Imperial Stars 1-The Stars at War (41 page)

No: his speech is predictable. He'll give some nodding acknowledgement to current hard times, predict an upswing, and tell his audience they better be prepared to buy a lot of airplanes.

Dr. Milton Friedman has a Nobel Prize in economics; one assumes he must know something about the subject. He once said, "Every economist knows that minimum wages cause unemployment. That's not a principle, it's a definition." The logic seems clear enough, at least when applied to home economics: if I can get the yard cut for a couple of bucks, I'll pay it; raise THe minimum wage to $17.50 an hour, and I'll cut it myself, or let it grow. Whomever I'd have hired will go jobless.

Of course not all economists agree with that. After all, it's not only possible, but
likely
that the Nobel Prize in economics will go in alternate years to people who disagree on nearly every fundamental. I have a textbook on macroeconomics, and every chapter essentially cancels out the last, as each "school" presents its theories—and proves the others wrong.

In point of fact, the economists don't have the foggiest notion of what's wrong with our economy or what to do about it; and the very best economics textbook have almost nothing to say about science, engineering, research, development, and technology.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. recently said, "The collapse of economic analysis is demonstrated by the hopeless cacophony of economic forecasting, where experts generally disagree with each other and nearly all turn out wrong—a circumstance that, alas, discourages neither economists from making forecasts nor the rest of us from believing them."

So: will someone tell me what, other than one's political preferences, is the difference between "professional" and "voodoo" economics? And why we pay a Council of Economic Advisors while neglecting to have a Chief Astrologer?

Go to any U.S. university. You will hear lamentation and wailing and gnashing of teeth. Washington has become unfeeling and stupidly refuses to support higher education: don't those idiots on the Potomac know that education is investment in the future? Don't they know that human resources are our most valuable resources, that public higher education is necessary preparation for a democratic future? That we must invest in the future?

But now wander about the campus, and look at how our typical university allocates that all-important investment dollar. You will find that the "social science" departments are far larger than the "hard sciences," and indeed have more students than are enrolled in liberal arts. You will find that even in states with tens of thousands of unemployed teachers, the Department of Education is among the very largest departments on campus.

The social sciences will be large and important departments, with many members of faculty and much classroom space. One wonders what it is that graduates in the social sciences are prepared to do. It must be an important skill; we are spending a large part of our scarce but all-important investment funds to acquire it. Oddly enough, though, we're not training so many engineers and scientists, physicists and mathematicians. Why?

But of course the answer is well known. In most universities, our education investment funds are allocated by entering freshmen. They go to a kind of oriental bazaar, where they are seduced into choosing a major; the number of majors then determines the department's share of the university's budget funds. It does seem an odd way to allocate an important resource.

One might suppose a better way: that the legislature, or other public authority, determine the number of engineers, biologists, physicists, medicos, sociologists, etc., that might reasonably be required in future, and allocate public funds among the departments accordingly. Students wishing to declare various majors could so do; but when the number that the taxpayers will support is exceeded, the next student to enroll in that major gets to pay tuition accordingly. If tax supported higher education is an investment—and what other theory justifies sending the tax collector, policeman, and ultimately the public hangman to extort funds from the taxpayers?—then might we have some care in the way that investment is allocated? The present scheme looks like a bad parody invented by an inept science fiction writer. Who'd believe it if it weren't happening?

At least, though, the present scheme should give us plenty of social scientists, as well as lots of professional teachers. With all those behavioral scientists we shouldn't have any problems teaching the young to read and write: even if the teachers have problems, the sociologists and psychologists can devise a scientific education program.

Only they don't. They don't even try. And when someone does succeed, as for example Marva Collins of Chicago who built quality private schools in what she called "the allegedly fetid ghetto", the "professional educators" put out reams of material calling her a "hoax" who was "carefully constructed as a media event." It really infuriates the educational professionals to find someone able to do the job they claim they can do.

Mrs. Roberta Pournelle teaches in a juvenile detention facility. Her students are teenage illiterates. Most of them come with five pounds of paperwork that definitely
proves
that this kid cannot possibly learn to read. The schools, the psychologists, the educators haven't failed; there's something wrong with the kid. Roberta throws the paperwork away and teaches the kid to read. She hasn't failed yet.

Then there's the court system. In the history of trials, there must be about three cases in which the prosecution's psychiatrist said an accused pleading not guilty by reason of insanity was nuts, and none at all in which the defense's psychiatrist said he wasn't. Yet the taxpayers continue to pay for this all too predictable "scientific" expert testimony.

This is professionalism?

And yet: we not only excuse gross incompetence among social scientists, we let them give real scientists and engineers an inferiority complex. Somehow we've swallowed whole the myth that you can be well-rounded, an educated person, although knowing no science and mathematics whatever; but engineering and science majors are automatically uncultured boors, hardly fit for polite society.

We have a Council of Economic Advisors, and we debate economic policy, and everyone listens as these soothsayers pontificate about monetary policy; and meanwhile, the President's Science Advisor is a low ranking White House official, there is no Engineering Advisory Council, and there is no cabinet level post held by an engineer. More than a majority of seats in every major legislature in the land is held by lawyers (and we wonder why the law is so complex?); but there are about two engineers in Congress, and no cabinet-level post is held by an engineer or scientist.

