Estimado Don Carlos:
Este artículo, relativamente reciente, sobre una biografía de Herbert
Simon, escrita por Hunter Crowther y Herbert Heyck's me pareció muy
interesante.
Podría ser de provecho a los que participan en esta lista, sobre todo
en virtud de las discusiones relacionadas a la "eficiencia" en la
toma de decisiones organizacionales.
Si usted es tan amable de hacerselo llegar a Don Luis Fernando Díaz,
se lo agradezco ya que creo podría ser de su interés.
Gracias
SUNDAY, MAY 13, 2007
Review of H. Crowther-Heyck, Herbert A. Simon: the bounds of reason
in modern America
Herbert A. Simon: the bounds of reason in modern America. Hunter
Crowther-Heyck. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2005.
Hunter Crowther-Heyck’s Herbert A. Simon: the bounds of reason in
modern America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), is a biography
of Herbert A. Simon (1916-2001), a political scientist and pioneering
cognitive psychologist who was also a significant organizer of
interdisciplinary, computer-assisted (or computer-driven) research
into cognition on the international and national levels. The book is
based on Crowther-Heyck’s 1999 dissertation, Herbert Simon,
organization man (Thesis (Ph.D.)--Johns Hopkins University, 2000).
Crowther-Heyck is currently an assistant professor of the History of
Science at the University of Oklahoma.
Crowther-Heyck’s research, including his work on Simon, is devoted to
what he calls the “bureaucratic worldview,” as expressed by the
research interactions of the Federal Government, foundations, and
large research universities since the New Deal. Implicit in Crowther-
Heyck’s work is a concern with the fate of the individual in a public
sphere dominated by large institutions.
Herbert A. Simon grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His father, Arthur
Simon, trained in Electrical Engineering at the Technische Hochschule
in Darmstadt, immigrated to the United States in 1903. The family was
situated culturally in the German-American professional class of
Protestant or Jewish origins (Simon’s father was Jewish; Herbert
Simon became a Unitarian later in life) who strongly identified with
the nonsectarian American civic ideal of the Progressive Era, which
in Milwaukee was also the period of Socialist control of city
government. In his autobiography, Simon recounted with some pride
that he lived in a neighborhood where both corporate leaders and the
Socialist mayor Daniel Hoan were neighbors (Crowther-Heyck, pp.
16-19, 22; Herbert A. Simon, Models of my life (Basic Books, 1991),
p. 6).
In the first part of Simon’s career, starting at the University of
Chicago, where he became a graduate assistant in Political Science (a
program referred to as the “Chicago School” throughout the book) in
1936, he was involved with research into the possibilities of
professional, nonpartisan urban planning and the improvement of
public services. In the second part of his career, from the early
1950s on, based in the Graduate School of Industrial Administration
at Carnegie Institute of Technology, later Carnegie-Mellon
University, Pittsburgh, Simon became familiar with large,
institutional, digital computers, and began to concentrate on making
programs to study problem solving in collaboration with Allen Newell
(1927-1992). This programming research led to Simon and Newell’s
invention of artificial intelligence (Crowther-Heyck, chapter 10) and
for Simon, an ever-expanding set of institutional relationships, a
true research network. The question for a biographer is how to link
up these distinct phases to form a picture of Simon’s work as a
whole, and to explain the continuity of what Simon was trying to
contribute intellectually.
Notes on the text. Crowther-Heyck’s book is organized around the
events in Simon’s life up until the late 1960s. Many facts of the
life are presented in an Introduction, “(Un)bounded
rationality.” (The term “Bounded Rationality” originates with Simon.)
