p These ties are exceptionally extensive and important, especially with the economy. That is why the prognostication and planning of scientific and technical progress may be justly regarded as the most important starting point in the prognostication and planning of society’s economic development.

p Let us look at the main lines of connection and interaction between scientific and technical progress and the processes of economic growth and development in society.

p I believe that there are at least three main lines.

p The first is the immediate influence of scientific and technical progress on the development of the productive forces, on the dynamic and structure of social production. By raising the technical level and efficiency of the traditional elements of production and creating new and more perfect ones, scientific and technical progress makes for a growth in the volume of material production and for considerable changes in its structure. It also induces substantial changes in the structure of production and individual consumption. By shaping new interconnections between industries and changing the traditional ones and the flows of material inputs, it has an influence on shaping the structure of the final product, i.e., on the balance between production and non- production consumption and accumulation.

p The second line is that scientific and technical progress has a considerable influence on almost all the exogenous factors of economic growth, like the dynamic of the population and manpower, the volume and structure of available natural resources, and so on. In present-day conditions, scientific and technical progress is increasingly becoming an integral part of all these basic conditions and factors of economic growth and development. In effect, the scientific and technical achievements provided the conditions for medicine to reduce mortality and to some extent promoted the " demographic explosion". They also largely determine the steady growth and changing structure of the population’s requirements. Or, say, natural resources. So long as they have not been prospected and extracted, they are in a sense a "thing in itself". Scientific and technical progress, and the STR in particular, help to explore mineral deposits of which men had no knowledge before using the equipment of geological survey with the latest technical facilities, like ultrasonics and radar, mathematical computer-based modelling, modern optical devices, artificial satellites and spaceships. Modern scientific achievements make it possible to extract and dress natural resources which had earlier been regarded as useless.

p The third line consists to some extent of indirect and mediated connections between scientific and technical progress and economic growth. The fact is that the key trends in the progress of science and technology result in a whole complex of qualitative changes in man, society’s chief productive force.

p Biology, genetics, physiology and medicine, biological chemistry and pharmacology have exerted and will continue to exert a growing influence on man’s physiological and mental state. Computers and communications facilities tend radically to change the system of education, the forms, volume and methods in which man receives internal and international information. The importance of these changes is quite comparable with the changes produced by the invention of printing.

p Whereas the facilities of large-scale machine production, beginning from the industrial revolution characterised by Marx, up until the recent past, and largely even today, immeasurably enhanced man’s physical capabilities and potentialities, the means of communication and data processing being developed on the basis of the STR tend sharply to enhance man’s intellectual potentialities.

p But man is not only the subject of production. He is also the subject of R & D. The physical, intellectual and moral improvement of men is a powerful catalyst of scientific and technical progress. It will be easily realised that these processes will exert a substantial influence on the quantitative and qualitative changes in the economy.

p The quantitative interpretation of the three lines of scientific and technical progress and their respective reflection in models and plans for economic development is a complicat-, ed methodological problem.

p The most difficult task, both in methodological and information terms, is to determine the quantitative parameters of the interconnections and the interdependencies in this chain: scientific and technical progress—production—man.

p The investigation of social production as a large and complex system evidently requires not only an analysis of the processes which determine changes in technology, but also a parallel analysis of the processes which are connected with the changes and progress in man himself, and also of their interaction. Primary importance attaches to the analysis of the changes in the nature of labour arising as a result of technological progress, which determine the radical social shifts in the structure of society.

p The point is that the development of man, the chief productive force, and the impact of these changes on the course and pace of scientific and technical progress, on the factors and processes of economic development have usually been 31 very rarely and inadequately appreciated and reckoned with. But these impacts and interactions are perfectly obvious. Here are their main lines:

p 1. The influence of social, scientific and technical progress on man’s living and working span, and on his physical and intellectual capacity.

p 2. The influence of scientific and technical progress on the length of time it takes a worker to acquire a professional skill with the rapid changes in technology.

