Petroski’s Policy

The engineering apologetics juggernaut known as Henry Petroski has once again turned out a well-designed and timely reflection on technology and its social relations—The Essential Engineer: Why Science Alone Will Not Solve Our Global Problems (New York: Knopf, 2010. Pp. x+274. $26.95). For those acquainted with any reasonable subset of Petroski’s fourteen related books published since 1985—four of which have been favorably reviewed in Technology and Culture—the basic argument will be familiar. Although fraught with costs as well as benefits, engineering is a uniquely human activity with special abilities to remake the world as a more humanly habitable place than it would otherwise be. Here the argument is deployed with special reference to policy questions involving climate change, energy, and related challenges. The utility of engineering for policy requires appreciation of its distinction from science and its range of engagements with politics, argues Petroski. But to what extent does conceptual clarification and recognition of distinctions between science and engineering really promote effective engineering (or science) for policy?

The book opens with a review of the ubiquity in human affairs of risks, which science and technology attempt to overcome. Using the risk of asteroid impacts as an example, Petroski proposes that “scientists warn, engineers fix.” The next four chapters give the distinction nuance. Engineering is more complex than it may appear. As much or more than medicine, engineering deserves credit for two centuries of improvements in human health. Although science sometimes and to some extent can precede engineering, the opposite is also the case. The first six chapters of the book conclude with reflections on how, even when engineering fixes, the fixes can sometimes have unintended consequences that need their own fixing. Petroski calls these “speed bumps,” noting that speed bumps themselves illustrate the problem: while slowing traffic they also increase fuel consumption, pollution, and noise (as cars slow and resume speed) and impede emergency vehicles. Good speed bump design requires systems engineering that takes more into account than the simple bump itself.

Two transitional chapters on the ideas and practices of research and development before World War II (chapter 7) and after (chapter 8) provide deft overviews and insightful, measured reassessments of the linear model—i.e., that autonomous science necessarily precedes development into military, medical, and economic applications—which has been a default belief among politicians and the public when considering science-society relations. Indeed, the linear model has been utilized especially by scientists for their own benefit when appealing for increased public funding of science and engineering in terms of both research and education. After all, if basic research autonomously managed by the techno-scientific community itself is the reservoir from which development and economic innovation draws, should research not receive substantial support to keep the reservoir full? Moreover, to grow the scientific community and the scientific literacy of a democratic citizenry, should science education not be accorded pride of place in public education? These two chapters would function especially well to introduce science and engineering students—and those in the humanities and social sciences as well—to science policy questions, broadly construed.

The second half of the book then turns to public policy challenges themselves and how science and engineering might serve to address them. Leading off is a chapter on “Alternative Energies,” the longest in the book by almost a third. It provides a broad if somewhat conventional overview, focused on the United States, of the past half-century of public policies affecting energy developments related to nuclear, wind, solar, and geothermal systems, and batteries, oceans, pedestrian power, biofuels, conservation, fuel cells and hydrogen, and natural gas. In the middle of these overviews Petroski reiterates his brief for a systems engineering approach by quoting “the legendary engineer-educator Hardy Cross” to the effect that engineering practice is involved with three trilogies: “The first is pure science, applied science, engineering; the second is economic theory, finance, and engineering; and the third is social relations, industrial relations, engineering” (p. 145). But engineering is more related to social problems than to pure science, because “engineering is all about...