Focus on the Future

Prediction of future social conditions is of great importance to contemporary society. The rapid movement of an unsteady spotlight of policy commitment among social and technological problems --and an increasing confinement to rationalized social choices which only include the span of "average" preferences --has us staring nervously down trend lines which hopefully or pessimisticly will describe the type of life it's all leading to. A slightly increasing capacity in the social sciences to predict or conjecture convincingly about such trends has reinforced our concern for preparing people and institutions to meet that future. It may also enable us to provide the ever greater and more fragile assortment of hardware and software required for human satisfaction in the appropriate quantity and variety. The Next Generation speculates sensitively and in considerable breadth on these matters. Its criterion for selection is: changes that "seem especially pertinent for youth development." Its purpose is to cause action. Having been developed from a report to the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and having been cast in a very broad format, the book is very direct, reads easily, and does not belabor the analysis of causal linkages. The discussion is informally developed; an overriding concern for the effects of automation is its clearest organizing base. Its normative position is neutral, but the author confides in preface that he is withholding some opinions. His organization of materials may slightly betray some of them. The book begins with a section on future conditions which are largely independent of the influence of youth developers: the macro-economy, technologic innovation, and the rationalization of society. Since much of Michael's good previous work has been on the latter two topics, this is a strong section which exposes the prime moving forces behind most of the social conditions described in subsequent parts. In following current trends into the future, the focus repeatedly turns to a three-part social system comprised of professionals, technicians, and the unskilled. In this trichotomized system the professional is characterized as: --needing a longer and more rigorous education which intensifies at an earlier age than now; --becoming more fully and more intellectually identified with his work role; --having less leisure time; --being called upon for more stressful decisions as automation siphons out the routine ones which lent assurance to his prestige feelings; -and requiring constant re-education to keep abreast of changing demands. The technician is epitomized by the "human abstractor," required in increasing numbers to supplement the automated equipment in constantly monitoring and organizing the increased output of professional publications: --his work will be skilled and interesting, but not highly demanding or allconsuming; -he will be retrained for several job changes during his lifetime; --his more relaxed education, shorter work hours, and comfortable salary will make him the chief participant in the burgeoning recreation market, so society is called upon for the difficult job of developing his disposition to spend leisure time and money in a manner which gains him satisfaction. The unskilled are disturbingly portrayed as an increasingly distinct group during the next generation. Only limited progress out of this group is envisioned for the Negro population--perhaps the only manifestly negative prediction in the book: Without . . . changes in national effort, the overall national trend will be in the direction of a white, privileged, skilled intellectual-professional society and a Negro menial, unskilled, worker society. This is not to say that more Negroes, in absolute numbers, won't join the technical ranks. But particularly in the professional group the author predicts an increasing proportion of whites to Negroes owing to the greater demands for schooled sophistication, a disinclination to sufficiently provide the "better than equal" services necessary to catch up with those greater demands, and the continued resistance of the white community. This is a most important conclusion because it suggests that a self-reinforcing effect of unskilled group membership will cause many problems of the poor to get worse. This would put additionally high priority on minimizing the related social damage and costs by an early allout effort. The problem may be worsened by a reduction in the number of unskilled jobs in comparison with the number of people who need them, perhaps giving rise to special programs to provide reasonable payment and self respect in unskilled jobs, and to keep youthful members of this group out of the labor market for a longer time. Michael's book, in an effort to be convincing as a guide to major policy intervention, is essentially conservative in its expectations of change. The most compelling thing about the book is that it largely extends well known trends, rather than anticipating future causal events or innovations, and then views them in combination to come up with qualitatively different states of the social system. This approach, complemented by the flat, factual phrasing of the book, makes it very convincing; most of the predictions seem almost to be structural certainties. Since he is predicting the social consequences of technologic change, rather than the inventions themselves, he is on safer ground, because a single social state can be reached by various plausible routes of innovation. On the other hand, one occasionally suspects that as certain trends begin disturbing basic balances in the society, natural correcting mechanisms may dampen them. (One observer has calculated that if reduction of the average workman's work week continues at the recent rate, his work will completely disappear by the year 2014!) But changes in the changes are difficult to foresee. Also, the brevity of discussion on cause-and-effect relationships makes the book less well adapted than might be desired to conditional prediction; it is difficult to predict what might happen i[ certain events took place or certain related trends were different. This is another difficult job toward which the book is a beginning.