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1034 Walter A. McDougall 



grandeur through explosive technological advance, but "without France ceasing to 

 be France.'*' And Webb promised miracles, but only through existing institutions. 



GauUist technocracy, therefore, was also a tool of domestic politics. By offering a 

 captivating vision of the French future "in the year 2000," technocracy served to 

 legitimate a Fifth Republic that had, after all, decreed the end of Imperial France 

 and Socialist France and soon forestalled Atlanticist France and European France 

 as well. Can a similar hypothesis be applied to the United States? This problem 

 invites research: the emergence of a "revolutionary centrism" offering technologi- 

 cal, not ideological or social, change to play midwife to a future as secure and 

 bountiful, but less threatening, than that offered by either a socialist Left or a laissez 

 faire Right. 



The technocratic promise, of course, was not fulfilled, in part because its implicit 

 dynamics were those of a perpetual motion machine. The "future" of the Great 

 Society, like the final attainment of Communism in the Soviet bloc, never arrived. 

 But material change has occurred on a massive scale. How can we measure the 

 effects of Space Age technology? Econometrician Mary Holman analyzed the 

 NASA budget and its impact on given localities (often very great), on economic 

 growth and stabilization in the aerospace industry (positive), on the tendency 

 toward centralization and monopoly in the industry (problematic), and as a 

 stimulus to general economic growth (ineffective)." Unfortunately, the best efforts 

 of NASA itself ("more than any other federal agency NASA has tried to 

 understand its social and economic impact"), the Organization for Economic 

 Cooperation and Development, the National Science Foundation, and academic 

 economists have been insufficient to measure the impact of spending on science 

 and technology.^^ The economic cost of research in one sector depends on guesses 

 as to the likely alternative employment of scientific labor and capital as determined 

 by the state or marketplace. There is also no accepted set of values for spending 

 directed toward no specific economic goal. What precisely is the state trying to 

 achieve through federal scholarships, lunar voyages, or oceanography satellites? 

 But one chore historians can undertake is to trace changes in the value-set of the 

 "official mind" according to the educational, scientific, and technical projects that 

 receive the blessing of public funding. 



Estimates of the economic fallout from space spending still range from the 

 minute to the cosmic. Critics described the space race as ceremonial waste,^ and 

 Holman has cited studies promising phenomenal benefit to cost ratios from earth 

 resources satellites (for example, 128: 1 in increased rice production and 296: 1 in 

 malaria control). And if we assume that space technology never existed (as Robert 

 Fogel assumed away American railroad technology), the cost of alternate systems to 

 perform given jobs is generally many times higher. Of course, mankind may get on 



*' De Gaulle, Speech of February 5, 1962, as quoted in Gilpin, France in the Age of the Scientific State. 3. 



" Holman, The Political Economy of the Space Program (Palo Alto, 1974). 



Ibid., 169—95. Raymond Bauer has suggested some procedures for measuring the social effects of space 

 research, but his study was written too early for empirical analysis; Bauer, Second Order Consequences: A 

 Methodological Essay on the Impact of Technology (Cambridge. Mass., 1969). Also see the excellent introduction by 

 Wilbert E. Moore to Moore, ed.. Technology and Social Change (Chicago. 1972), 3-25. 



" A "potlatch" ceremony; Diamond, Rise and Fall of the Space Age, chap I . 



