Editor's Notebook

EDITOR'S NOTEBOOK

Dear Readers:

Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government has just announced an extensive program aimed at developing new understandings of government's role in our society. The "Visions of Governance for the 21st Century" project is a worthy undertaking for the nation's oldest university, because government today is struggling with every aspect of its existence. Consensus is lacking on the relative roles of federal, state and local governments, on the proper role and configuration of the military, and on the wisdom of transferring government functions to the private sector, to name but three debates.

A question the Harvard study no doubt will ask is: "What's the core business of the U.S. government?" More than two-thirds of federal employees would answer that government is in the business of national security. But in truth government, as the accompanying graph shows, has been shifting its focus from guns to butter for decades. This emerges too in the table of numbers on this page. Each of the red numbers is larger than the sum of all of the black numbers in the same column, observes Carl H. Builder of the RAND Corp.

Builder argued during a presentation to a National Academy of Public Administration panel, that government, building on its present core business, will increasingly focus on distributing income, jobs and services to its "majority constituencies"-the 80 percent of population who will be "wealth consumers and marginal wealth-generators." This huge group will include not only the poor but also the middle class, by today's definition, who will more and more be supplicants for governmental favors.

The new and emerging information economies ride on a creative few, says Builder, and government will be faced with the hard task of raising much of the revenue it needs from about a fifth of the population-creative people and entrepreneurs-who can skip across national borders at a moment's notice or quickly redeploy capital to the excess of plant and labor available globally.

Government is surely ill-prepared for such a future, but one can hope that efforts like the one at Harvard will help our leaders think about the questions of equity, social stability and economic growth that futurists like Builder so compellingly pose.

--Timothy B. Clark
Editor and Publisher, Government Executive