Each period provides a starting point for intellectual histories
constructed around the principal theme of the book, the juxtaposition
of Control and Choice. In chapter 2, Crowther-Heyck uses the
atmosphere of the University of Chicago in the 1930s to explain the
background and outlook of the Chicago School of Political Science,
particularly its preoccupation with control, here enlightened public
administration within the context of representative government. In
chapter 3, Crowther-Heyck presents a different facet of the same
environment, the interest in applying mathematics and logic, the
“sciences of control” to sociology so that research could be
constructed and interpreted as much as possible in quantitative terms
(“operationalism”). The chapter titles imply an almost mythological
narrative about Simon’s lifetime intellectual quest following
“forking paths,” an image borrowed from a short story by Borges (see
Jorge Luis Borges, “The garden of forking paths,” pp. 19-29, in:
Labyrinths (New Directions, 1964)).
The strength of the book lies in Crowther-Heyck’s explication of
ideas and institutional relationships. To get at and to digest his
interpretations, the reader has to navigate through Crowther-Heyck’s
resistance to the ideology of liberal technocracy. This resistance
emerges from statements about Simon’s personal beliefs that seem to
resonate with the author.
For example, in discussing Simon’s attitude to gender as shown by his
use of language and his treatment of women as students and
colleagues, Crowther-Heyck writes “he was typical of a generation of
liberal men who were taken rather by surprise by the need for a
women’s movement in the late 1960s but who were friendly to it so
long as it focused on equality of opportunity rather than equality of
result” (p. 19). Why does the author feel obliged to insert a slogan
about redistribution in an otherwise helpful observation about
Simon’s relative gender neutrality?
Toward the end of the book (p. 312), Crowther-Heyck comments on a
Simon colleague’s anecdote about his amazement at Simon’s compulsion
to invent and solve problems on a car trip, in an effort to temper
the impression of the colleague’s conventional and unqualified
admiration for Simon, but digresses into the following:
"Most of us chose our field because we had a passion for ideas that
was stronger than our passions for money or power or fame, else we
would not have become academic scholars, to whom money, power, and
fame are but nodding acquaintances. It is unfair to refuse to
attribute to others the same 'noble' goals that we attribute to
ourselves, just as it is unwise to refuse to analyze one’s own
motives the way one analyzes those of others."
Reading this lament about the altruism and powerlessness of
academics, one might forget that college teaching is one of the most
privileged and personally rewarding occupations in the world today,
or that Crowther-Heyck has spent much of the book showing how Simon
was able to use the advantage of his academic positions to
outmaneuver and overcome opposition (see pp. 258-259, an account of
Simon’s lobbying to force the restructuring of the graduate program
in Psychology at CIT).
Finally, in the conclusion (pp. 326-327), Crowther-Heyck presents a
sort of credo in Simon, explaining that after beginning “as an
instinctive supporter of his views on economics and critic of his
psychology and his political science,” he had accepted Simon because
of what he had learned about Simon’s personal political beliefs. But
these beliefs as Crowther-Heyck states them, including “equal rights
for all, a federal government that actively supports those rights,
stewardship of the earth’s resources, and rational tolerance of
different peoples, cultures, faiths, and political views” seem like
inarguable, mainstream liberalism. They do not explain the “forking”
path that the author has taken us on.
In the Borges story, “The garden of forking paths” two characters
have a dialogue about the central theme of a Chinese novel also
called “The garden of forking paths,” that is constructed as a
labyrinth. The scholar who has reconstructed and translated the novel
concludes that the theme of the novel is “time,” because the Chinese
words for time are never used. Therefore, time, as its omission
shows, is the theme of the book. “In a riddle whose answer is chess,
what is the only prohibited word?” “…Chess.”
In Crowther-Heyck’s biography of Simon, while sociology, social
psychology, and social modeling are discussed at length, society and
the social impacts of research and research tools are never
mentioned. By their omission, we can conclude that Crowther-Heyck is
profoundly skeptical about the potential for positive social change
through the application of technology. To return to the Borges story,
Society is what this book is about, but the narrative excludes it.
