even though their lives were now governed by elaborate organizations and complicated technologies. Their "adaptation" to modern conditions would have to be guided by social science, with its relentless "revision of implicit assumptions." Many people thoughtlessly blamed technology for the modern malaise; but it was the "intractability of the human factor, and not our technology, that has spoiled the American dream." Social scientists alone understood the "human factor." If democracy was to "function in a population of widely unequal individuals," social science would have to "show the way to restructure the culture so as to care for those inequalities." Scientific research could discover "which differences are so biologically controlled that favorable cultural conditions cannot materially change them." It could show policymakers how to erect "appropriate safeguards" against the exploitation of "specific groups of unequal persons." It could thus lay the basis for a fully developed form of the welfare state that would protect people from the consequences of their own shortsightedness, ignorance, and folly.
What would our American culture need to do if it were to set itself to see that its citizens from birth to death had as little chance as possible to invest their savings ignorantly, to purchase sub-standard commodities, to marry disastrously, to have unwanted children "accidentally," to postpone needed operations, to go into blind-alley jobs, and so on?
The question, as Lynd framed it, could have only one answer: all power to the experts. In order to make everyone happy and safe, America would have to institutionalize expertise in the form of social insurance, consumer protection, family planning, "manpower selection," vocational guidance, and socialized medicine. It would have to "resolve, in the engineer's favor, the conflict between the engineer and the businessman." Failure to do so would betray the old illusion that autonomous,
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