MAT 2006

It is easy to accept Freud as an applied scientist, and, indeed he is widely regarded as the twentieth century's master clinician. However, in viewing Marx as an applied social scientist, the stance needed is that of a Machiavellian operationalism. The objective is neither to bury nor to praise him. The assumption is simply that he is better understood for being understood as an applied sociologist. This is in part the clear implication of Marx's Theses on Feurbach, which culminate in the resounding 11th thesis: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways; the point, however, is to change it". This would seem to be the tacit creed of applied scientists everywhere. Marx was no Faustian, concerned solely with understanding society, but a Promethean who sought to understand it well enough to influence and to change it. He was centrally concerned with the social problems of a lay group, the proletariat, and there can be little doubt that his work is motivated by an effort to reduce, their suffering, as he saw it. His diagnosis was that their increasing misery and alienation engendered endemic class struggle; his prognosis claimed that this would culminate in revolution; his therapeutic prescription was class consciousness and active struggle. Here, as in assessing Durkheim or Freud, the issue is not whether this analysis is empirically correct or scientifically adequate. Furthermore, whether or not this formulation seems to eviscerate Marx's revolutionary core, as critics on the left may charge, or whether the formulation provides Marx with a new veneer of academic respectability, as critics on the right may allege, is entirely irrelevant from the present standpoint. Insofar as Marx's or any other social scientist's work conforms to a generalised model of applied social science, insofar as it is professionally oriented to the values and social problems of laymen in his society, he may be treated as an applied social scientist. Despite Durkheim's intellectualistic proclivities and rationalistic pathos, he was too much the product of European turbulence to turn his back on the travail of his culture. "Why strive for knowledge of reality, if this knowledge cannot aid us in life", he asked. "Social science", he said, "can provide us with rules of action for the future". Durkheim, like Marx, conceived of science as an agency of social action, and like him was professionally oriented to the values and problems of laymen in his society. Unless one sees that Durkheim was in some part an applied social scientist, it is impossible to understand why he concludes his monumental study of Suicide with a chapter on "Practical Consequences", and why, in the Division of Labour, he proposes a specific remedy for anomie. Durkheim is today widely regarded as a model of theoretic and methodologic sophistication, and is thus usually seen only in his capacity as a pure social scientist. Surely this is an incomplete view of the man who regarded the practical effectiveness of a science as its principal justification. To be more fully understood, Durkheim also needs to be seen as an applied sociologist. His interest in religious beliefs and organisation, in crime and penology, in educational methods and organisation, in suicide and anomie, are not casually chosen problem areas. Nor did he select them only because they provided occasions for the development of his theoretical orientation. These areas were in his time, as they are today, problems of indigenous interest to applied sociologist in Western Society, precisely because of their practical significance.

Unemployment is an important index of economic slack and lost output, but it is muchmore than that. For the unemployed person, it is often a damaging affront to human dignity and sometimes a catastrophic blow to family life. Nor is this cost distributed in proportion to ability to bear it. It falls most heavily on the young, the semiskilled and unskilled, the black person, the older worker, and the underemployed peeson in a low income rural area who is denied the option of securing more rewarding urban employment.

The concentrated incidence of unemployment among specific groups in the population means far greater costs to society that can be measured simply in hours of involuntary idleness of dollars of income lost. The extra costs include disruption of the careers of young people, increased juvenile delinquency, and perpetuation of conditions which breed racial discrimination in employment and otherwise deny equality of opportunity. There is another and more subtle cost. The social and economic strains of prolonged underutilisation create strong pressures for costincreasing solutions. On the side of labour, prolonged high unemployment leads to "sharethework" pressures for shorter hours, intensifies resistance to technological change and to rationalisation of work rules, and, in general, increases incentives for restrictive and inefficient measures to protect existing jobs. On the side of business, the weakness of markets leads to attempts to raise prices to cover high average overhead costs and to pressures for protection against foreign and domestic competition. On the side of agriculture, higher prices are necessary to achieve income objectives when urban and industrial demand for foods and fibers is depressed and lack of opportunities for jobs and higher incomes in industry keep people on the farm. In all these cases, the problems are real and the claims understandable. But the solutions suggested raise costs and promote inefficiency. By no means the least of the advantages of full utilisation will be a diminution of these pressures. They will be weaker, and they can be more firmly resisted in good conscience, when markets are generally strong and job opportunities are plentiful. The demand for labour is derived from the demand for the goods and services which labour participates in producing. Thus, unemployment will be reduced to 4 per cent of the labour force only when the demand for the myriad of goods and services―automobiles, clothing, food, haircuts, electric generators, highways, and so on--is sufficiently great in total to require the productive efforts of 96 per cent of the civilian labour force. Although, many goods are initially produced as materials or components to meet demands related to the further production of other goods, all goods (and services) are ultimately destined to satisfy demands that can, for convenience, be classified into four categories; consumer demand, business demand for new plants and machinery and for additions to inventories, net export demand of foreign buyers, and demand of government units, federal, state and local. Thus gross national product (GNP), our total output, is the sum of four major components of expenditure; personnel consumption expenditures, gross private domestic investment, net exports and government purchases of goods and services. The primary line of attack on the problem of unemployment must be through measures which will expand one or more of these components of demand. Once a satisfactory level of employment has been achieved in a growing economy, economic stability requires the maintenance of a continuing balance between growing productive capacity and growing demand. Action to expand demand is called for not only when demand actually declines and recession appears but even when the rate of growth of demand falls short of the rate of growth of capacity.

Pick out the effective pair of words from the given choices A, B, C and D in each of these questions to make the sentence meaningfully complete.