Dr. Doomsday's Sunshine Scenario

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE COMING BOOM by Herman Kahn; Simon & Schuster; 237pages; $14.95

The latest sooth, says the veteran think-tank commander Herman Kahn, is that prosperity and stability are probably just around the next bell curve. Barring bad luck and bad management, the last 18 years of the century should see higher productivity, lower inflation and a resurgence of traditional values. This upbeat news comes from a man who has taken a particular pleasure in bucking intellectual trends. Kahn, a co-founder and director of the Hudson Institute, infuriated liberals of the early '60s with two books that can still start an argument. On Thermonuclear War and Thinking About the Unthinkable asserted a simple premise: since an exchange of atomic weapons was possible, speculation on the circumstances and consequences of such conflict was natural and useful.

Kahn gave the public one of its first looks at the world of war games and doomsday scenarios, linkages of events that could trigger a nuclear catastrophe. It all read like a strange new genre: a nonfiction science fiction for an age of "value-neutral" technocrats. Predictably, traditional humanists who felt their influence slipping considered Kahn's intellectual game playing to be an amoral acceptance of mass annihilation. Kahn is, in fact, a conservative moralist. He is also a systems evangelist who puts his faith in the power of reason and works hard to appear more holistic than thou. The result is a fast-talking, all-inclusive style that announces to laymen and rival alike: "My big picture is bigger than your big picture."

And getting bigger. It would be futile to put a frame around The Coming Boom. The book is more like a sprawling by-the-numbers kit used to paint the dome of a new Renaissance chapel. There the enervated finger of post-industrial Adam is about to be plugged into the socket of divine science. One can even find a title for this vaulting masterpiece: CI. It stands for command, control, communications, computing/information and intelligence. Kahn is not too specific about command and control. His discussion of CI other components describes an information network that he believes should enable government and business to make faster and better decisions. What of the Big Brother potential? He admits the danger, but with the impatience for outside skeptics that characterizes his book, he concludes that the benefits of "massive data banks" would outweigh the risks.

Kahn's sunshine scenario has no room for the critics he labels neo-liberal symbolists. Again, the author is soft on specifics. His futurology appears to be identifying a group as yet unborn. Perhaps "neoliberal" is simply a term invented to oppose "neo-conservative." The derisive use of "symbolists" suggests that the author himself does not communicate in symbols. He does. What, in fact, are words and pseudomathematical formulations like CI?

Kahn seeks to project a lofty vision in which high tech creates pure information that experts like himself analyze and turn into policy options. He speaks the language of government and business. The objects of his criticism are frequently dead horses: the romantic rebels of the '60s and the insular faddists of the '70s. He applauds Reaganomics but doubts that the present Administration has the technical skills to fulfill its ideology.

Then why expect a boom? Kahn's broadest reason is apolitical: a slowing of population growth and a continuing rise in gross world product should mean that there will be more to go around. In the U.S., he offers the possibility of a $5 trillion gross national product in 2000 that would mean a per capita income of about $20,000. There is no prediction about how this wealth will trickle to 250 million Americans. There is guarded optimism about inflation. Inflation, of course, is very thinkable, though Kahn's thoughts on how to deal with it are fairly familiar. They include indexing, creative financing, energy policies and a modified yes on a worldwide gold standard.

The Coming Boom is, as its title booms, a call to optimism. The question is: How much? If the book's promise is taken at face value, the reader will be disappointed. Kahn occasionally sounds like Annie singing "Tomorrow .. . Tomorrow." But these strained high notes are immediately followed by flat-out qualification: ifs, maybes and "Scotch verdicts," which he describes as "good enough for our purposes." The small print in this social contract gets irritating. One sentence announces a new dynamism, but the next pulls back to "a good possibility for substantial improvement." Some paragraphs seem to have been written in a kind of probable-perfect tense (see Excerpt).

Kahn would be a more convincing positive thinker if he stopped trying to bully readers with his raw intelligence. His practice of blitzing an audience with conjecture and perceptions, as if they were facts, may be stimulating in a lecture hall but is unsatisfying in a book. His proposal to promote conservative virtues with conferences and public relations campaigns, as if values were so many hamburgers, is simply materialism as usual. The spirit gets only lip service, which is no way to build lasting confidence. Investors in The Coming Boom should be careful. At times like these, one can never be too thin or too diversified.

--By R.Z. Sheppard

Excerpt

"The United States will not exceed (or even return to) the relative dynamism of the 1950s, when it was less dynamic in terms of its rate of economic growth than it had been in its first 'good' era (1886-1913), and did not even show any catch-up phenomena to make up for the 'bad' years (1914-1947) as almost all other advanced economies did ... The United States is now rich enough, and 'postindustrial' enough, that long-term social limits to growth are beginning to take effect. Even if it has a successful revitalization, its potential for long-term economic growth will still begin to slow down ... The relative 'stagnation' which results from this is due less to physical constraints than to specific acts of mismanagement, to new emphases ... to growing hostility to 'creative destruction,' and to other social limits. But despite these likely long-term trends, and barring major setbacks (whether originating in the Middle East, the Soviet bloc, the OPEC countries, or the United States), we think domestic revitalization--a boom--is a matter of when, not if. "

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