once said: "Some men see things as they are and ask, Why? I see things that have never been and ask, Why not?" The public official, the social scientist, and those concerned with mankind everywhere must ask, Why not? We cannot begin to answer that question until we have greater knowledge and understanding of man and his relationships with other men. Nor can we answer it until we have better cooperation between public officials and social scientists.A folksinger I saw recently said, as a part of his onstage patter while tuning his guitar, "If I ever get this thing tuned again, I'm going to weld it." Many of us feel that way about modern domestic and world problems; we want to get things solved and settled once and for all.But the central fact of our age is change, a fact not easy for us to accept or live with. And however much we may tend to perceive reality not as it is but as it --once was, change nevertheless does come. It has occurred. It is occurring. It will occur.Consider the twin facts of America's population growth and continued urbanization. Think of an America of today's population where 14.5 million young people live in such poverty that their diet is below the basic nutritional requirements; or where last year 52,500 people were killed on our crowded highways; or where the air we breathe in most of our major cities is a hazard to health; or where many of our rivers are unfit for fish, not to mention human beings; or where housing and educational needs are staggering. And then try to envision, for example, the problems of housing and education just 11 years from now, and just in the three supercities-strips from San Francisco to Los Angeles, from Buffalo to Chicago, and from New York to Washington -which, experts say, will then have 125 million Americans, more than half the nation's population.On a larger scale, consider today's world of 3.3 billion people, a world where there is an everwidening gap between the rich one-third and the poor two-thirds, where already there is a hunger crisis. Then visualize the world as it may be just 33 years from now Senator Harris (D-Okla.) is chairman of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Government Research. This article is based on a speech presented before the Society for Applied Anthropology at its annual meeting, 6 May 1967, in Washington, D.C. AUGUST 1967when, experts say, the 3.3 billion will have become 7.5 billion, through population growth mainly in the poorer nations.Think of the problems that have been brought about in education, for example, by the explosion of knowledge and technology resulting from the fact that 90 percent of all the scientists who have ever lived are alive today, and that 85 percent of all the Ph.D. degrees ever granted in America have been granted since the end of World War II. These problems, too, will multiply and precipitate change.In addition, there will be changes resulting from altered age distribution. Today in America more than half of all our people are under 25 years of age. These are the best educated, the most dedicated, the ...
The Invention of the United States Senate. By Daniel Wirls and Stephen Wirls. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. 288p. $49.95 cloth. $18.95 paper.In a meeting in Moscow some years ago, the former Soviet Union's principal Americanologist, Georgi Arbatov, complained to me quite seriously, “We study your system, and we still do not know how it works.” Probably one reason for Arbatov's expressed puzzlement had to do with the role played in the American governmental system by the United States Senate, of which, at the time of our conversation, I was a member.
I MINORITY-GROUP syndrome . . . still characterizes the, sell-evaluation of so many of us in the social sciences," and "still leads us to feel despised, discriminated against, and disliked by society and government," said Robert A. Nisbet (1966, p. SO) about his fellow social scientists.This inferiority complex or "other science" selfimage, together with the fact that social scientists work in moral-charged subjects which frequently cause strong public reaction, is, in part, responsible [or the present low level of public support and recognition for research and scholarship in the social sciences.The existing Federal structure for the support of science, generally, has largely resulted from the need to carry out missions which require reliance on the natural and physical sciences and related disciplines. The payoff has been unquestionably great. It might even be said that the return from that investment is unparalleled by any other field in which heavy Federal expenditures have been made. Yet, while the natural and physical sciences have been at the center of the stage, the social sciences virtually have been left out.The Senate Subcommittee on Government Research, of which I am Chairman, has held extensive hearings on the needs and promises of the social sciences and has found that, although significant and useful work is being done, there is much more which needs to be clone and could be done if funds were available.Eighty-five percent of all PhDs in science and engineering in this country have been granted since World War IT. 1 find it hard to believe that this is not a rather direct result of the large expenditures by the Federal Government in these fields, beginning with the Manhattan Project. The social sciences have never had a Manhattan Project
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