or variants of them, are ones you often hear as well, and perhaps are ones that members of the subcommittee sometimes frame in their own minds. • Are the social and behavioral sciences useful to the nation? • Social scientists often study problems in our economy, in our schools, in our cities, and throughout our society which nevertheless resist solution-why is this? • How important is basic research of the kind supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to the usefulness of the social and behavioral sciences? One test of whether something is useful is whether it is used. The social and behavioral sciences clearly pass this market test. Everywhere I look I see the practical application of concepts and ideas, of tools and techniques, of systematic data, and of ways of organizing information which can be traced to the social sciences. Policy making in this and other modern governments is heavily dependent on a national statistical system which is the product of a half century of social science developments in measurement, statistics, demography, index construction, and survey methodology. Foreign policy making and national security issues are debated and discussed in frameworks-and often with information-that owes much to social scientific and humanistic research on non-American societies. The language of discourse in government, industry, and throughout the society draws upon the social sciences: externalities, reference groups, cost-benefit analysis, socialization, and latent functions-all are social science terms which have found their way into public discourse. To be more specific, I see the Committee on Banking, Currency, and Housing making regular use of economic concepts, urban sociology, and sam pIe surveys. I note that the Congressional Budget Office is largely staffed by economists, political scientists, and sociologists-and that these staff members bring the tools and concepts of their disciplines to the exacting task of advising on the national budget. I see the Congressional Research Service and the General Accounting Office drawing upon the social science literature and consulting with persons trained in the many social science disciplines. I doubt that the Antitrust Division in the Justice Department, now deliberating what action, if any, to take with respect to IBM and AT&T, could forecast the supply of goods and services or price fluctuations or job dislocations, or could analyze the relationship between corporate size and technological innovation, without the con2
cepts and techniques of the social sciences. Who, if not our social scientists and humanists, is going to provide the deeper interpretations and analysis of the enormous transformations now going on in China? Perhaps the heavy use of social science can be demonstrated most starkly by imagining an Office of Management and Budget, a Central Intelligence Agency, a Department of Labor, or any numb~r of Congressional committees totally stripped of any ideas or approaches or analytic techniques or information . bases which derive from the social and behavioral sciences. The very difficulty we have playing this counterfactual game, trying to imagine the modern governing process in the total absence of the social and behavioral sciences, convinces us that they indeed are in demand. I turn from the comparatively easy question, are the social sciences used, to the more demanding question, are they useful? The question appears in many forms. Some persons challenge the usefulness of social scientists because the problems which are said. to be the subject matter of their studies resist solution. Often this challenge is posed by comparing, unfavorably, the social with the natural sciences. If the natural scientists can produce the science which leads to putting a man on the moon, why cannot the social scientists produce the science which would lead to a strategy for decreasing crime and delinquency in America's cities or for predicting social revolutions in Third World countries? Setting aside the rejoinder that it took complicated organization, and thus administrative science, and theories of information processing and notions about human stress, and thus cognitive psychology, as well as calculations of rocket thrust, etc., to put a man on the moon, the assertion that social science can never solve anything merits a response. Let me tell a short story that will help put the usefulness issue in perspective. A quarter century ago, another president of the Social Science Research Council testified before a House committee. He came, in 1954, to defend the social sciences against the charge that they were part of a Communist conspiracy. We have all matured since then-the House, the social sciences, and the nation. And I welcome the fact that I am here to defend the social importance rather than the political patriotism of the social sciences. In his testimony, twenty-six years ago, Pendleton Herring told the following story. In the 1830s, when steamboats first began to come into use, there were some early problems with bursting boilers. A small research grant from the Secretary of the Treasury was given to a Professor Bates of the University of VOLUME
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