staff to be a limited role as far as setting goals. I would draw a distinction between staff, which is a group of professionals and which is the Commission, like the Eisenhower Commission, which was a distinguished group. We may have been distinguished professionals, but we are not people of the stature of the Eisenhower Commission. Senator MONDALE. You mean you are smaller, or what? Dr. BAUER. We were smaller in number and different in nature. Senator MONDALE. Don't you think the Eisenhower goals Commission report had value? Dr. BAUER. I think that the Counterbudget has a similar value. If you look at it from the Presidential point of view, one of the things the President can do and this has been demonstrated, is ignore the Commission. He can't as gracefully ignore a report of his own staff. I think he is only loosely, and perhaps not even loosely bound by what a Commission finds. Senator MONDALE. Thank you very much, Dr. Bauer, for a most valuable contribution to the work of our committee. (The prepared statement of Dr. Bauer follows:) TESTIMONY ON "THE FULL OPPORTUNITY AND NATIONAL GOALS AND PRIORITIES ACT" By Raymond A. Bauer My name is Raymond A. Bauer. I am Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration. By professional training I am a social psychologist. There are two items in my background that are especially relevant to my testimony on The Full Opportunity and National Goals and Priorities Act. A few years ago I assembled a group of scholars, and with them produced a book called Social Indicators which called attention to the weakness of our understanding of the noneconomic aspects of our society. The book appears to have been one of the events which stimulated interest in social reporting and social indicators featured in Title I of this act. However, if my memory serves me right, I should say that the idea had occurred independently to Senator Mondale even before the book appeared. Secondly, I served for a number of months as Senior Consultant to the National Goals Research Staff of the White House. The National Goals Research Staff had a mandate, during Before I proceed with the substance of what I have to say, let me express my appreciation for the efforts Senator Mondale has made over recent years to address certain vital concerns that we all share. On matters as complex as the application of the behavioral and social sciences to national problems it is inevitable that there will not be complete and precise agreement as to exactly what should be done. Nevertheless, the entire informed behavioral and social science community has been appreciative of the Senator's understanding of the relevance and contribution of these disciplines both potential and actual. - 2. I shall confine my remarks to Title I, where my competence is most relevant. I should, however, say in passing that the proposals of Title II appear to offer a valuable contribution to Congressional decisionmaking as I understand it. Title I declares that it is the policy and responsibility of the Federal Government to promote such conditions as to offer "every American the opportunity to live in decency and dignity," and specifies a considerable number of areas of life in which this policy should be pursued. It requires the President to report annually on progress in implementing this policy. This report shall be called the social report. To aid the President, a Council of Social Advisors shall be established in the Executive Office of the President which will aid him in preparing the social report, which will establish a series of social indicators for measuring social progress, and which will do a variety of research and analysis to facilitate the policy established in Title I. The attractiveness of this proposal is so great that one may perhaps best proceed by considering some of the reservations which have been raised against it in the past. One objection is that we should not clutter up the Executive Office any further with another unit reporting to the President. I am very sympathetic to this desire to avoid further administrative complexity. However, we already have a Council of Economic Advisors and a Council on Environmental Quality, an Office of Science and Technology, and so on. Much of what is important to the "decency and dignity of Americans" does not fall in the mandate of any of these existing agencies. It seems to me that the argument for administrative simplicity does not carry sufficient weight to warrant our not giving equal attention to these central areas of human concern. - 3 A version of the preceding argument is that the functions of a Council of Social Advisors should be included in an expanded version of the Council of Economic and Social Advisors. It is my understanding that I do not know the stand a previous CEA was resistant to this suggestion. of the present CEA. However, a strong argument could be made, and I would subscribe to that argument, that the work of the Council of Social Advisors would develop better if that group were permitted to operate independently of the more mature discipline of economics maintaining close liapon with the CEA. It is conceivable that a version of a combined Council of Economic and Social Advisors could be presented of which I would approve. However, we are not confronted with - that option, and the non-economic part of that which is "social" goes relatively neglected. though Finally, the most important question that has been raised is of a Council of Social Advisors. The answer to that question depends, of course, on what one thinks the job is, and what level of contribution short of perfection he aspires toward. A clue to the thinking that lies behind the question of whether we are competent to undertake the task of a Council of Social Advisors can be found in the recommendations of the highly prestigious Behavioral and Social Sciences Survey Committee of the National Academy of Sciences and the Social Science Research Council, the so-called BASS Committee report. These recommendations, which cover a wide variety of topics, were inserted by Senator Mondale in the Congressional Record of January 25, 1971 immediately following his introduction of the Act. .4 The BASS Committee does not recommend a Council of Social Advisors at this time. Rather, they recommend the development of an annual social report in the private sector to run for some unspecified period of time until it has proven itself. At this point, says the report "a natural next step would be to establish a council of social advisors to consider the policy implications of this report." The model for this sequence obviously is the pioneering work of the National Bureau of Economic Research which developed a system of national economic accounts prior to the establishment of the Council of Economic Advisors in 1946. The inevitable yardstick that is used for assessing our competence to undertake a Council of Social Advisors is that of whether the other behavioral and social sciences are as well developed as was economics with the establishment of the CEA. And, specifically, it is pointed out that we do not have a model of the American social system comparable to the model of the economy on which economists could reach at least reasonable agreement some twenty-five years ago. The answers are several. We are far from having a model of the social system as adequate as I understand the economic model of 1946 was. There may be a minor blessing in this in that the existence of such a model might evoke images of widespread social control which I am sure is far from the intent of this Act. However, such a model could indeed be useful - if properly employed when and if we are able to develop one on which there is substantial consens us. It does not follow that the existence of a single unified model of anything is the sole criterion by which to judge the level of development of such a wide range of disciplines as the social and behavioral sciences. The other social and behavioral sciences have a work agenda considerably broader than that of economics. And in their several areas of concern each of |