and social reform through relatively peaceful means associated with the New Deal
and western European socialist parties, China and the Soviet Union were under-
going revolutionary ideological change.

In the 1970s, the People's Republic of China (PRC) was seeking to resolve public
policy problems largely by consulting the ideological writings of Karl Marx, Mao
Zedong, and their interpreters. In the 1980s, government agencies in China were
seeking to become more professional by introducing personnel management,
financial administration, and other bureaucratic ideas from the West, some of which
are actually a throwback to Confucius bureaucracy.

Thus, ideology became offset by technocracy. What we were seeing may fit
the classic Hegelian and Marxist dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.
Ideology represented the prevailing thesis in the 1970s, whereby population control
might be analyzed by reading Marx and Mao. Technocracy represented the
antithesis in the 1980s, whereby population control might be analyzed by reading
biological literature.

The 1990s may represent a super-optimum synthesis (SOS) of the best, not the
worst, of both possible worlds. It may draw on the idea of having goal-oriented
values from the ideological thesis, as contrasted to rejecting values as being
unscientific or not objective. Values and goals may be quite objective in the sense
of being provable means to higher goals or in the sense of proving that certain
alternatives are more capable of achieving the goals than others.

The 1990s may also draw on the idea of empirical proof based on observable
consequences, rather than ideological labels of socialism or capitalism. It is
empirical proof that also makes sense in terms of deductive consistency with what
else is known about the world, rather than mindless technical number crunching
without thinking about how the results might fit common sense. Being technical
does not necessarily mean being effective in getting the job done efficiently and
equitably, which is what should really count in governmental decision making.

The kind of synthesis to which SOS refers is a synthesis of goals to be achieved
(the ideological element) and systematic methods for determining which alternative
or alternatives most achieve these goals (the technical element). The true dialectic
is dynamic not only in the sense that a thesis leads to an antithesis, which leads
to a higher-level synthesis, but also in the sense that a synthesis does not stagnate
but becomes a subsequent thesis to be resynthesized by a new antithesis into a
still higher level of analysis. There may be policy evaluation methods that are
even more effective, efficient, and equitable.

Those are the methods that are hinted at in various places in this book where
super-optimum solutions are explicitly or implicitly mentioned. Such solutions

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