INNOVATION POLICY AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

This paper offers a rationale for expanding current efforts to support industrial innovation to encompass the important and unique contributions that the social sciences can make in this area. In order to provide a comprehensive overview of these contributions, the paper examines the role that social factors play in the process of technological innovations, the importance of social innovations, and the potential contributions of social science research to the diffusion of innovation as well as its importance in considering the broad social impacts of social innovations.     

POLICY EVALUATION. DEMOCRATIC THEORY. AND THE DIVISION OF SCHOLARLY LABOR

The implicit priorities of political science have been inhospitable to policy evaluation as a scholarly endeavor. Political science, at least as practiced in the West, draws from a philosophic tradition that views political life, and especially democratic political life, as a public objective, not principally as instrumental for other social ends. Comparative policy analysis deviated from that tradition by treating political conditions as independent variables. Policy evaluation, which assesses the social consequences of governmental actions, deviated even further, adopting an explicitly and totally instrumental approach. The argument ofthis essay is that the tactics of policy evaluation should be adopted for assessing the impact of policy patterns on democratic institutions and citizenship. This recommendation flows from a diagnosis of the division of labor in policy evaluation and an identification of the optimum entry points for political science.     

ECONOMIC CONVERSION: INDUSTRIAL POLICY AND DEMOCRATIC VALUES

While arms control and disarmament represent efforts to respond to the military and political factors in the arms race, there has not been a com- parable effort to reduce the economic incentives. To do so military contrac- tors would have to be able to convert their production facilities to civilian manufacturing without loss of profits or workers.     

WELFARE LIBERALISM, SOCIAL POLICY, AND POVERTY IN AMERICA

The conservative explanation for the persistence of poverty—that liberal social programs have created with disincentives-explains very little of the poverty that exists. It has gained acceptance because liberal anti-poverty efforts have been based on flawed understanding of the problem that insured their failure. Because of the oversupply of young adult workers in the 1970s, there was a proliferation of jobs paying low wages. Liberal programs that assumed that the poor simply needed training and education to lift themselves out of poverty, ignored the shortage of jobs paying above-poverty-level wages. Liberals also assumed that with the requisite training and jobs, all Americans have the capacity to gain the skills necessary to obtain those jobs. This neglects data showing that a larger proportion of individuals with low native ability have earnings beneath the poverty line than workers with normal ability, even when controlling for educational attainment. A new anti-poverty effort must take into account these realities.