Grind" and "grinding"
are the American terms. "Ochsen" and "büffeln" are the German ones. But afterwards there was a real gain. There was prestige. In Germany and Austria one said: Sie sind akademisch gebildet. In the United States, you were wel
comed into"the community of educated persons" by the presi
dent of Harvard when he handed you your diploma. Statis
ticians computed that your average income for your lifetime even in the 1 950's - would be $ 100,000. higher, on the
average if you had a college diploma than if you didn't.
That was no trifle. Even spread over 40 years, it still worked out to $ 2,500 a year. Nowadays we cannot promise our students any of these things. But studying is just as hard as it ever was. In fact, it's harder because more science and mathematics have got in, and young people are nearly unemployable if they can read but not count. It's a little easier, but not much, if they can count but hardly read. So by and large we have a real problem here. The net result is luckily not for the majority of the young people but for a growing percentage of young people that the displeasure to pleasure or the pleasure-pain balance, famous since Jeremy Bentham's days, is getting more
unfavorable.
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Perhaps this is why we are getting people who refuse to
perform. Heinrich Boll and others have made them creditable figures in German literature, calling them "Leistungsver
weigerer". By now the word also turns up in East German literature in the GDR. It is a serious problem, and we also have it in the United States. We don't have the word yet for it, but we call them "drop-outs" or "hippies".
And whether they react with let us say passive withdrawal or with rage is secondary: the net point is that for too many young people there is more pain than pleasure involved in studying as well as perhaps in many other types of work.
This imbalance of motivations becomes particularly severe if they have the misfortune of having successful parents, because part of the pleasure of studying is to do better than your parents. You can beat the "old man" in the family, do better than your father - that's a benefit not to be neglected. But if the old man is already a professor at Hamburg or at Yale or Harvard or in Pennsylvania, what do you do for an encore? If he was in the habit of getting excellent grades and usually had A's in school, what can you do to surpass him? Perhaps you can join the guerilla theater or learn carpentry or grow vegetables by organic methods. In very many ways, some young people face here
a real, serious loss.
This problem is easily visible among academic youth but it's only part of the more broader problem. Consider the
pleasure-pain balance for the general question of work v s . leisure. Much work has always been boring and monotonous.
But much of leisure used to be no less monotonous. You could get bored stiff working in a factory but living in a tenement and walking down the desolate streets of some working-class suburb was not much more entertaining after work was over. At least at work you can talk to colleagues.
Most people are willing to work. Young women from peasant families were very happy to accept domestic service because cleaning out an apartment was much preferable to cleaning out a cowshed. But the cowsheds to be cleaned out have
