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The social indicator movement has always faced in two directions—toward academic disciplines that provide quality control and estimate causal relations, and toward the political system that chooses and uses indicator statistics. At worst, the movement has risked appearing to be peripheral to both theoretical social science and policy choice; such perceptions may have contributed to the movement's weakening. The use of noneconomic time series of data to guide the definition of public problems, however, did not and will not die away.

The development of valid and useful social science requires social structures different from those of basic disciplines and departments. One such structure is a "technical community"; whereas a basic scientific community ideally looks only to its own members for definitions of problems, a technical community also looks to laymen. In planning to build or strengthen policy-related technical communities, we must systematically examine various aspects in which they differfrom scientific communities and may vary among themselves. These include the ways in which knowledge and expertise are relevant to policy; the boundaries between the expert knowledge of a particular technical community and other available knowledge; the balance between general and specific knowledge; the systems of careers and quality control needed; the types of organizations in which research and analysis are to be done; and the ways in which knowledge producers can be linked with users and practitioners. Although government policies can foster technical communities, their success requires the consent of members of present scientific communities. This consent in turn requires the dispelling of prejudices held by many basic social scientists, as well as careful testing as to what particular technical communities can accomplish.

The long-debated issue whether social scientists should be concerned with improving the human condition, and if so how they should attempt this task, has been raised afresh in the exchange of views between Lee Benson (1978) and Warren Miller (1978) on "Changing Social Science to Change the World." Before plunging into this debate, however, I should like to suggest that all of us who participate in it are viewing the world from a particular occupational perspective. Some years ago, when George Lundberg's Can Science Save Us? (1947) was current, a friend suggested to me that a prior question was, "Should science save us?" He may have meant, as Miller suggests, that saving or changing the world is not the principal task of social scientists; or in another meaning, he may have been anticipating more recent critics in noting that a world "saved" by social science might not be one in which everyone would prefer to live. I hope that our efforts will not be counter-productive.

Public policy analysis is an interdisciplinary field combining sociology with philosophy, economics, political science, statistics, & other fields. It aims at the choice of the best policy among a set of alternatives with the aid of reason & evidence. Undergraduate instruction is especially important in this field because policy analysis should be done by citizens & not merely by staff experts in government. Citizens must choose their valuative premises independently of employers, & can make use of systematic ethics to formulate criteria of the public interest. A useful way to teach this subject is by means of case studies. In a course of this sort, students have been required to submit brief reports on assigned cases. The student must choose a role to occupy, specify criteria of choice, list alternative policies, indicate relevant information available & needed, choose a policy, & tell how it would be enacted & implemented. A course using this method has been taught for seven years; improved cases are desirable. A textbook, Policy Analysis for Public Decisions (Duxbury, 1979), has been developed for use in such courses. AA.

Application of economic concepts to politics involves implicit normative assumptions. (1) Meta-ethical assumptions: valuative assertions are restricted to concepts of economics. The formalization of economic ethics, however, is helpful. (2) Substantive ethical assumptions: only ethics of consequences are considered, especially that of satisfaction of given preferences with consumer sovereignty. But welfare & judgments of collective welfare are improperly combined with various sorts of preferences in "utility." (3) Concentration on certain problems: detailed variations within democratic regimes, but not regime choice or policies influencing preferences. Exchange based on private interests is stressed, even for public officials, over deliberation concerning social welfare or welfare functions. AA.