Now go again to your typical university. Find an engineering student and a social science student. I'll bet you anything you like that the engineer will have read about as much history and literature and genuine liberal arts as the social scientist; while the social scientist will know nothing of engineering and physics, little of biology, and no mathematics. He may protest that he "took stat"; which will mean that he knows how to do cookbook calculations to produce the mean, median, and mode of a bunch of numbers. Given a little help he may also be able to compute the standard deviation; and with a textbook and a bit of luck he might even be able to do a "T" test, although odds are that he won't have the foggiest notion of what the T test assumes.

Go now to a rally protesting a nuclear power plant. There'll be a lot of students there. How many will be engineers? And how many social scientists? Of the social scientists, how many will understand
anything
of nuclear physics? How many will know the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation?

Engineering students may apologize for deficiencies in "culture." Social activists glory in their ignorance of science. The man who started the People's Lobby, the first of California's mass anti-nuclear groups, used to say proudly, "The only physics I ever took was Ex-Lax."

The fact is that engineers and scientists will have studied far more of the liberal arts than social scientists will have studied of physics or engineering. (And alas, neither will know any history.)

Isn't it about time we ended this farce? Granted, the social sciences have a tough subject matter; but it isn't made easier by involving us all in a conspiracy to act as if they'd skills they just haven't got. It would be a lot easier to respect them if they made their students take hard courses: calculus through differential equations,
real
probability and statistics, operations research, basic computer science. Of course if their students mastered those subjects, they'd probably get out of "social science" and into something useful. Meantime, though, they can stop trying to get the rest of us to act as if they know something we don't.

I read this story not long after I returned from the Korean War; it takes place during that unhappy era, and makes use of characters and incidents of that war, and must therefore be considered an "alternate universe."

It could as easily be rewritten to take place tomorrow morning, or in the next century.

In North America, it was a bright, cool April night when Galactic Security, after several years of careful observation, decided the Solar Phoenix was a little too hot for Terrestrials to play with.

Early Warning, as was its function, made first contact as the ships flashed up over the northwestern horizon. The first report was disbelieved, it was off the grid and too high and too fast—but it was followed almost instantly by contact from three other sites. The controller made a rough mental plot from those first few tracks and did not like it at all. He gnawed his thumbnail for about thirty seconds, and by that time the tracks were going up in plot. The sight decided him. There was no time to be wrong about this, the strangers were closing too fast, better to take a chance on looking silly than to be caught short. He scrambled everything he had and transmitted a fall alert—

On the control deck of the lead ship of the second element, the captain and the task commander of the GS patrol stood watching Earth roll by them fifty miles below.

"We're being tracked," the watch officer said. He did not speak in English, of course, nor in any Earthly tongue. As a matter of fact, he did not speak at all, as we use the term.

The task commander nodded. "Let 'em track. This is task, not reconnaissance. They'll have plenty of reason to know we're here in a few minutes, anyway."

Below, off the starboard bow, a smudge of light marking an airfield suddenly winked out. "Rather effective security they have, at that," he added grudgingly, "considering their technical limitations."

"Coming on first target," the watch officer said.

The task commander glanced at the position plot and stepped over to his station. "Polka Dot Leader, Task Leader," he said, "coming on your target. Advise an execution."

"Polka Dot Leader, Roger," the speaker said, "coming on target." Thirty miles ahead, the first gleaming shape showed gaping holes along its belly as its bays slid open.

"On target," the speaker said.

An orderly array of stubby-winged projectiles drifted leisurely out of her belly.

"All clear, 1319 and a quarter," the speaker said.

"Roger," the task commander said. "Rendezvous." The empty bays of the big silver ship blinked shut and she stuck her nose up and began to climb. Below her, her progeny dipped and swung faster and faster toward Earth, while the remainder of the formation swept past above.

The task commander studied the position plot again. "Polka Dot Two," he said, "coming on your target."

The radar did not at first catch the drop, but when the lead ship left formation and began to climb, the controller smelled death on its way. Without thinking twice, he ordered Bomb Warning A. He had no way of knowing what was coming, but those ships up there were certainly nuclear powered, no chemical engine could drive that high and fast, and whatever they laid would be potent. For himself, and the personnel of plot, there was nothing he could do. They had to stay and keep trying. He did not, he thought somewhat gloomily, even have time to worry about it; at that moment the first tracks on the projectiles began to come through, as they separated from the formation, and he began to be very busy.

There was no use trying for the ships themselves, they went over at five times his interceptors' ceiling and six times their speed, he vectored everything he had in on the extrapolated drop course. Even this was useless, he soon found. As they closed with his fighters, the projectiles suddenly put on power and took evasive action. He had guessed they would, a free drop would hardly be made from that altitude and distance, but confirmation did not make him happy. The first projectile sizzled past the fighters at fifteen hundred miles an hour and streaked for the base—

Strategic Air Command alerted on the first flash, and by the time the GS patrol had made its second drop the heavies were rumbling-out onto the runways. They were armed and their eggs snuggled lethally in their bellies, but their pilots did not yet know their targets. Their mission was retaliatory, to get air-borne before the first strike hit them, and to see there were no bases for the enemy to return to. They would get their targets when the enemy was identified.

They never did get them. The first bomber was fifty miles out climbing on course when they got the bad news from their controller. A moment later their own radar picked up the bandit, closing fast from above. The turrets began to swivel, but they were not fast enough, they could not even track the enemy; as he flashed by at two thousand yards something flickered out to touch the big bomber, and it crumpled in on itself and lost speed and began to fall through the night just beginning to be touched by dawn.

The commanding general of SAC himself had observed the action by radar.