Imperial Stars 1-The Stars at War (40 page)

These essays are polemical; but I do mean what I say. I may have overstated the case against the so-called social sciences, but not by much.

Both essays are mostly concerned with economics, simply because economics is supposed to be the most advanced of the social sciences. We have, by law, a Council of Economic Advisors, and they give Nobel Prizes in economics. God help us.

This 1982 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science featured as keynote speaker Dr. George A. Keyworth, Science Advisor to the President.

Much of what Dr. Keyworth said made sense. We must, he said, cut back; be selective. The days of "As long as you're up, get me a grant" are over. We shall rigorously pursue excellence—

I'd have been more impressed if he hadn't, m the same speech, made it pretty clear that they re cutting back the planetary exploration program. It you want excellence, what's better?

He did announce that they've no intention of saying money by turning off the Deep Space Net; they'll be listening to
Voyager
when he gets to Uranus The rest of the planetary program, however, is in trouble.

So is space investment. The Citizen's Advisory Council (The Citizen's Advisory Council on National Space Policy: J. E. Pournelle, Ph.D., Chairman; a civilian advisory group privileged to make reports to the President) has shown that every year for a decade we have seriously underestimated the requirements for capability to put payloads in orbit. This includes
all
requirements: civil, scientific, environmental (such as weather and pollution monitoring), and communications. If we lose one Shuttle—something not at all impossible—we are in
real
trouble. Yet, with all the evidence staring them in the face, the administration has not made any commitment to great expansion of our space access capability.

That's the space-front. We're not doing so much on the rest of the high technology front, either. Why?

One problem, I think, is that we have so many economists pretending they know something. Perhaps one or two do. Perhaps. But no two of them seem to make the same recommendations, and most of them ignore what seems so obvious that I suppose you have to get a Ph.D. before you can't see it.

I once heard John Kenneth Galbraith and Arthur Laffer, respectively champions of liberal and conservative economics, debate for a full two hours on the subject of why the 60's were so good and the 70's so bad; and in all that time, neither mentioned the words "research", "development", "space", or "technology."

Yet it seems clear: if you've got to spend more than you make, you'd better do some investing, and fast. You might also want to gamble.

If a family can see that over the next five years they've no choice but to spend money that won't be coming in, they've got some decisions to make. Perhaps a second job, or a new source of income; but suppose there aren't any?

Sell something? But if there's nothing to sell? Cut expenses? Perhaps, although if the expenses are
taxes
that's not going to work either. And governments, it seems,
can't
cut expenses. Reagan's "cuts" were only a slowdown of increases; the 1983 budget is considerably larger (in real dollars) than was the 1982 budget. So while we talk of budget cuts, we don't mean it, and I don't suppose we ever will.

Then what's left? In the case of a family, it's obvious. Speculative investments. If you're going to go broke anyway, take a high flyer and the worst that happens is you're bankrupt sooner; at best you make enough to keep going.

Return now to the US: we have an aging work force. It is absolutely predictable that in a few years there are going to be more people retired, and fewer able to work; and somebody's got to support the retired. They're voters, you know, and they'll be organized.

Project this scenario ahead twenty years, and you can scare yourself; yet I think of no single institution, none whatever, that can and will do anything about it. All parts of our government operate on a much shorter time frame. If we had one hereditary house in Congress—heresy as it is to say—we'd at least have an institution that worried about the next decade, since its members would know they'd still be there to face the problems. They might also be concerned about their children. But we have no such institution in government, and now that the family has become relatively unimportant we don't have many private ones to look that far ahead either.

Does this mean we're doomed?

I don't know. It's sure a hell of a challenge.

How, then, can we prevent our children from cursing our memory?

The best way, it seems to me, is investment; to do what Keyworth said the administration wants to do; but do it in a big way. Look: we're facing bankruptcy. They keep projecting federal deficits larger than the whole budget was during the Johnson administration. The remedy, some say, is to raise taxes, but we all know that's asinine. All higher taxes do is stimulate people to spend effort on tax avoidance rather than wealth creation. Right now we have teams of the brightest people in the nation working for the IRS, and other equally competent teams working for their victims; the vectorial sum of their activity is zero. How is the Republic well served by this?

No: if we're headed for bankruptcy, we'd as well be hung for sheep as lambs. You're going to have deficits? Pity; but if so, take some of it and invest. Back long shots. Like space industries. Lunar colonies. Heave money at the universities. Change tax laws to provide really heavy incentives for industry to do basic R&D.

What you're praying for is a breakthrough; some way to change the very rules of the game. That's happened often enough in history, although seldom in response to deliberate stimulation; but what the hell, we're desperate, or should be.

And I mean that: we should be in a state of near panic just now. How can you look into the future and be anything but scared? The work force gets older. Our machines get older. Our taxes get higher, and our savings get lower. More and more people become concerned with "survival", the underground economy is the only thing that's booming (and what a marvelous thing that is! We get surgeons out painting their own houses, because it's cheaper than hiring it done. A real accomplishment). We ought to be scared stiff.

Now maybe, just maybe my colleague Harry Stine is right; that without any government investments the capital for space development will be forthcoming from the private sector; the Third Industrial Revolution will proceed apace, without stimulation from Washington. Maybe. I hope so. But I don't see many signs of it. I don't have a lot of faith in corporate management.

Here is a question for the Ph.D. Qualifying Examinations in Management Science:

The aliens have landed, and they are every bit as powerful as we imagined. The guards we place around them are merely to keep them from being annoyed. They spend a few weeks studying us; then their leader makes an offer.

