Policy Sciences 5 (1974), pp. 131-136

9 Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company, Amsterdam--Printed in Scotland

The Critical Path to Growth* SIR CHARLES G O O D E V E Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, London, U.K.

ABSTRACT Growth has for long been accepted as one of the major objectives of most people. Recently it has been challenged from a number of directions and the challengers have been counter-challenged. The inadequacy of scientific evidence lays the field open for much controversy, but the questions which have been brought into prominence are of great importance and demand answers. These answers in turn require knowledge associated with many branches of the physical, biological and social sciences. The techniques of operational research can be and are being used to assemble and blend the evidence. These techniques can also show up the gaps and the obstacles in the path to progress.

The first I F O R S conference was held in Oxford in 1957. Its major task was to prescribe the objective and functions of this branch of science and to establish its disciplines. One of these functions was to form a bridgehead between the natural and the social sciences; there was a large and growing gap between the two. One can look back over these fifteen years with satisfaction in regard to the development and use of operational research (OR) techniques to assist in decision making by management both in industry and government, but only with disappointment in the use of these techniques in the application of social science knowledge generally. Today we see economists in disarray and seeking refuge by hiding from the growing problems of society. We see our precious "freedom of choice" so badly abused that the press and many responsible public figures are reacting and pressing for more controls, for more powers to the center, for a move towards dictatorship. We have recently seen in Britain the law-lords joining the many politicians who do not accept the basic laws of economics. To all this has been added the spread of the antigrowth movement. All these phenomena are hardly surprising in view of our failure to advance our knowledge of how society works or could work, or even to make more widely known what knowledge we have. On the occasion of the Sixth International OR Conference I suggested that the OR world should resolve to re-examine this challenge. Perhaps the most noticeable example of failure to understand the mechanisms of society is the current controversy related to growth. Here the issues are not only * Slightly revised version of a paper presented at the Sixth Conference of the International Federation of Operations Research Societies, Dublin, Ireland, August 1972. 131

technological, i.e. based on the physical and biological sciences but also social and political. Indeed the latter two with their much less rigid disciplines of logic are tending to overwhelm the more rigid disciplines of the natural sciences. The objectives of the group advocating certain courses of action are seldom specifically clarified. Worse still the facts are selected or distorted to support objectives believed in by individuals prominent in the controversy. The controversy is likely thus to lie in the objectives rather than in the actions. Very often it is simply in the meaning of words. One of the cardinal principles of OR is that a group should be helped to ascertain its objectives and should not have its objectives imposed upon it. By definition, the objectives of a group are the things the members of a group want. Their choice of these may of course be influenced by persuasive individuals. If you accept this as the basic method of clarifying objectives, it is not difficult to find a definition for the word "growth" in the context of the current controversies. Growth is an increase in the satisfaction o f all people's wants.

This is a less precise but also less controversial meaning of the word than that used by many. But it is a much more satisfactory one because it refers not just to material wants but rather to a whole package of wants, including psychological, that form the basis of human behaviour. This package includes the wanting of children or at least of the actions that lead to children. It also includes the wanting to continue to live and thus it involves the growth of population. It implies a degree of equality of satisfaction between people. Growth as defined here is difficult to measure but not impossible. Opinion surveys or even migration can be useful. A theoretical method was described in the concluding paper to the second IFORS Conference. This measures the expected satisfaction or "eudemony" of one geographic or social state compared with another by observing the net migration between the two. Much more needs to be said. People's wants differ and worse still, the satisfaction of one person's or one group's wants puts restraints or limits on the satisfaction of other persons' or groups' wants. To OR people this is a typical case of multiple and divergent objectives, not one to be solved by propaganda but by careful analysis and the presentation to the group or the world of a balanced picture. What do we get instead ? A highly exaggerated presentation of doom by many people, including ecologists, which has generated a vigorous defensive reaction from many economists, scientists, industrialists and others. The whole subject has become polarized, with most people taking up a position either for or against growth; there are few people in mid-position, keen to analyse and to seek a balance. The exaggeration of the antigrowth people is perhaps due to the difficulties of alerting the public to real risks in the face of the fact that people by and large want growth, want it very strongly. Threats of curtailment are resented. But is exaggeration the best method of getting an idea across ? No scientist likes it bu it may be necessary in order to produce an impact. Many OR people will have read the book The Limits to Growth, a report to the Club of Rome by Dennis L. Meadows and others1 which followed W o r m Dynamics 1 D. L. Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth New York: Universe Books, 1972. 132

