February 16, 1968

Mr. William D. Carey

Assistant Director

Executive Office of the President
Bureau of the Budget

Washington, D.C. 20503

DBar Mr. Carey:

I was very pleased to have received your letter of February 5

concerning my column in the Post. In fact after I read the

column in cold print I was wavering myself whether to write

you to assure you that I had a deeper sympathy for your purposes

than may have appeared in the column. I was reacting more to

what did appear in print in Industrial Research and is likely

to have as much influence with other policy makers and legislators-

than what I had guessed to be your own motives in pursuing this °
kind of analysis. Your letter certainly corroborated these

expectations.

If you have written anything more authoritative than that

news report tells about rational decision making in the alloca-
tion of resources I would be very eager to have a chance to
read it. (And tf it fs not published, needless to say, this
can be off the record)

If I have any residual anxiety it has to do with the over
exuberant use of a priori principles in making "rational"
judgments on social affairs. The processes on which we are
attempting to reach rational judgments are inevitably far more
complex than the models we build of them and I hardly have to
tell you how real life is full of paradoxes. So I would suggest
that an essential part of any new system is a built-in technique
for self evaluation of its performance ~ essentially the same
demand that we would want to make of any subsystem. At least
one way that I can see of beginning to do this is to look at
history, try to isolate examples that we retrospectively perceive
as having been the wrong decisions and then show that any new
procedure that we are trying to build would have been likely to
deliver a more satisfactory result.

\ f af by « U
Mr. William Carey
February 16, 1968
Page 2

The one point I regret having never gotten around to express
clearly in my column about the virtues of a merit matrix is
the extent to which it can help to focus controversies on the
underlying assumptions at issue. I hope to focus a little
more sharply on this in some future writing.

Our mutual friend, Bill Greulich has pressed me very warmly

to make an effort to meet you and I really would like very
much to do this at my next opportunity in Washington. I will
be attending a meeting of the Advisory Council for the National
Institute of Mental Health from March 25 to 27 and would like
to ask you whether you would be free for some informal conver-—
sation the evening of the 27th. If that is inconvenient for
you, there is a modest probablity that our Council work will
be over in time for lunch on the 27th but I am a little less
sure about that. If this is pressing you for a commitment
you cannot comfortably make please let me know and I will then
leave it to what ever we can arrange by a telephone call while
I am in Washington.

While I am in town I will be either staying with Judge David
Bazelon at 244-4550 or else either he or Dr. Yolles'’s office
at NIH will know where I am. Lest this confuse you, let me
say that I mean to call you.

Sincerely,

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