SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND SOCIETY — HAFSTAD 



217 



our modern industrial civilization. I maintain it is not. It is society 

 itself, and particularly the nontechnical part of society, which creates 

 the demands that are the motive force behind our technology. 



Let us turn to another basic question, the relations between stand- 

 ards of living, education, and technology. Much of the energy in our 

 educational system these days is focused on new thories of teaching 

 which will avoid grading and thus any semblance of conflict and com- 

 petition. This is no doubt desirable sociologically, but apparently 

 so is a rising standard of living. This presents a painful choice. 

 In technology if incentive is removed, so is struggle, and if struggle 

 is stopped, so is progress. This leveling process could, of course, 

 be carried out at any point in the history of a civilization, so it is of 

 interest to see what would have happened had it been carried out at 

 some previous times in our own history. The results are shown in 

 figure 5 (10) . Who made the greatest real contribution to the goal of 

 the humanist, the engineers or the self-appointed Robin Hoods of 

 1909, those people who thought all our social problems could be solved 

 by a redistribution of the wealth at that time ? 



RESEARCH CONTRIBUTION 



RESEARCH 



% 



improvement! 



DEVELOP- 

 MENT- 



PRODUCTION 



Finally, let us consider a little further the relationship between 

 incentive and progress. Let us assume, following the late Dr. Dicken- 

 son of the Bureau of Standards, that the actual innate abilities of 

 a population are given by a probability distribution curve such as 

 A in figure 6. As a base for comparison let us now imagine a per- 

 fectly "efficient and just" social system which extracted from each 

 individual a contribution proportional to his ability and rewarded 



