My work
Until recently I was a D.Phil. student in the University of Oxford’s Faculty of History, supervised by Dr. Gareth Davies and Professor Avner Offer. I passed my viva at the start of March 2010 and am currently teaching at the University of Reading and working as Mellon Fund Research Assistant at the University of Oxford, whilst looking for a permanent academic job.
My research examines efforts by coalitions of academics and politicians to re-define America’s national purpose through the use of social science knowledge, specifically the various attempts in the last century to establish a ‘Social Report of the President’. A Social Report was intended to discuss issues outside the remit of the annual Economic Report of the President, thereby shifting public debate towards the consideration of how government policies could raise the nation’s quality of life beyond simply maximising economic growth. In the twentieth century, three American governments published Social Reports, and two more considered following suit. The US was in fact the first country to publish a Social Report, and a great deal of social measurement was incorporated into governance procedures as a result of the social reporting drive, yet a Social Report never came to be institutionalised in American government, in contrast to the situation in some seventeen other nations. My research seeks to explain the provenance of the social reporting idea, and its impact on the American state, with reference to both academic and political developments, and their interplay. It draws upon archival materials from the Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter Presidential libraries, the Library of Congress, the US National Archives, and interviews with key participants, up to Vice Presidential level.
The research has broad intellectual significance for several reasons: it shows the extent to which American policy-making has long been undergirded by a faith in applied rationality; it illuminates the ideational and institutional tensions between expert-led and democratic governance; and it demonstrates that social scientists have had a greater influence on the setting of domestic policy, particularly in the 1970s, than commonly acknowledged by historians of public policy. The study is also important for the way it challenges historiographical conventions. Much political history emphasises the importance of the public face of politics – elections, parties, public opinion, political rhetoric. Such work tends to lend credence to historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s notion that alternating cycles of reform and reaction characterise American politics. My work is concerned with a more subterranean politics that complicates standard efforts to demarcate political periods. Surprisingly, the research shows that the infrastructure for federal social reporting was often strengthened during Presidencies that historians tend to think of as disposed to cutting back government functions. Finally, the research provides a novel perspective on the policies of Presidential administrations from Hoover to Reagan: internal debates over whether to sponsor the development of a Social Report often indicated how each administration wished their actions to be measured, illuminating their core operating rationales.
The first part of the thesis examines the roots of the social indicators movement, which extend back to Progressive era (1890-1920) drives to reform a political system widely seen as corrupt and unable to cope with rapid economic and social change. The Progressives’ solution was to institutionalise dispassionate expertise in the political process – social scientists would recommend policies based upon the systematic analysis of social and economic trends. Engineers were the heroes of this increasingly mechanised and prosperous age, and formed a vanguard with social scientists and philanthropic foundation trustees, pushing for technocratic governance. As President, the ‘Great Engineer’ Herbert Hoover quickly established a nationwide study on social trends to inform a program of rational reform. The economic collapse of the 1930s eclipsed the drive for social reform and New Deal forays into economic and social planning fomented a resurgent antistatism and antipathy to planning in Congress. However, World War II demonstrated anew the potential of expert-led governance and the harnessing of technology. The techniques of rational management honed in wartime would be further developed in the institutions of the national security state and in the nation’s large corporations, catalysed by optimism over the possibilities for harnessing the power of computers. Social planning for the purpose of social reform had given way to technical management to achieve efficiency. Amid the prosperity of the postwar years economists displaced engineers as the profession best embodying technocratic competence; the Council of Economic Advisers appeared to have honed the management of the economy to a fine art.
Once the political environment became more conducive to social reform in the early 1960s, faith in the principles and methods of rational management would underpin the drive to measure the state of society. In the late 1950s the domestic consensus which had marked the Cold War years first began to show signs of cracking. Two newly-salient political issues would lead to the Johnson Administration undertaking a project to publish a social report. Firstly a ‘postmaterialist’ literature and environmentalist movement began to critique the widespread assumption that economic growth was an accurate measure of social well-being. Secondly the emergent civil rights movement highlighted societal inequities. Liberal politicians would see a social report as a tool to measure inequality of opportunity across society, as a means to monitor progress to achieving the preconditions for full social inclusivity. I cover the projects to develop a social report in the Johnson and Nixon Administrations in detail in the second part of my thesis. The coalition which supported the development of a social report during the Johnson Administration was soon exposed as being partly held together by early optimism over the prospects for societal improvement through government social programs, and semantic confusion over the meaning, and utility, of ‘social indicators’. The development of a prototype Social Report of the President, published in 1969, revealed that social science knowledge lagged some way behind its proponents’ ambitions.
Faith in technocratic governance largely persisted through the 1970s in Congress. New surveys and refined social science theory raised the technical standards and coverage of American social reporting. All Administrations up to the Reagan Administration supported forays into social reporting, but in the austerity of the 1970s the political winds blew rightwards. The idea of a social report had become associated with building support for Federal government social programs, and faced numerous obstacles to its institutionalisation within the Federal government. The third part of the thesis examines the persistence of the social indicators movement through this inauspicious political climate, and its legacy today.
Shown are several of the key players in the early ’social indicators movement’: Bertram Gross (draftsman of the Full Employment Act of 1946 and the Council of Economic Advisers’ first executive secretary, a key lobbyist for social reporting in the Johnson Administration); Walter Mondale (as Senator, Mondale’s Full Opportunity and Social Accounting Act passed the Senate twice and created considerable impetus for social reporting. However as Vice President during a period of economic austerity his interest in the subject declined); Wilbur Cohen (HEW Secretary under LBJ and a key advocate for the institutionalisation of a social reporting capacity in the Federal government); Alice Rivlin (Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at HEW under Cohen and manager of Mancur Olson at this time, later the first director of the Congressional Budget Office); Mancur Olson (chief author of the LBJ Administration’s attempt at a social report and later a highly influential economist); and the initial product of their labours – Toward a social report.
Below are some of the many important public figures who supported the social reporting idea in the 1970s: Ex-domestic aide to LBJ Joseph Califano’s testimony on behalf of Senator Mondale’s Full Opportunity Act (to institutionalise a social reporting capacity in the Federal government) caused the White House to take the legislation seriously; Daniel Patrick Moynihan, as domestic counsellor to Nixon, persuaded the President to establish the National Goals Research Staff; Leonard Garment served as chairman of this White House staff unit until its dissolution in mid-1970; Vice President Nelson Rockefeller attempted to introduce elements of governance-by-social-indicators into the Ford Administration, with limited success; Finally two unlikely allies from their time as junior congressmen in the late 1970s – Newt Gingrich and Albert Gore Jr. – were united in their support for the use of social indicators to aid policy making and anticipate future national problems.
