by Oren Harman
Such thoughts had been afoot since the Diderots and La Metries of the eighteenth century, and even earlier, with Hobbes. Now, after Darwin and the rise of psychology and genetics, Skinner was arguing that freedom and free will were no more than comfortable illusions. For him autonomy was a “feel-good” invention, morality a sinister sham. The belief in an “inner man” was like the belief in God, a superstition, nothing but a symptom of humanity’s failure to understand a complex world. Whether he liked it or not, man was already controlled by external influences, some haphazard, others evil, others merely in step with “convention.” Where things went bad was when man made a fetish of individual freedom, seeking to give life to the internal “soul” at the expense of orderly society. In reality, Skinner preached, it was environments and not people, actions and not feelings, that needed to be changed. The “behavioral technology” called “operant conditioning” was civilization’s hope for deliverance. Where moral arguments had failed, it could create a world where man would refrain from polluting, from overpopulating, from rioting, from hating, even from waging war. George was a “as the twig bends” man. Visiting Skinner’s Harvard lab on the pretext of writing a story, he soon befriended “Fred.”5
The lab was a scene out of wild science fiction. Pigeons playing Ping-Pong, rats balancing balls on their noses; there was even the pigeon-guided missile, the “Pelican.” But these were animals. What about humans: Could they be similarly programmed? And was it punishment or reward that would be more effective in controlling behavior?
Skinner was convinced that it was reward, and had designed the “Teaching Machine” to prove it. A question was posed on a screen: If the child answered correctly he’d be immediately rewarded, not with a grain of corn but with a printed statement of approval—just as satisfying and effective. Walking George through the lab, Skinner claimed that kids could be taught arithmetic just as rats were taught circus acts and pigeons Ping-Pong.6
George was captivated. “Very quietly,” he wrote for THINK later that month, “almost unnoticed amid the fanfare over thermonuclear weapons, earth satellites and moon probes, an important new invention has made its appearance.” To Skinner he offered: “No doubt the most immediate application for such machines would be to teach reading and writing to the illiterate masses of Asia and Africa.” For the last hour he had been sketching out a way to make “a very cheap machine using an acoustic phonograph with spring motor, plus a paper disc, with controls to automatically position the phonograph pick-up at the beginning of the question, stop the phonograph at the end of questions, do the same for the answers, repeat questions and answers when desired, and skip questions previously answered correctly.” It could be mass-produced at just five dollars a pop.7
However useful Skinner’s machines, they got George wondering about larger questions. Was man in control of his destiny? Was freedom really just a fantasy, or worse—a trick? Skinner argued that man believes in free will only so that he can take credit for his “good” behavior. But George had been free to leave his family, and was taking no credit for good behavior. Clearly there were traits buried deep in his nature, things that had not necessarily been learned. The problem was how to manage them, especially self-centeredness and egoism, the most entrenched natural trait of all.
He translated personal deficiencies into public affairs, the easier, perhaps, to flee them. Writing drafts of his book for Harper, George remembered Thucydides’ famous description of Athens falling to Sparta on account of selfishness. De Tocqueville too, he recalled, had lamented how through vain self-absorption and greed men “lose sight of the close connection that exists between the private fortune of each of them and the prosperity of all.”8 He might be a bad family man, George thought, but he cared about his nation. True self-interest lay in strengthening the community, in devotion to the country, in paying a personal price for the good of all. Russia had done it. China had done it. Could America do it too? Could limits be put in a democracy on the individual pursuit of happiness? Skinner was hopeful, and George tended to agree. Americans just needed to be taught that personal sacrifice meant communal reward.
