When the Edsel failed, Ford did not give up its consumer and technical research, but used them to develop other cars such as the Thunderbird and Mustang, which proved successful. We must do the same with our social programmes. We must see them as stages in the evolution of truly valuable and important social technologies. One of the problems that we face in stimulating social inventions is the general lack of a recognition that they are necessary. People recognise that cancer can be cured only by medical research, but they do not yet realise that intergroup relations can be resolved through inventing better social methods, and the thing that really is needed is a number of social invention centres to invent these better methods on a continuous basis.
Some people believe that it is wrong to experiment with human beings.
It is a fact of commercial life that it is necessary to come up with a 'new improved' product each year. There is a popular notion that people do not want to be treated as 'guinea pigs', but the notion is wrong. People enjoy the special attention that they get when they are the subjects in an experiment. People want to be treated as individual human beings. Workers on the assembly line do not receive this treatment.