"We will make you wealthy," it says. "Wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, sufficient wealth that every child, woman, and man on Earth will have the equivalent of a million dollars. Each of you will have perfect health for five hundred years, after which you will have a quick and painless death. No senility and no lingering illnesses."

They mean it, too. Assume further that we have ways to verify this, perhaps by direct communication with the Galactic Federation. They can give us wealth, health, and longevity. They will also be able to exact the price, and we won't be able to fudge on it. They always do what they say.

"Knowledge, too," they offer. "We will tell you everything you want to know about the Cosmos. How stars work, and where the solar neutrinos have gone, and if the universe is open or closed, and how many elementary particles there are (you'll be surprised at the answer . . .)"

"What's the price?" we ask.

"We want your solar system. But we're in no hurry at all to collect it. All this we do for you; but after 1000 years exactly every human will be born sterile."

QUESTION: Should we accept or reject that offer? Use cost/benefit ratio theory to justify your answer.

The interesting part is not that everyone I know believes we ought to reject the offer, but that current management theory provides no reason why we should—at least I've seen none.

Current management theory doesn't give any good reasons for investing in space. Investments that don't mature for twenty years simply don't figure in Return on Investment (ROI) and Position in the Industry (PII) charts; while ten year maturity investments are hedged about with all sorts of caveats.

Looking out for the long term good ("To promote the general welfare, and insure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity") must be the province of government, because no manager who does that will long keep his job in industry. Managers are trained to look at, not just the bottom line on the annual report, but on
quarterly
earnings. The modern corporate notion of long-range planning is to look ahead two years.

But then politicians who look a generation ahead aren't likely to be rewarded either. Our political system gives jobs for life to judges and low to medium level bureaucrats, but never to political leaders or high-level decision makers; nor indeed do we have much of a mechanism for making long-term plans and carrying them out.

So while I'd like to believe Harry Stine is right, and that the space moguls will come up with the cash, I'm also a bit worried because I don't see many on the horizon.

Which brings me back to the central point: we, the readers of this book, are more important than perhaps we think. True, not all of us look ahead to the future: but most of us do,
and we may be most of the people doing that.

Scary, isn't it?

So what can we do?

Alas, nothing I haven't said before; nothing spectacular like marching on Washington. But we do have to organize. (My favorite organization, not surprisingly, is the L-5 Society, 1060 E. Elm, Tucson AZ 85619, $30/year.)

We must, somehow, convince Washington that the future has a real constituency; that we're not just a bunch of mild-mannered nuts out here, but people who are determined; that we can get together and change the results of elections; that space and high technology and investment in the future are issues that really do count, and politicians too blind to see that can be punished.

And, slowly, we are doing that. Not as quickly, not as dramatically as we'd like; but we're getting a hearing.

Our immediate goal is to get into the next State of the Union message. The long-term goal is to get official Washington to understand that when you're on a binge you can't get out of, and facing bankruptcy anyway, flinging a few percent into high-flying investments may be the only way out. It's not that far-out an idea. Anyone can understand it. Except maybe an economist.

"I wouldn't know anything about politics," my friend said the other day. "I'm only an engineer."

He happens to be a very good engineer, but he named his profession as if ashamed of it. I see this a lot. The social scientists are automatically assumed to know more about society and politics than the hard scientists—even when the subject matter is something like nuclear power.

I wouldn't be so sure.

I hear a lot recently about "voodoo economics." The term is most often employed by Democrats in reference to President Reagan's economic policies; but I've also heard professional economists use the term "voodoo economics" in a way that implies there is a real science of economics in contrast to "Reaganomics."

Certainly the official policy is that economics is a science. We have by law a Council of Economic Advisors to report to the President, while the Congress has Alice Rivkin and her staff of economists to tell them what they should do.

From all the evidence I've seen, we'd do as well to give the President a Council of Voodoo Practitioners, and let the Congress consult its Chief Astrologer. In fact, I suspect that a chief
hungan
and
mamba
would do less harm than our present economists: we'd be less likely to take them seriously. However much our Chief Voodoo Advisor protested that his work was scientific, we'd demand some kind of track record, some evidence that his predictions might once in a while come true; while we impose no such burdens on economists, which is just as well for them, since their track record is one of universally dismal failure.

One of the first things they teach stock brokers is to stay out of the stock market. Brokers make their pile from selling advice, and from commissions on stock transactions. They can't predict the market, and few risk their own money. They, at least, only affect their clients' fortunes. Economists, though, can ruin the lot of us with their advice—yet if no science can predict a relatively closed system like the stock market, how the devil are you going to "fine tune" something as large as the American economy? I'd think it arrogant to try; as arrogant as the man with three illiterate drug-addicted spoiled brats writing a book on parenting.

But there's worse to come: to the extent that there is a "science of economics", its practitioners must behave in ways that other professions would brand unethical. Example: the Corporate Economist of a large aircraft company is going to give a speech. He has made his analysis (cast lots? examined tea leaves?) and he forsees nothing but bad news. We're in a "downside cycle" and there ain't much to be done about it. So he goes to a meeting of, say, the Airline Owners, and of course when asked for his predictions he gives his honest professional opinion—

In a pig's eye, he does. If he told what he thinks is the truth, he'd be fired. Worse, the Securities Exchange Commission would look at all his financial records and probably charge him with manipulating the value of his company's stock. It would be sure to fall; and if he'd prudently sold any shares recently he would likely go to jail.