Meanwhile, Harper had reneged on its contract, finding some of his suggestions “brilliant” and “unexpected,” but the overall book unsalable. With a change of title, and the help of a talented literary agent, George secured a new publisher and advance. It was April 1958, and Doubleday would want No Easy Way no later than July.9
He was living now in the West Village in New York City. The small loft at 88 Bedford Street was just down the way from the historic town home of Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose poetry Thomas Hardy called America’s second attraction, after skyscrapers. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs were regulars in the coffeehouses. Dylan Thomas had collapsed and died a few years earlier drinking at the White Horse Tavern, just a few blocks away, and in a few years a young Bob Dylan would show up, playing “neo-ethnic” songs in the coffeehouses in the style of Woody Guthrie. There were writers and poets and artists and “beats,” and, dapper in his bow tie and crew cut, George was an anomaly. But he liked the idea that he was an “ex-chemist.” In a strange way, bohemia appealed to him. There was a kind of prurient satisfaction in being a straight arrow in a world of chaos. Proudly he had “writer” stamped in his passport.10
Still, he could not escape his past. Julia was after him for alimony, and his money was disappearing fast. He had taken another technical-editing job with IBM, this time in Poughkeepsie, and was only getting home on weekends. The Doubleday deadline was killing him. Besides, the world was changing faster than he could write about it: He had started off calling for armament, but now Russia’s position on disarmament seemed much more honorable. Should America compete? Should it withdraw? Could the Russians be trusted? He was confused. He hardly had time to eat. The world around him was spinning.11
Loosening his bow tie he popped them in, one by one: iproniazid, Dexedrine, ephedrine, Seconal; uppers, barbiturates, psychostimulants. Everyone else around him seemed to be taking them, so what the hell? The effects, he soon learned, were less than exhilarating. “I’ve spent most of the day so far lying down,” he wrote to his psychiatrist, Dr. Nathan Kline. The drugs had taken away his panic but had left him tranquil and sedate. He wasn’t getting anything done. He was loafing. He felt neither pain nor joy. Worryingly, he was taking “some measures” to try to release adrenaline from his adrenals; he just couldn’t quite remember whether it gets through the blood-brain barrier. Did Kline?12
Then, as the winter of 1960 rolled in, a tumor was discovered in his throat. At first his internist thought, Hodgkins. But an old Manhattan Project friend who was chief of X-ray at Memorial Sloan-Kettering sent him to a cancer expert who diagnosed a nonmalignant thyroid tumor. Recovering from the operation in March, George was handed a new type of medicine: He had a thyroid imbalance, and would need to take tablets from now on if he wanted to stay alive and healthy.13
There was an instruction manual for a GE electricity and magnetism kit to finish, and another one on gyros and accelerometers for Sperry-Marine. There was a new love interest, Joan, a teacher at Bennington College for Women in Vermont. There was Alice, still with her Japanese roomers, but growing old and infirm. There was his estranged lighting-expert-inventor brother, Edison, who had taken over Display, renaming it Edison Price Lighting Company Incorporated and operating out of 409 East Sixtieth Street. There was Julia, seeking contested alimony in domestic relations court. There were his daughters, whom he hadn’t seen for quite some time. There were desperate letters to friends asking for loans. There was his health. There were the drugs. And then, on April 10, 1960, there was a letter from Fred Schneider of the Advanced Systems Development Division at IBM. Regarding his old article in Fortune, IBM was beginning to invest in computer-aided design (CAD). Would George be interested in joining the project?14
That fall a surgeon friend from his days in Minnesota wrote a kind note to say that his wife had a bad thyroid, too. Do
n Ferguson was now at the University of Chicago, and really, George, the thyroid was no big deal. He’d be fine. Still, didn’t he think that he was wasting himself on those damn manuals? After all, he had the kind of mind that needed to be applied to real scientific problems.15
In fact George had been working on two scientific papers, with the hope of once again gaining a university position. The first was about the fallacies of random neural networks as they pertained to the organization of the brain, the second a theory of the function of the hymen.16 Of course he had absolutely no training in either of these matters. But he had gone through the literature thoroughly and was planning to send the papers to Science all the same. He needed one big breakthrough—one truth, he thought, just one. IBM had toyed with him before, and by now he had lost interest in his Design Machine. Still, until the papers were accepted and made him a name, he’d need to take a job to settle his finances.
