Group 1985

By BERNARD CAZES ALL national planning is a combination of

medium-term aims and policies, geared to a final year (say) four or five years ahead. Yet in drawing up a medium-term plan, decisions have to be made which bear on a more distant future, whether they involve infrastructure, human investment or the development of land. In the long run, as Keynes quite rightly said, we shall all be dead, but in the meantime those who will be dead will have made, for better or worse, choices whose consequences their descendants will have to live with. It is desirable, therefore, to base these choices on a close study of what is likely to be happening fifteen or twenty years from now.

With this aim a working party was set up in 1962 under M. Guillaumat, formerly Minister of the Armed Forces and now President of the French Electricity Board. It included three eco- nomists, a doctor of medicine, a former Minister of Public Works, two experts on agricultural questions, a trade unionist, an industrialist, and M Gruson, the founder of state accounting in France and at present Director of the Institute of Statistics. Group 1985 also had the assistance of a team of researchers, made up of civil ser- vants and engineers.

The group met twenty times in all. Each meet- ing was devoted to a particular topic, introduced by a person not usually a member of the working party—for example, Raymond Aron, the archi- tect Candilis, the anthropologist Levi-Strauss. The group's conclusions are embodied in a report, Thoughts on 1985, which was published by Documentation Frangaise (the equivalent of HMSO) in a collection under the general title 'Documents for the Plan,' and has already sold 20,000 copies in three months, in spite of limited publicity.

Briefly, Group 1985 had two aims: to point out the most powerful national trends, whose good effects ought to be emphasised and harmful effects eliminated; and make as exhaustive an inventory as possible of all the possibilities that might arise, in order to make sure that the plan of action envisaged should not run counter to the tide of future events. The practical aim was the preparation of the Fifth Plan and in fact the inquiry had considerable influence on the outlines of the plan which has just been approved by parliament.

The report stresses the necessity for further research into the factors and conditions of economic growth, the social tensions it creates, and the economic imbalances which hinder its progress. It does not recommend increasing the gross national product as an end in itself, but recognises that, since both individual and group consumption are unlikely to slow down, twenty years from now we shall not be able to consider growth an outdated aim, and shall still have to maintain a delicate balance between more effort and more leisure. The report concludes that at the centre of each great public administration there should be a planning section, *hose task would be to provide a running analysis of long-

term tendencies likely to-have an effect in fields which require action by the government. The

Ministries of Agriculture, Transport and Labour are among those likely to be used as testing- grounds for this experiment.

To develop the suggestions of Group 1985, three major subjects for research are being

incorporated in the Fifth Plan. They correspond to three particularly crucial problems for the future.

The first is the question of the large-scale use of 'refresher courses,' which in a rapidly changing world have become a necessity we have to meet more effectively than simply by raising the school-leaving age. Entirely new schemes will have to be worked out, bringing together business, trade unions and the universities. Such a scheme might bring us within sight of fulfilling one of the dreams of all utopias--the elimination of the age-old triple division of the human life- span into education, working life and retirement. No longer would they form an inevitable pro- gression; instead, they would become three complementary ways of life.

The second subject, linked in a way to the first, concerns the organisation of patterns of life and activity in retirement. It means taking account of the consequences of medical research into old age which can lead to the prolongation of man's active life, the harmful psychological effects of the abrupt transition to complete idleness at retiring age, and finally of the cost to the nation of an ambitious policy of social mobility to benefit the old. Thus, in the words of the report, there would be provision for 'research into the planning of careers so as to provide for the prolongation, by mutual consent, of a man's working life, in appropriate jobs, beyond the present retiring age.'

Finally there is the problem of what M. Masse of the Commissariat du Plan has called 'the

place of collective values in the society of tomorrow' and the financing of the correspond- ing amenities. An industrial society is one where men work, travel and pursue their leisure activities together, while the administrative and financial machinery was conceived at a time when the normal way of life demanded far less in the way of collective amenities. An estimate of the French economy in 1985, carried out by the Institute of Statistics at the request of Group 1985, foresees an overall increase in production at a coefficient of 3.15 compared with 1960. Household consumption is put at a coefficient of 3, but collective amenities and social benefits at a coefficient of 7! That is to say that apart from any ideological parti prix about the relative importance of the private and the public sectors, France, like the other countries of the west, will have to find a way of meeting this challenge thrown down by the dominant trends of our civilisation.

This challenge cannot be met simply by the labours of experts, even the most qualified. The progressive investigation of the great problems of tomorrow is worth while only if it reaches beyond the inner circle of the initiated to the public at large. But how can one interest the man in the street in what will be happening tomorrow without falling into science-fiction? Probably by showing him that this is not simply a debate in abstract terms, but that in the long run it is his daily life which is at stake.

To this end, and at the suggestion of one of the members of Group 1985, Bertrand de Jouvenel, French television is devising a series of programmes on France, 1985. The immediate aim is to prepare public opinion for the problems of the distant future. But the programme will also attempt to present visually some examples of the life that French men and women will be living in twenty years' time, if such and such a thing comes about. Then the public will be shown that their future pattern of life is not yet determined and that the choice is still in their hands.