ABSTRACT

A middle road, on which an informed political consensus is harnessed to decision making, and is driven by a recognition of time constants, is the evident choice. How science and technology are deployed, toward which goals and at what rates of effort, all depend under our system upon the behavior and the quality of the nation’s policy apparatus and, to be sure, on the public consensus that legitimizes decision making. In each of the issue-areas with which this report deals, both time and information are central to deciding how the nation’s policies are to be positioned and carried out. When lead time is wasted it cannot be recovered. With few exceptions, the issues treated in this report are in differential stages of development and calibration. What they have in common, however, is the perceived time constant, which is one thing in the case of population growth and something else in the case of materials and energy resource depletion.