by J. W. Forrester.2 This book starts in a moderate key but almost immediately descends into extravagances of "catastrophes" or of "collapse of society" which can only be avoided by restraining growth, even of things that people want most. The computer, which to an OR man is a basic tool or "ploughshare," is used by Forrester and Meadows as a "sword" to alert people to a danger which may or may not face us sooner than we think. It must be very difficult to get people worried about the hothouse effect of a rise in the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, when they have suffered the discomfort of a 1972 so-called "summer." It also must be very difficult to get people worried about limitations to resources which are unlikely to come in the lives of anyone living today. The future often ranks low in people's thoughts and ecologists have done a service if only by bringing it more into prominence. This whole subject area is too big, too complex and too important to treat properly in this paper. There are hundreds of people in it already. What can the OR people contribute ? The answers are manifold but I can only pick a few problems where OR techniques should prove useful. The first problem is the balancing or the realignment of objectives in the package of wants referred to above. Objectives are related to motivations which are forces and these usually pull in different directions. Through analysis one can find whether the objectives are realignable or whether they can only be resolved by compromise. For example an objective of satisfaction some time in the future is often in the opposite direction to satisfaction today, an either/or situation. People differ widely in the relative importance they put on the future but they would have less difficulty in deciding the best balance if they knew how these two objectives were related. Employees sometimes object if their employers make and retain a profit but do not realize that their security for the future depends very much on profits. Much has been written on the factors which affect population growth but it is still one of the most unpredictable characteristics of society. Many of the factors can be measured with substantial accuracy, but other factors such as education, degree of affluence or poverty, religion, ethics, etc. are only vaguely understood and indeed are controversial. This is a very serious problem and every scientific approach should be used. At the moment population growth is greatest in those countries which do not have the technical skill and the resources to feed and clothe themselves properly. Yet most of the education or propaganda for control is in the countries that can feed themselves. Perhaps this will right itself. People want children to give them support and companionship in ill-health or old age but this need diminishes with growth as defined here. In deciding to have more children the danger to these children of dying by starvation or of violence can perhaps be given more weight. This situation of local overpopulation formerly was solved by mass migration but the acceptability of this cure is on the decline as the infrastructure of a receiving country plays a greater and greater part in its eudemony. The indigenous population of a country claim an ownership right to their infrastructure and sharing it with newcomers does not accord with their own desire for growth. Currently there exists a poor substitute for migration in the form of so-called "aid" but nevertheless the 2 J. W. Forrester, World Dynamics Cambridge, Mass. : Wright-Allen Press, 1971. 133

economic gap between the rich and the poor nations continues to grow. One can tear down Meadows' exponential growth of population as much as one wishes but we are still left with this problem of imbalance, one which is already with us. A third problem is that of establishing indices of urgency or priorities for the many problems brought into the open by ecologists. What do we need to worry about and how much do we need to worry ? What aspects should we tackle first and how urgent are they ? We need a worry or urgency index. To illustrate this let us look again at the growth of CO2 in the atmosphere through the burning of fossill fuel. The CO2 content is not difficult to measure but its effect on the climate is very uncertain. Any model must take into account the relative cloud cover over the globe between day and night, the dynamics of the oceans and their ability to absorb CO2, plus many other factors. Much work is being done on this and we can focus attention on the possible consequences and remedies. Nobody is going to worry much about a small rise in average temperature and anyway it is almost impossible to isolate a change due to CO2 from those due to other more natural causes. Indeed there is growing evidence that natural and so far unlocated causes are at the moment producing a cooling effect which may continue for 50 years or so. So we have some time .before we need to start worrying and well before then our children or grandchildren are likely to know whether there is a need to worry or not. In the past, drastic climatic chafiges have required thousands of years. Any index of urgency is likely to be dominated by a quantity which is a ratio between the predicted time (in the denominator) of a given change and the time required to take action to prevent that change having serious consequences. A second important part of this index would be the cost/benefit ratio of the action and its effect. So long as the combined ratio is well below unity there is little need for worry. This appears to be the case in regard to CO2 but numerous people would be happier if they knew that a close watch was being kept on the Antarctic icecap, the melting of which would lead to a rise in the level of the oceans. Indeed such a rise might occur through causes unconnected with CO2. Similarly indices of urgency should be established for the nonrenewability of resources. This would include the effects of the automatic negative feedback of the price mechanism, the omission of which by Meadows has hardly attracted support from economists. It would also include the fact that searches for more reserves are strongly held back by the commercial disadvantages of diverting effort today to find resources unlikely to be wanted for 20, or even 50, years hence; discount cash flow calculations here act as a deterrent to expenditure for the future. This suggestion of an index of urgency, a "worry index," needs much more refining. Its evaluation falls right in the middle of the OR area. It needs a model to establish and quantify effects, it needs methods of resolving multiple and conflicting objectives and it needs the presentation of results to get commitments to them. I come now to my fourth and by far the most important example of a problem area where OR techniques should be able to help, an area that has been hinted at in the opening two paragraphs and one which led to the choice of title for this paper. The paths leading to growth as defined above have many obstacles to surmount and man's ability to do so is dependent upon his knowledge, including, I repeat, the 134

