Mr. BROWN. Thank you very much, Dr. Newlon.

The overriding question in economics today, in the areas of macroeconomics and I do not expect that we will get into that particularly, but the question I would have is that the theoretical implications from experiments with the small groups possibly can be extrapolated. In other words, is there a large framework as well as a smaller framework within which this research could have significance?

Dr. NEWLON. Yes. There is a body of experimental literature on not just small group decisionmaking but on market contexts, simulating markets. This research was used in our program review the last time because of the fascinating results that were emerging from that research.

There are macroeconomic experiments that are used as teaching devices but there, of necessity, you have to work with historical experiments in interpreting what happened in the past and use that to test the different competing explanations of the macroeconomy. Let me emphasize, though, this is not purely economics or even principally economics.

Mr. BROWN. Well, I understand that. As a matter of fact, I welcome it. I think one of the errors that we perhaps have made and I see signs that we are doing our best to overcome it, is to departmentalize too much. The best that I am able to gather, in my own readings, in this field-even Adam Smith had a somewhat broader concept of economics than we give him credit for today.

I am interested in the interdisciplinary aspect of this and to better understand it. Again, I am using the term that Redfield used, that understanding is the goal, not just an opportunity to demonstrate expertise in applying certain methodologies.

Thank you very much, Dr. Newlon. We will reserve the rest of our time for our last witness this morning, Dr. Herbert Simon, who is, as I indicated previously, a Nobel Prize laureate in economics, but, as I understand it, who is here from the Department of Psychology. Would you explain this anomaly, Dr. Simon? You may proceed with your statement.

STATEMENT OF DR. HERBERT SIMON, DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY, CARNEGIE-MELLON UNIVERSITY, PITTSBURGH, PA.

Dr. SIMON. Thank you, Mr. Brown.

Mr. Chairman and committee members, I am very grateful to have this opportunity to appear and talk about what I love best. I won't talk too long, but maybe I need a ruling from the chairman as to when you would like this morning's session to end?

Mr. BROWN. I am going to stay here as long as you have anything to say. We will probably go until 12:30 without any difficulty.

Dr. SIMON. Fine.

I think the theme of this morning's discussion and of the conversation between the committee and the witnesses have been very consistent. We know what the social sciences are about. The social sciences are concerned with following the advice of the Greek philosopher: "Know thyself." As Congressman Ritter put it this morning, we are interested, in the social sciences, in understanding our own human behavior because, after all, the difficult problems that our society faces

today, like those it has faced in the past, are most of all human problems. They are problems of how we get organized to do the things that need to be done, with due regard for the conflicting interests that surround many social problems. Solutions to our problems require the resolution of those conflicts.

Many of these problems are thought of as technical and scientific— for example, the problems of energy and environment today. We know that we need to conserve energy. We know that we need to find alternate energy sources. These are partly technical problems; but central to them all is how we organize to do it, and that is a social science problem.

Much of social and behavioral science is concerned with understanding the great mechanisms that society uses to bring about mutual coordination of our efforts. There is the mechanism of the market which we just heard discussed a few minutes ago, which allows us to coordinate all of our specialized economic activities, each one of us going about his business and coordinating through this remarkable mechanism.

There are mechanisms of formal organization, that we use in business, government, and education. We see in developing countries the difficulties they experience in implementing development plans because they lack the kinds of organizational structure and organizational skills that a society of our sort has. There are the processes of bargaining, negotiating, and voting.

These social mechanisms are the fundamental tools we use, and on which we base the productivity of our society. Productivity isn't just a matter of machines and factories. It is also a matter of skill in organizing for decisionmaking in our society, so that we can use the machines and factories effectively.

I think the task for application of the social and behavioral sciences, as we enlarge fundamental knowledge, is to help us build effective social mechanisms and use them well. Now, Congressman Ritter and Congressman Brown raised some questions about what the Federal Government's role is and ought to be in that kind of effort.

There is one very simple view that I don't think is entirely satisfying; but it is an important part of the answer; namely, the role we want the Federal Government to play depends a lot on what rate of scientific progress we want; not only in the social and behavioral sciences, but across the board in all the sciences.

In the period when Margaret Meade was doing her first anthropological research and the period before that, we would have to recognize that American science was living largely on European research and European science. The universities were transmitting knowledge in the modest way that their funds and foundation funds permitted. They were advancing knowledge, but we were very heavy borrowers from European science.

What the post-war period in American science has done in the behavioral and social sciences as well as in the physical and biological sciences, has been to turn that around. It has made us leaders in the world with respect to scientific progress.

