How Many Scientists and Technologists? FF.w if any reigning governments enjoy the freely expressed esteem of the educated classes of their respective countries, yet the solution of nearly every problem is thought to be attainable through the agency of government. A capacity for omniscience and omnicompetence is attributed to government in an age which exceeds all others in the discovery of problems needing solution. The coming of the year 2000 is bringing with it a new millenarianism which takes as its task the discovery of problems, apocalyptic in scale and awfulness. This time, as befits our age, the apocalypse is described and the cure is offered in the idiom of science rather than that of salvationary theology. Prevision replaces providence. Scientists are to describe and offer the cure for the future; government with the necessary knowledge provided by scientists is to deal with every problem and lay it to rest. At the centre of this age still to be bom are naturally science and the scientists. Without scientists there is obviously no science and equally obviously there must be enough scientists to do the needed research. But how is one to know how many scientists will be needed? Enough now being known of the length of time taken to turn a schoolboy or schoolgirl into a scientist and knowing how many schoolboys and girls there are at a given moment, it is feasible to estimate, on certain assumptions regarding the proportions disposed to give their minds and careers to science, the number of scientists as a general class likely to be " p r o d u c e d " by a given date. It should therefore be intellectually possible to make provision for all those capable of meeting a certain examination standard at each stage in the flow and likely to desire to continue into the next stage, to estimate the numbers of places to be provided for prospective scientists in universities, technical colleges, etc. The " swing away from science" shows, however, how hazardous the estimation of the distribution of inclinations towards science can be, even for very limited steps into the future. The pitfalls of prediction are serious matters. If one postulates only that higher education should be available to all those intellectually capable of benefiting from it and inclined to do so, it would be a serious matter because the provision of teaching staff, equipment and buildings is costly. The principle of higher education for all--or at least for all those capable of it and wanting it--would not be denied by anyone except a handful of reactionary cranks out of tune with the spirit of the age, but there are many other demands for the revenue which even in the richest countries is limited. Roads have to be built, housing has to be constructed, the aged and the ill must be looked after, agriculture must be subsidised, the armed forces must be supported, the civil service must

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be expanded and it is even acknowledged that primary and secondary education must be improved. Mistakes in prediction of the demand for places in higher education for scientists result either in overcrowding and inadequate teaching or in wasted resources. The argument for more places for scientists and technologists is a demand for increased resources at a time when politically and ethically founded demands for other uses for the same resources grow more intense and numerous. Hence the demand for the education of more scientists and technologists, the costliest of all types of higher education with the exception, perhaps, of that of physicians, needs the support of arguments additional to those of capacity and desire. The additional argument is that there is a " n e e d " for them. And beyond a doubt they are "needed ". They are " n e e d e d " in the first instance by any advanced culture in the same way that cathedrals, clergymen, monks and ecclesiastical administrators have been needed in cultures more traditionally religious than our own. They are needed in the way in which artists and writers are needed, but since writers train themselves at their own cost and artists have usually done so, the task of estimating the magnitude of the need has wisely not been undertaken. As far as I know, the high dignitaries of the churches did not attempt in any explicit fashion to estimate how many "religious professionals" were needed. They trained as many as they could get and obtain support for. When latterly, responsible churchmen, concerned with the staffing of the cure of souls, have attempted to estimate their needs, they have defined needs in terms of the number of existing churches; they have assumed as their standard the previous numbers of practising clergymen and have thought that they would do well to maintain those numbers. The need for scientists is however another matter. If science were defined, as the economists now say, simply as a "consumption good ", the need for scientists would be just as indeterminate and as elusive as the need for clergymen or artists or literary men and the matter could, for better or for worse, be left to take care of itself. Science is however not just a "consumption good "; it is a "factor of production" and it is that property of science which is the preponderant determinant of the need for scientists. It is because their particular kind of need is so generally agreed upon that taxpayers, producers of "surplus value" and their representatives and rulers are willing to spend such great sums on the training of scientists and technologists. The tangibility and the urgency of ~his need belong in the class of hard facts. It is a hard fact in a number of senses. It is hard because it is connected with the production and the use of wealth, because it is connected in many roundabout ways with the production of "hardware ", civil as well as military. It is also a hard fact in the sense that it is extraordinarily difficult to assess. It must however be assessed, since otherwise the perhaps most widely persuasive argument for the support of scientific research and for the training of scientists and technologists is left without evidence.