distribution of knowledge. The increase in knowledge in the physical and biological areas is to some extent keeping pace with man's problems that are arising from growth; indeed the pace of growth is set by such increases in knowledge and by its dissemination. But physical and biological growth h a s led to a shrinkage of this "One Earth" of ours. The advances of technology, of transportation, of communication, of commerce, even of medicine have vastly increased the interdependence of one person on another and of one group on another. One person's decisions and actions are more and more likely to restrain the choices open to others. Man is an emotional animal and he resents restraints, particularly when he misunderstands or does not accept some of the reasons for them. This resentment is the basic cause of conflict and conflict can escalate rapidly to the point where its wasteful aspects vastly overshadow its benefits. The scientific analysis of social conflict is in its very early stages but some things are known. Like an epidemic, conflict can feed on itself and grow with astonishing speed. "Explosive" is a better adjective than "exponential." More important is that the background of interdependence, restraints, stress and ignorance is with us today; it is not just a problem for our children. Conflict or its threat is not only the earliest but the biggest obstacle to growth. It is the manifestation of the shrinking earth with its pressures of populations, of resources, of pollution. The critical path to growth is one which surmounts or avoids this obstacle of conflict.

The problem of setting up a framework in which to find or build this path is one for all of us to try to solve. Its solution will make manageable most of the physical and biological limits to growth and will prevent or at least modify the "catastrophes" predicted by the antigrowth ecologists. Failure to find a solution leaves open the expectation of sudden bursts of conflict which could exceed these predictions. Our worry index here has a high positive value. One might say that the finding of this critical path is the job of the social scientist and With that I would agree. Unfortunately the application of the social sciences is so fraught with difficulties and dangers that most social scientists withdraw from the arena of public discussion or activity. Bolder ones mix up their objectives, which are usually political, with their analyses. Some go even further and claim that it is not good social science unless the objectives are the "right" ones. A study of the social sciences and of the associated methods of working have convinced me that our best hope is that social scientists and OR people should work together on this problem. I do not underestimate the difficulties in this. Anyone going from the physical, through OR to the social sciences is struck by many differences; the complexity of the subject, the absence of attention to laws and principles, the concentration on pushing out the frontiers of each specialized subject, the small part that the experiment can play--one could go on at length. The problems get worse when one attempts to apply the findings. Political and ethical problems are bound to interfere with action. Communication becomes a severe problem. It does not matter if a man-in-the-street believes in perpetual motion but, if he is a citizen, it does matter if he believes he can consume more of the national cake without leaving less for others or believes that a government or an industry can control prices without 135

control of costs. How can one communicate a truth, once found, to those who need to know, when one is faced with a multitude of pens, all writing different and incompatible things--it is hardly any wonder that the sword has become mightier than the pen. What is written or spoken, or let us say believed, is chosen not by reason but by the degree of comfort it gives to the recipient. Despite all these difficulties we have managed to start a small Unit at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London which is applying social science and OR to the analysis of wasteful conflict. Resources are low but confidence in achieving something useful is high. We have already gone a long way in extracting from the vast literature certain key laws and principles which have a high validity and are relevant to conflict. We are now exploring the problems of communication of these to part o f the citizenship and of observing the results. Some people have expressed a worry that OR has pushed its frontiers nearly to the limit. Anyone feeling like this should look beside him at this vast area of applied social science which needs his help.

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