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WHO SHALL DECIDE?
WHO SHALL DECIDE?
Pages 130-141
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From page 130... ...
But what may be functional to the advancement of the individual and his profession may come to be inappropriate for social problem solving. Then, too, the thinking, the logic, and the conclusions of experts include hidden value judgments that either lie beyond their fields of expertise or are not shared by their peers or by the society for which they purport to speak.
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From page 131... ...
propeller had the power of propelling a...vessel, it would be found altogether useless in practice, because the power being applied in the stern it would be absolutely impossible to make the vessel steer." Sir William Symonds, Surveyor of the British Navy, 1837 If, therefore, experts display themselves to be as fallible as the rest of us within their own areas of expertise, some persons have begun to ask for their credentials for claiming our unquestioning assent when they move outside their fields and begin to forecast social and cultural consequences of the technologies they purvey. Even if we were to grant (and there is little reason for doing so)
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From page 132... ...
He describes how economic rationality has gradually been gaining dominance over social and political choices: Most of the sociocultural changes occurring in the Western world in recent centuries are either a part of, or a result of, economic and technological progress. One cultural element after another has been absorbed into the ever-widening economy, subjected to the test of economic rationality, rationalized, and turned into a commodity or factor of production.
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From page 133... ...
For example, more single family dwellings, urged on by mortgage policies that implicitly value economic development more than environmental preservation, mean more strip mines and greater pressure to build large-scale and more polluting energy parks. How do we balance these two conflicting tendencies, one that apparently improves our well-being, the other that reduces it, both of them hard to measure?
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From page 134... ...
For although the growth of suburbs and the increased travel suburbanites needed to obtain services were certainly facilitated by the availability of inexpensive gasoline, mortgage and land-use policies quite unrelated to energy concerns were also important factors. This is not to say that decisions to subsidize suburbanization and single family dwellings were incorrect but only that they were made on the basis of individualistic values, perhaps to the exclusion of micro- and macro-economic considerations.
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From page 135... ...
The Energy Research and Development Administration (1976) spoke of developing energy resources in ways that will not restrict lifestyle choices because of energy availability -- but the direct and indirect costs associated with making increasingly larger amounts of various energy forms available will themselves restrict lifestyle choices to some degree, because rising costs will fall disproportionately on the poor, because the environmental values that are dear to some groups may be sacrificed in the interests of higher energy production for the nation as a whole, and because centralized decision making appears to be a necessary concomitant of any high-energy future.
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From page 136... ...
1976. A National Plan for Energy Research, Development, and Demonstration: Creating Energy Choices for the Future.
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