{"title":"Facing the Future","authors":"Lise Butler","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198862895.003.0007","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"This chapter examines Young’s work as founding chair of the Social Science Research Council between 1965 and 1968 in the Labour government led by Harold Wilson. It describes how Young responded to increasing anxieties about the nature of planning and expertise in the British civil service by arguing that the social sciences should play a more prominent role in government policy making. The chapter focuses mainly on Young’s Committee on the Next Thirty Years, and his proposals for an Institute of Forecasting Studies, which he unsuccessfully sought to develop as part of a transnational forecasting movement with the support of foreign intellectuals such as the American sociologist Daniel Bell and the French futurologist Bertrand de Jouvenel. The chapter also discusses the intellectual networks associated with the popular social science journal New Society, showing that this group promoted libertarian and state-critical perspectives on urban planning, and radical economic ideas like negative income tax. While the Next Thirty Years Committee was short-lived, it reflected Young’s career-long conviction that public policy should be guided by interdisciplinary social science.","PeriodicalId":202171,"journal":{"name":"Michael Young, Social Science, and the British Left, 1945-1970","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2020-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Michael Young, Social Science, and the British Left, 1945-1970","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198862895.003.0007","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This chapter examines Young’s work as founding chair of the Social Science Research Council between 1965 and 1968 in the Labour government led by Harold Wilson. It describes how Young responded to increasing anxieties about the nature of planning and expertise in the British civil service by arguing that the social sciences should play a more prominent role in government policy making. The chapter focuses mainly on Young’s Committee on the Next Thirty Years, and his proposals for an Institute of Forecasting Studies, which he unsuccessfully sought to develop as part of a transnational forecasting movement with the support of foreign intellectuals such as the American sociologist Daniel Bell and the French futurologist Bertrand de Jouvenel. The chapter also discusses the intellectual networks associated with the popular social science journal New Society, showing that this group promoted libertarian and state-critical perspectives on urban planning, and radical economic ideas like negative income tax. While the Next Thirty Years Committee was short-lived, it reflected Young’s career-long conviction that public policy should be guided by interdisciplinary social science.
本章考察了1965年至1968年期间,杨在哈罗德·威尔逊领导的工党政府中担任社会科学研究委员会创始主席期间的工作。书中描述了杨是如何通过主张社会科学应该在政府政策制定中发挥更重要的作用,来回应人们对英国公务员的规划和专业知识的本质日益增长的担忧的。这一章主要关注杨的未来三十年委员会,以及他关于建立预测研究所的建议,他试图将该研究所发展成为跨国预测运动的一部分,并得到了美国社会学家丹尼尔·贝尔(Daniel Bell)和法国未来学家贝特朗·德·朱弗内尔(Bertrand de Jouvenel)等外国知识分子的支持。本章还讨论了与流行的社会科学杂志《新社会》相关的知识分子网络,表明这个群体提倡自由主义和国家批判的城市规划观点,以及激进的经济思想,如负所得税。虽然“未来三十年委员会”的成立时间很短,但它反映了杨的长期信念,即公共政策应该以跨学科的社会科学为指导。