p 3. The influence of the changes in man’s creative capacity on the acceleration of scientific and technical progress.

p I think that any economic study of scientific and technical progress must simultaneously be a socio-economic study, at least from the standpoint of taking into account the capabilities and potentialities of man as the active factor in scientific and’.technical progress and economic development.

p In principle, the impact of the first two lines lends itself most simply to a quantitative interpretation. The first of these, in effect, results in an increase in productive manpower resources. It is a methodologically soluble problem to calculate the additional manpower resources made available in establishing losses arising from illness, and to determine the age interval of the highest labour productivity and measures designed to lengthen it. The second line accelerates the (attainment of high skill standards and also a rise in their level, so that, given the relevant information, it is also possible to determine the measure of related structural shifts in the labour productivity.

p The importance of taking into account these changes tends to increase because the training of specialists and of skilled workers turns out to be an ever longer process.

p But it is a highly complicated methodological problem to produce a quantitative evaluation of the influence of man’s growing creative capabilities on the pace of scientific and technical progress and on the level and efficiency of production, a problem whose solution entails special sociological studies, collection of sizable amounts of information, points evaluations, etc.

p There is a need specially to consider the interconnections between scientific and technical progress (and the STR in particular) and production which are characteristic for the present and the foreseeable periods in the development of society.

p In the second half of the 20th century, R & D are being intensively industrialised.

p Tremendous material and manpower resources—an ever growing share of the national income—are going into research, development and engineering. Nowadays, the basic sciences increasingly require complex, powerful and expensive technical equipment. Academician L. A. Artsimovich, a leading Soviet physicist, wrote: "With each year, physicists have to make their way through ever thicker layers of ever harder rock. Everything that has lain on the surface has long since been discovered, studied and understood. The exploration and comprehension of new uniformities in the sphere of elementary particles relating to distances approaching 10  ¹⁵ cm or in the world of recently discovered superstellar objects billions of light years away require extreme tension on the part of physicists and astrophysicists and regular technical re-equipment of laboratories as experimental facilities acquire ever greater dimensions and truly astronomical costs... One could say that in the past several years there has been in physics a steady and extremely rapid increase in the cost of scientific discoveries (that is, of the material and intellectual inputs incidental to each of these)" -  [32•1 

p An official NASA publication said that the Apollo programme is estimated to have cost $’20-30 billion; it took $400-700 million to .develop the IBM-360 generation of computers on hard logic circuits; the development of the Boeing-707 commercial jet cost roughly $700 million; about $2 billion was put into the development of fast-neutron nuclear reactors, and so on.

p In the USSR, direct appropriations for science from the state budget and other sources in 1965 came to 6.9 billion rubles, in 1970, to 11.7 billion, and in 1977, to 18.3 billion.

p The vast proportions of the specific inputs required for advancing R & D also mean that present-day scientific and technical progress, developing in accordance with its own logic, tends increasingly to be influenced by the scientific and technical policy of the state, and in this sense is controlable and even dependent. From this it follows that the financing of science 33 and technology, and the provision of their material facilities call for considering long-term strategic perspectives, i.e., long-term prognostications of their development, which, for their part, become an instrument of active influence on the course and direction of scientific and technical progress.

Consequently, scientific and technical progress being, on the one hand, a very important factor of economic development, is, on the other, increasingly dependent on the latter. It would be an oversimplification to assert that the direction of scientific and technical development is straightforwardly predetermined by the volume of material resources allocated for these purposes. But it is incontestable that the general scope of such progress is increasingly determined by the dynamic of material inputs into this sphere. The latter, for their part, are determined by the relation between accumulation and consumption, that is, by the basic proportions of reproduction. Consequently, the prognostication of economic growth in which the results of scientific and technical progress are regarded as starting factors or conditions has to be preceded by the elaboration of some preliminary model which helps to determine the approximate scale of the resources society is capable of allocating for the development and acceleration of scientific and technical progress.