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192 ANNALS NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 



and technology policy. Let us now turn to some specific "policy puzzles" 

 that are raised in trying to resolve international issues. 



Policy Puzzles: The Urgent,' the Important, and the Uncertain 



In this second part of the discussion, we will follow the same pattern as in 

 the first part. Let us categorize major areas of difficulty. 



To begin with, competing geopolitical views guide the directions of 

 science and technology policy. For example, if the intentions of the 

 Soviet Union were known accurately, that knowledge would certainly 

 affect the way in which the United States proceeded in defense R&R; in 

 the absence of reliable knowledge about USSR goals, competing 

 estimates arise and defense R&D can be viewed as insurance. Similarly, 

 longer range projections for Asia often turn upon estimates of the 

 technological strength of Japan and of China, in relation to the U.S. and 

 the Soviet Union (as well as to other smaller, industrializing countries in 

 the region). More generally, if the United States saw technology as its 

 principal lever for ensuring both military and economic power, then our 

 political uses of such technologically based power would depend heavily 

 upon making larger, more visible investments in new technological 

 capabilities. To the extent that any country wishes to use technology for 

 pursuing foreign policy goals, it must take account of long term political 

 trends reflected in national technical efforts around the world. Whether 

 or not one takes classical geopolitics as the dominant perspective, 

 technological capabilities probably will play a key role in geopolitical 

 trends. 



A second area of puzzles, particularly pressing at the moment, is in the 

 use of economic models to test the consequences of alternate policies. To 

 oversimplify somewhat, there is no "theory of R&D" that holds water in 

 our present economic models. In DCs, we cannot compute how to 

 achieve the right level of "innovation" — the level sufficient to avoid 

 stagflation and sustain increasing productivity. For LDCs, we cannot 

 demonstrate convincingly what will be the varied immediate impacts of 

 technical change during the process of modernization; and even less well 

 can we predict the more long-range cultural changes caused by "develop- 

 ment." Thus, for two of the most far-reaching economic frustrations in 

 the world today, the apparently critical role of technology remains 

 murky. 



Stunning evidence about these crippling gaps in our economic 

 knowledge emerged last year from a Fortune poll of professors of 

 economics at 55 American universities. The results of the poll showed an 

 extraordinary loss of confidence in the ability to make accurate macro- 



