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Daniel and David Bell

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from: Daniel Bell

The Beginning of Wisdom Is Disaggregation

Posted Tuesday, Dec. 14, 1999, at 4:43 PM ET

Dear David:

Many questions. Many "methodological difficulties." How can I sort these out? The old method, in cheder, is to tell a drusha, to tell a story. (In my old age, I regress to the methods of my youth.)

In 1946, William Fielding Ogburn, the leading sociologist of social change, wrote a sober book, The Social Effects of Aviation, in which he sought to trace out the possible impact of airplanes for the remainder of the century. He looked to see how aviation might affect our lives in 21 different areas, such as population, family, cities, religion, health, environment, recreation, crime, education, marketing, agriculture, public administration, international relations--you name it. Quite an exhaustive list for effects from a single cause.

Ogburn began with population, since those changes "affect almost all the phenomena of social life," and went on to say : "Aviation will probably have the effect of reducing the number of births slightly." One rubs one's eyes in "slight" astonishment.

Ogburn was reasoning from the economist's model of the introduction of the automobile, since "families postponed the expense of ... rearing a child in order to own an automobile. ... In a similar manner some families will be smaller than would otherwise be because of the expense of owning and operating an aircraft."

What? What? What? (as George III would say). Yes, at that time the government had made that assumption. Eugene Vidal, the undersecretary of commerce (and father of Gore Vidal), had said that with the development of helicopters, about 710,000 families (out of 32 million in the United States) would have private airplanes, the reason being that these were the ones with incomes of more than $10,000 a year. A lot of people today fly a private plane--I do not know the number. But the initial assumption was flat wrong.

A number of years ago, Dennis Gabor won the Nobel Prize for inventing the hologram. Many people thought that this would "transform" our lives. Fifteen years ago, AT&T "predicted" that we would all have picture phones in our houses. What? What? What? I do not mean to jeer, but the point is that, beginning with Future Schlock (endorsed by Richard Nixon and later by Newt Gingrich), every technological change is hailed with a whiz, boom, bang, etc.

You use the phrase "the rate of technological change." The only trouble is that we do not know how to measure it. Technology is a large globule of many diverse components. Rate is a metric, but what is it? Economists measure technology as part of total factor productivity, but usually as a residual after all the other factors (capital, labor) have been measured. Not very glamorous. And of limited use, since it does not deal with institutional and organizational changes.

Some technologies can be "predicted"--some forecasters define it as "envelope curve" projections--if you can define the narrow parameters and the physical constraints of particular items, such as Moore's Law on computer-chip speeds and size, or more broadly, the change from a propeller drive plane to a jet engine--but there, the upper limits are 16,000 miles an hour, for that is escape velocity and you are then not in cyberspace but real outer space.

The beginning of wisdom, I suppose, is disaggregation and particularity, and once these have been carefully defined, to begin to generalize through theory (which brings me back to where I began yesterday).

On primordial identities: I don't believe in single identities, but there are root identities such as being a Basque, a Catalan, a Kurd, or an Occitan, especially when there is a need to assert such a root identity against a larger, sometimes more smothering polity or culture. But let me reserve that for another day.

Love,
Dad

the breakfast table
entries
12345678910111213141516
from: Daniel Bell

The Beginning of Wisdom Is Disaggregation

Posted Tuesday, Dec. 14, 1999, at 4:43 PM ET
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Daniel Bell is professor emeritus of sociology at Harvard and the author of The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, which was recently re-issued (click hereto buy it). David Bell, Daniel's son, teaches history at Johns Hopkins University, and is the author of the forthcoming The National and the Sacred: Religion and the Origins of Nationalism in France.
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