VIEWSrnThe Myths of the Social Sciencesrnby Jack D. DouglasrnSeveral years ago one of my former roommates at Harvard,rnnow an economist with the United Nations, dropped by forrna visit. We drifted into an informal review of the social sciencerncourses we had taken at Harvard in the late 1950’s. The onernoverriding memory that we both had of those courses wasrnthat they assumed that the central planning of societies, especiallyrnof the economic segments of societies, worked. This ledrnall of Harvard’s social scientists, with no single exception werncould remember, to assume that the Soviet economic systemrnwas inherently far more rational, creative, and productive thanrnthe American.rnThat was why they believed, along with their counterparts inrnother Western governments, that the Soviets were such a gravernthreat to the West. The Soviets would soon surpass us andrnmight “bury us” economically, unless we met their threat withrna democratic form of social and economic planning. Thernform of economic planning they favored, almost universally,rnwas Keynesianism. Government planning of aggregate consumption,rnthrough the miracles of deficit financing and thern”multiplier effect,” would solve the terrible social problem ofrnthe business cycle and send us soaring onward and upward.rnThough they did not have as unified a view of general socialrnplanning, some of them soon came up with such a grand proposalrnand helped to implement it in Lyndon Johnson’s GreatrnSociety plan, euphemistically called a “program” to providernJack D. Douglas is professor emeritus of sociology at thernUniversity of California, San Diego, and author mostrnrecently of The Myth of the Welfare State.rnsome product differentiation from the totalitarian form ofrnplanning.rnMy friend and I roared with laughter as we reviewed the absurdrniron-clad assumptions and arguments of these social scientists.rnBut there was also an undercurrent of sadness to ourrndiscussion. We ourselves had wasted an awful lot of our youthfulrnhours studying piles of economic texts and other social sciencernliterature built on those bogus assumptions and arguments.rnIt had also taken us years of anguished observation andrnexperience to work our way out of them and find new foundationsrnfor our own thinking. America’s “best and brightest” socialrnscientists and policymakers had miseducated us and ourrnwhole nation. They had set us on a path of terrible waste andrnour nation on a path of decline, decay, corruption, and conflictrnfrom which we have not begun to recover. Indeed, we werernboth also painfully aware that the social “scientists” in ourrn”elite” universities and the policymakers of our nation were stillrnplummeting deeper into the morass of collectivist ideas.rn”Reaganomics” and “Bushonomics” involved much rhetoricrnabout “free markets,” but they were actually massive plungesrninto Keynesianism and all that entailed.rnI do not mean to imply that everything taught in the socialrnsciences at Harvard and the “elite” universities in general hasrnbeen wrong for the past 40 years—although I do grant the possibility.rnAfter all, anyone seriously surveying this history fromrnthe vantage point of what has actually happened over therndecades, including the collapse of the Soviet threat and thernrapid decline of our Keynesian economies, must carefullyrnweigh the possibility that much of what people learned inrn16/CHRONICLESrnrnrn