To complete Crowther-Heyck’s story of Herbert Simon, his historical
context, and the social impacts of elite research communities after
World War II, we have to look beyond his work. Through Simon’s
autobiography, Models of my life, we get a clear portrait of a
liberal scholar who through his interest in computer science
transformed himself into a public intellectual, editorializing about
rational approaches to reform in opposition to attacks on the
“system” in the 1960s (chapter 18), serving on advisory committees at
the federal level (see chapter 19, “The scientist as politician”),
and traveling abroad to receive awards or as part of cultural
missions (chapter 21, “Nobel to now,” 22, “The amateur diplomat in
China and the Soviet Union”). Paul N. Edwards’s The closed world:
computers and the politics of discourse in Cold War America
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), explores the connection between
the development of computers, game theory and other models of
control, cognition, and behavior, defense research, and Cold War
resistance to Soviet power. His presentation of the evolution of the
concept of artificial intelligence (Edwards, pp. 250-255) is crucial
to an understanding of Crowther-Heyck’s interpretation of its
significance (Crowther-Heyck, chapter 10). From Jennifer S. Light’s
book, From warfare to welfare: defense intellectuals and urban
problems in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2003), we learn about how socially-conscious intellectuals
positioned themselves in the defense establishment, taking advantage
of postwar Federal largesse and an atmosphere of creative freedom to
explore applications of systems research to urban problems. For the
“defense intellectuals,” Simon’s colleagues, the military-industrial
complex served as a refuge permitting experimental social thought
within the context of applied research.
Evaluation. I found reviews of Herbert Simon: the bounds of reason in
modern America in International Social Science Review, The journal of
American history, Public administration review, and Technology and
culture. The reviews are friendly, recognizing Crowther-Heyck’s
pioneering effort to capture the range of Simon’s activities, and
especially the academic milieux and schools of thought within which
he worked. At the same time, there is impatience among reviewers both
with the lack of a “romantic” emphasis on personal details, which to
my mind underscores the work's reliability, and Crowther-Heyck’s
reticence at drawing conclusions about the validity of Simon’s
lifelong preoccupation with planning, modeling, and the understanding
of cognition.
To conclude, I would like to suggest some lessons about Simon that
might have been drawn from Crowther-Heyck’s extensive research, in
the spirit of our class on Uncovering Information Labor. I agree with
Crowther-Heyck that Simon embodies the classic German bureaucratic
attitude, the notion that a highly trained elite, loyal only to
public service and the State, would manage problems, and achieve
public order and social control. Simon’s faith in this bureaucratic
public sphere is sharply at odds with United States political and
economic trends from 1980 to the present, and as Vincent Mosco has
discussed, with the tradition of public planning by the financial
elite in particular regions like greater New York City.
In contrast to today’s faith, albeit waning, in the power of
unregulated markets to solve social problems by concentrating capital
in the hands of winners best suited to lead, Simon proclaims, in
effect, “I [my generation] am the Revolution!” In the chapter from
Models of my life called “The student troubles” (pp. 279-289), Simon
recounts with satisfaction his role in damping down revolutionary
enthusiasm at Carnegie-Mellon by appealing to the potential for
planning within the institutional framework. Clearly, he believed
that the real Revolution had already taken place when the
intellectuals were able to take charge of so much federally funded
research during and in the aftermath of the New Deal. Nevertheless,
he reserves a nice parting shot about the charisma of the newly
affluent: “Whether the yuppie climate that replaced revolution has
been, on balance, an improvement is a question….” Simon, unlike the
class of “venture laborers” identified by Gina Neff, always protected
himself by embracing the support structures of government and
academic institutions. He seems to have little or no faith in a
transcendent notion of individual freedom.
The weakness of Simon’s career is that he functioned entirely on an
elite level, and that there were no apparent immediate, street-level
benefits from his work. Part of the corrective to this perception
lies in the greater public transparency to planning processes that is
emerging, painfully, in the early 21st century. (The current
discussion over the optimal location for a new power line in the
Madison region demonstrates the potential and problems of public
inputs.) As Amy Slaton suggests, why should the public not
participate in engineering decisions that will have significant
impacts on their environment? For public participation to work there
must be greater and more general technological and environmental
literacy. Had Herbert Simon spent more of his time contributing to
public as opposed to elite education into the benefits of his many
research directions, his legacy would be less troubling_______________________________________________
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