There could have been worse job opportunities. “The IBM company,” the Annual Report of 1961 declared,
is engaged in the creation of machines and methods to help find solutions to the increasingly complex problems occurring in business, government, science, defense, education, space exploration and nearly every other area of human endeavor.17
Gross revenue from domestic operations alone amounted to $1,694,295,547, an increase of more than $250 million from the previous year. His “unfortunate No Easy Way,” George wrote to his editor, Dick Winslow, at Doubleday, would need to be put aside for now. Almost four years after that fateful interview with Piore, George was joining IBM.18
A few months after he had become an “official IBMer,” Science wrote back rejecting his papers. The hymen theory was way too speculative, and a damning report had slammed “Fallacies” to the ground. “This crotchety, verbose diatribe has no place in a scientific journal,” an anonymous reviewer had written. George was “merely a biased reader of other people’s papers.”19
The last thing he needed was another blow. His shoulder had been dislocated on a recent climb (his friends called him “kinetic”) and again a few months later, swimming in rough surf. It was the old injury, compounded by the polio, and it would need to be taken care of. Recovering at home from the operation in the fall of 1962, he was gloomy. The Science report was a humiliating rebuke, a slap in the face from the professional to the impudent amateur. He hadn’t seen his girls in more than five years. Joan was out of the picture. A Tatiana whom he had met in the public library was in and then out again. He was almost forty. He had yet to make his mark. He was starting to wonder about the merits of free will.
As always the only fixture in his life, Alice, came to his side. “You will succeed in a big way before you know it,” she wrote to him, trying to be encouraging. She had her own troubles. There was a Mr. Aramachi, thank God, renting the southeast room, and a Mr. Ishida in the southwest. But then there were the “bird haters” from the municipality who plastered signs across the park forbidding feeding them. “The birds are starving to death fast in this city of plenty,” she wrote to George, despondent. A diminutive octogenarian, she was already well known to the authorities. Municipal fines and court subpoenas had failed to stop her. Intransigent, at war with all the cruelty and lack of mercy in the world, Alice was sneaking pigeons to her home to mend and feed them before releasing them in Central Park.20
Back at IBM George had worked a bit on CAD but quickly lost interest entirely. It was hard for him to get excited about a brainchild he felt had now been stolen from him in broad daylight. The New Product Line, on the other hand, was doing a market survey concerning programmed instruction, and George figured he could help with that. After all, it had to do with Skinner.
They had been friends, but George’s sympathy had soured; in a “market requirements memorandum” he came down hard on his former pal. Falsely analogizing from pigeons and dogs to humans, Skinner had presented a simplified and therefore skewed theory of learning.21 To him learning was a simple stimulus-response (S-R) pattern, and any intervening steps should be analyzed into the basic S-R components. But what if learning in humans really looked more like this: S-A-B-C-D-E-F-R, and what if A-B-C-D-E-F could not be collapsed into either stimulus or response? George was certain that this was the case: Perception (A), attention (B), understanding (C), belief or acceptance (D), memorization (E), recall (F), and performance (G) were distinguishable components of learning, and reinforcement worked differently on each of them. Skinner’s notion that reinforcement led to learning was simple-minded and misleading. If teaching machines for programmed employee instruction were to work, one would need a better understanding of how reinforcement affects each of the components of learning. One would need to know what was innate in man, and what could be acquired. There were many layers lurking beneath the mystery of behavior. Free will was more complicated than Skinner thought.22