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Estimates of the probable effective demand would appear to be not too difficult through the ordinary method of eliciting the opinions of businessmen regarding the numbers of scientists and technologists of different kinds they might wish to employ in the future. The same can be done with respect to the demand for trained persons in those professions by universities, other teaching establishments and governments or by any other institutions employing scientists and engineers. But the estimates are not made with regard to the rates of remuneration which would be paid and which would, when the time comes, affect the numbers which will actually be employed. The adduction of this evidence regarding future needs for productive purposes can follow a number of courses. The first is that of complete scepticism. This asserts that it is impossible to predict with any reasonable accuracy what the future effective demand will be outside higher education, where the demand can in principle be fixed by government decision, although such demand has in the past usually exceeded governmental decisions; the solution in this course is to assume that demand will not be less than at present and to proceed therefore to produce as many scientists and scientifically trained technologists as possible, given the tug of war among the proponents of the alternative uses of funds. This is what has in fact been happening in most advanced and in some underdeveloped societies, although it is not felt to be very satisfactory intellectually. It makes decisions about the future extent of scientific training and research into a political problem resolved by the usual methods of political conflict and compromise. Furthermore, it has, as in the case of engineers in India and recently of mathematicians and physicists in the United States, produced more trained persons than can find employment at expected levels of remuneration and appropriateness. It is natural that intellectually more satisfactory solutions should be sought. One of these has been to estimate the economic structure of the future on the basis of predicted rates of growth and, proceeding with a hypothetical correlation between economic structure and occupational structure (sometimes a tautology), to assert that for the hypothetical future economic structure such and such a proportion of scientists in the entire gainfully employed population will be necessary. From this the gross numerical magnitudes may be readily deduced. This procedure, or one very much like it, has been employed in what is called "highlevel" manpower planning. It has understandably fallen under the shadow of doubt in the last few years since estimates of employment opportunities have turned out to be so inaccurate. Even where governments or bodies dependent on them are the major employers of scientific and technological manpower, the outcome is usually different from the prediction based on decision. Governments are inconsistent and they are constantly confronted by unforeseen vicissitudes. Furthermore, even in countries which are thought to " p l a n " their future, the period of

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planning is almost always shorter than the period of production of scientists and technologists from secondary schools onward or from university entrance to the Ph.D. or its equivalent. Nonetheless, with all its defects, the course of "high-level manpower planning" seems to me to be better than the other major modes of solving the question. It is at least a rational procedure, even if in its present form it is too rational for an irrationally complicated world. There is a third approach to the question, one which has become part of the general effort to meet the d~fi am~ricain by closing the "technological gap ". The image of the United States has become somewhat tarnished in the world since the assassination of President Kennedy. The growth of the " n e w left" in so many countries has brought antiAmericanism to a high tide. Nonetheless, the attractive power of the American model in science and technology has scarcely been affected by this. The American expenditure of 3 per cent. of gross national product on scientific research has become a standard by which participants in science policy discussions measure the dignity of their respective countries. The 3 per cent. expenditure on research has tended to replace the "religion of the growth rate" in the minds of those concerned with development. The scientists of science in the poor countries of Asia express the hope that their countries will rise to the point of spending 1 per cent. of their gross national product on research and they believe that this is not enough. They simply think that it would be a very great improvement in a world in which 3 per cent. is the ideal. For them it is at present an unattainable ideal but it remains the ideal nonetheless. If 3 per cent. of the gross national product is the correct scale of expenditure on research, then the number of scientists and technologists maintained by this 3 per cent. is also correct. This view of the matter has recently been given the authority of the study group on scientific manpower of the French Consultative Committee for Scientific and Technical Research. 1 If the United States will have 800,000 scientists and engineers in 1980 then France must have 200,000, the necessary allowance being made for the differences in population between the two countries. Those who argue for more generous provision to be made for scientific research and training in Western Gernaany, France, Great Britain, Spain or Italy are never tired of pointing to the number of scientists and engineers in the United States (or the Soviet Union). Science policy--and this includes scientific manpower policy--is supposed to be a rational undertaking. We all know that it has limits and that political considerations often crowd out the others. Nor is it necessarily wrong that they should sometimes do so. It is however for /

t " Prospective de la recherche scientitique et technique en France. Rapport du groupe de travail I I I : Prospective ' Probl~mes des hommes et des c h e r c h e u r s ' " , Le Progr~s Scientifique, 128 (March, 1969). A slightly abridged translation of this report will appear in the Reports and Documents section of the forthcoming issue of Minerva.

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the politicians to introduce the political considerations and not for the experts on rational procedures of science policy-making. Nonetheless, in this "cult of the 3 per cent. " and in the manpower planning conclusions which are drawn from it, this is exactly what seems to have happened, The United States and the Soviet Union are asserted to be the most powerful countries in the world and whatever they do which can in some way be connected with their power has become a model. There is a mixture of motives and reasons in this and none of them seems to me to be very admirable. One is the self-serving arguments of the friends of science who wish to take advantage of the aspirations of their political leaders for the grandeur of wealth and power. Another is the equally regrettable tendency, deep ha the human heart, to admire the powerful simply because they are powerful--although few would acknowledge this. But most important is the intellectual sloth which is entailed in the acceptance of the loosest of associations between per capita income, percentage of gross national product spent on research and the proportion of scientists among the gainfully employed, without reservations or qualifications or serious intellectual analysis. E.S.