Now, I think most scientists, and certainly most behavioral and social scientists, would be much more comfortable if the role of the Federal Government in the total support were more modest. We would

be more comfortable with a plurality of sources of funding. If someone will tell us what those sources are, where we can go, I am sure many of us would explore them very vigorously. We should acknowledge the important role of the private foundations. They are not able to support the sciences on the scale that the Federal Government can but-to cite one example in the area of cognitive science which was mentioned this morning, the Sloan Foundation is doing, at present, a very useful and important job of supporting pioneering efforts.

So, probably the answer, as in so many things, has to be that we want to have a mixed system of support here. For the health of American science, for a rate of progress that will support the continuing advance in productivity of our society, we are going to need to rely on heavy funding from the Federal Government. But we certainly will look to other sources and explore those sources vigorously in order to preserve pluralism in the support of science.

That relates to another issue that was raised here this morning: the very direct impingement of the social and behavioral sciences on our social values. The natural sciences do that, too. We just have to think back a little bit to the controversies about Darwinism and the theory of evolution in this country, and the impact that theory had on some fundamental religious values in our society.

To give you a more recent example, the matter of experimentation with DNA and recombination of DNA, and the possibilities of changing the whole genetic character of organisms. This touches on basic values in somewhat the same nerve-tingling way that many topics in the behavioral and social sciences do.

Of course, our task and the task of any science is not to tell society what values it ought to have. I think Dr. Friedl made that point very effectively a few months ago. Our job is to achieve an understanding of social phenomena on the faith-and I suppose it is basically just a faith that if a society understands itself, if it understands the human behavior of its own members, it will make, in the light of its values, better judgments about how to implement those values and how to go ahead.

We have had some excellent examples of social science research presented to us this morning. The agenda committee for the National Science Foundation was quite mindful of representing a number of different approaches that the social sciences employ in carrying out research. I don't want to elaborate on the topics they have surveyed, but would like to point to a few examples of kinds of research that illustrate the relation between basic knowledge about our society and applications of this knowledge, and thereby touch very directly on the value question.

I spoke of our society's concern today with energy problems. One of the methods we are using to help us deal with those problems is to model our energy and environmental systems and to look at alternative scenarios, to try to understand what would happen if we followed one policy or another. The modeling research, some of which has been supported by the Foundation-I think of the work of Nordhaus and Jorgenson-provided a basis for building large models of energy systems to study their environmental and economic impacts.

Now, here it is quite clear that the applications is. We have some direct policy concerns. We can model our situation, and we can draw

from the modeling knowledge that is directly relevant to the policy choices that we have to make. I think that is, perhaps, not the typical case in the social sciences.

Let me turn to a rather different area: the area of opinion and attitude polling which, again, has been supported to a substantial extent by NSF through such organizations as the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan, the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, and others.

With respect to such research, the crucial point is that when we have to make decisions in our society and don't have facts, we make those decisions on the basis of folklore. In Lordstown, Ohio, there was a series of labor disputes involving an automobile assembly plant which went on for a number of years, and these disputes were reported quite frequently in the media as some kind of crisis of our whole industrial system. It was alleged that the mechanized, automated industrial system was building up something called worker alienation, that workers were alienated not only from their jobs, which were not very satisfying, but were alienated from the institutions of our whole society.

Well, I think it is terribly important that we know whether this is the case, and one way we can find out is by careful and scientific exploration of the attitudes of people to see whether there does exist this kind of alienation, and equally important, to see whether there are any trends in it-whether people are less satisfied with their working lives today than they were some time back.

We can only find that out if we have scientific institutions that are gathering and analyzing such data over a period of time on a comparable basis. We have, today, 25 or 30 years of experience with public opinion polls, including polls about workers' attitudes and, as a result, we know enough to know that there has been no major trend. There have been no major increases in our society in people's satisfactions or dissatisfactions with their jobs. Roughly speaking, people derive about the same pleasures and the same gripes from their jobs as they did 30 years ago.

So, we learn from these polling data that we can't generalize to the whole society from a single, dramatic incident like the Lordstown troubles, that we have to have a wider information base to understand the important trends that are going on in our society or aren't going

on.

I am deliberately using examples that are sometimes thought to be a little controversial, example of research that do raise questions of the values of our society. But I think that the social sciences aren't, in most cases, dealing with the most basic phenomena of human behavior unless they do get rather close to some of these issues of purpose and value.

We are very much concerned with our educational system, one of the largest public programs that we maintain. We are interested in knowing whether Johnny is really learning to read and add. Each of us, at one time or another in our lives, have had our own "Johnnies" in our families, and we perhaps formed our judgments about the educational process by comparing Johnny's progress with our own progress at school-as we remembered it. That's the only way we had in the past to make such judgments; but today, we have quite good longitu