In fact George already had ideas on the matter. So much so, he wrote to Winslow at Doubleday, that he was thinking of writing a book. With No Easy Way not yet dead and buried, he had risen again like a phoenix from the sand and turned, as was his pattern, to a new project. “The Reformation of Psychology” seemed too colorless a title, but he would come up with something better, he was sure. The main thing was to explain how all the current theories in psychology were unsupported by masses of current data. Such theories still abounded because a replacement had not yet been formulated. Reviewing animal and human data relating to brain function and anatomy, introspection, learning, motivation, memory, love, and the nature-nurture controversy, George’s book would provide the missing context. Here he could include the rejected papers on the fallacies of random neural networks and the function of the hymen, as well as his thoughts about everything from where memory resides in the brain to how mathematicians can be useful to psychology. He had left the Village now, he told Winslow, and was living in (and hating) Poughkeepsie. But the IBM job gave him a good salary and an enormous amount of freedom, and, given the thumbs-up, he could set to work on the book right away.23
The more covetous he grew of his liberty at IBM, the more his coworkers became suspicious. Who was this George Price: A journalist? A scientist? An inventor? A quack? And why was he often working from home? Some suspected that he might be trying to steal IBM secrets for further articles in Life or in Fortune, or maybe even an “intelligence machine” of his own. Others wondered why he was working on a book about psychology when he had been contracted to work on the development of a new computer. Believing in his abilities, his boss, Fred Brooks, was doing his best to cover for him. It wasn’t easy. Brooks’s own secretary forced George to buy stationery supplies with his own money. On one of the rare occasions that he had come in to the office, someone mentioned that there would soon be a public announcement of the new System/360 computer. “What’s the 360?” George asked. “I never remember these machine numbers, you know.” The people in the office shot incredulous glances at one another: George was working for the man who was in charge of the entire project.24
He didn’t mind. He was after one big breakthrough and would do what it took to make it. “Many of the most imaginative and important inventions,” he had written in an old article for THINK, “have been made by outsiders not employed in the field concerned, who have followed their own schedules and worked according to their own plan.” This became his motto.25
There were two fields where he felt he might make important strides. The first was a new type of mathematical optimization system, the second a neurophysiological coding scheme to explain color vision. Neither of these had any direct connection to work at IBM, but off beat as always, George went around trying to convince the people in Research and Development that they might bring the company glory.
The optimization system stemmed from work he had been doing on the development of procedures for solving linear problems with variables limited to 0 and 1. The objective had been to develop rapid methods for finding nearly optimal solutions of multiple-activity, multiple-factor situatio
ns—a computer programming problem. But it soon became obvious to George that the really interesting implication had nothing to do with the “register problem” in computer programming but rather with economic cycles. What he had found was that the 0, 1 restriction resulted in models that were much more helpful than the usual linear models for understanding the behavior of price and profit-based economic systems. Immediately he wrote to the eminent MIT professor Paul Samuelson. Without having intended it, George had found himself with a skeletal model of a profit-based economic system in which complex phenomena became surprisingly transparent.26
“In order to show you that I am not as ignorant in economics as you may think,” he explained to Samuelson in a long letter, he should know that during his one year at Harvard in 1940 he had been in the same class as Bob Solow, and that later in 1947 Andy Papandreou had used his Winthrop House digs for tutorials. “Finally, most impressive of all, when I was about thirteen the Chairman of the Department of Economics and Social Sciences of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology told me I was talented…. I met with him at a meeting of some organization to which we both belonged (no, not the Communist Party), and talked with him about his paper for a while, at the close of which he remarked: ‘You ought to go into economics. You’re good at it.’ (Instead I went into chemistry. I wasn’t good at it.)”27
It was classic George: trying to ingratiate himself by means of an original idea mixed in with some oddball humor. Samuelson was impressed. George’s profitability algorithm sounded “interesting and novel.” Still, there was a vast literature on business cycle dynamics that he would do well to look at. Picking up on the curious mixture of George’s originality and somewhat autistic penchant for reinventing the wheel, he wrote: ‘I am sure that much of what you are doing would interest economists, particularly if it could be related to earlier work.”28