Harsh Judgment

U.S. social scientists have more than doubled their total research and development budget in the past five years, to $803 million. Yet for all their increasing participation in Government and business, these 20th century shamans have not been nearly as helpful as they might be in taming the nation's violent social problems.

That harsh judgment is being rendered with growing vehemence by the radical new sociologists. It is also the burden of recent reports by three separate panels of more traditional social scientists who have made their own appraisals of how the so-called "soft" sciences are--and are not--put to use. The most wide-ranging group is the Behavioral and Social Sciences (BASS) Survey Committee, sponsored by two private organizations, the National Academy of Sciences and the Social Science Research Council. The BASS committee's recommendations:

sb Further development of raw social statistics and "social indicators." These indexes would parallel economic yardsticks, measuring such qualities of American life as the amount of opportunity and the learning produced by education. They would encourage sound research, and provide gauges of how well Government policies are working.

sb Ten graduate schools devoted to applied behavioral science, perhaps similar to the schools of engineering, medicine, and business administration that currently apply pure research in physics, biology and economics.

sb More social scientists on the staff of such key Government science-policy bodies as the President's Science Advisory Committee (it now has one psychologist).

The price tag is modest: $91 million per year for the recommended new programs, plus continuing the growth of federal funding for present social science projects at a rate of 12% to 18% each year. Bills embodying some ideas in the report have been introduced in Congress during the past two years, but have made little real progress. Nonetheless, the BASS report and its counterparts released in the past 18 months by other groups put social scientists on notice. "If they are to contribute effectively to the quality of life," warns the BASS committee, "they may have to move more rapidly than is altogether congenial."

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