Ian M Hart - History DPhil student 

I am a D.Phil. student (and a part-time research assistant) in the University of Oxford’s Modern History Department, supervised by Professor Avner Offer and Dr. Gareth Davies. My research looks at the efforts of a coalition of academics, politicians and businessmen in America to re-define the national purpose through the use of social science knowledge, circa 1965-1981. Working according to the old business adage that “what gets measured gets done” they sought the annual publication of a Federal ‘social report’ analogous to the Economic Report of the President. The social report would have informed discussion of the nation’s priorities and future direction by showcasing trends in educational attainment, environmental pollution, crime levels and other social statistics, and relating the figures to government policies. For its liberal proponents the social report promised to redefine the very idea of national progress, going beyond the singular figure of the gross national product used as a de facto measure of progress at the time (as it still is today) towards a more comprehensive and humanistic conception. But this was not just an idea of the left, it enjoyed wide support for a time. The breadth of this ‘social indicators movement’ was illustrated by the fact that, in the early 1970s, even the National Association of Manufacturers lobbied the Nixon Administration to establish a planning capacity to use data on social trends to aid business and government planning.

Drawing on archival sources and interviews with key participants my research aims to account for the provenance, extent and limits of the social reporting idea in American government circa 1965-1980. This will inform several areas of scholarship in contemporary American political history:

1. The character of the Great Society project. I consider the social reporting idea to be emblematic of an approach to politics I shall label “managerial liberalism”, which those driving the Great Society project wished to attain. This political ethos centred upon a faith that rationally-derived government policies could maximise social well-being. I believe that studying the rise of the social reporting project during the Johnson years can inform discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the Johnson Administration’s approach to domestic politics. This is particularly the case when the rational managerial approach is contrasted with the haphazard fashion in which many of the Office of Economic Opportunity’s programs were conceived and initiated.
2. The character(s) of the Nixon Administration. Studying the Nixon Administration’s variable support for the social reporting idea focuses attention on the starkly different operating creed which characterised the first eighteen months of the Administration compared to the remaining years. Support for social reporting depended upon the Administration’s willingness to adopt an interventionist domestic policy stance and to plan for the long-term social well-being of the nation.
3. The changing nature of liberal and conservative groups’ political attitudes in America. Different ideological groupings’ attitudes to key issues such as whether the government should highlight and redress social inequities, or whether the government should engage in long-term planning, and how these attitudes changed through the 1970s.
4. The importance of economic growth as a political backdrop to modern U.S. politics. This study will shed light on the degree of primacy given to economic growth, vis-à-vis concern for increasing social opportunity, at different stages of economic and political cycles. It will also illuminate why the G.N.P. remains the pre-eminent measure of national progress today, despite efforts by the inventor of the index Simon Kuznets, and other Nobel Prize winning economists, to stress the measure’s inappropriateness for such a function.
5. Shifting attitudes to the use of social science knowledge and the proper role of unelected experts in government.
6. The structure of government, specifically the suitability of a system designed nearly 200 years previously to manage rapid social change, and the modifications which the Executive and Legislative branches underwent to cope. The degree to which the lack of an institutionalised government foresight capability and consequent capacity for systematic long-term policy making impeded the optimal functioning of the American political system. The degree to which changes in the structure of government, both in the executive (the establishment of systematic management techniques, the changed configuration of OMB and the Domestic Council, later the Domestic Affairs Council) and the legislature (the establishment of the Congressional Research Service, Office of Technology Assessment, Congressional Budget Office) expanded policy makers’ informational resources.
7. Illuminate changing national priorities over c.1965-1980, particularly the fluctuating propensity to look to the future. The degree to which Maslow’s ‘hierarchy of needs’ concept can apply to a nation, not just an individual. Evidence for changing national priorities in this period comes from a variety of sources but the most salient individual example the study will present is the contrast between Senator Walter Mondale’s introduction and assiduous promotion of a bill to establish a Council of Social Advisers, 1967-1973, and the absence of efforts by Vice President Mondale to institutionalise a social reporting capacity within the executive.
8. Factual description of the increased collection, collation and analysis of social and economic statistics within government and without c. 1958-1980. No such historical account currently exists.

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.