Human Resources and Manpower Needs

Abstract

May I indorse the review by Luther Evans of Frederick Harbison and Charles Myers, Education, Manpower, and Economic Growth: Strategies of Human Resource Development (New York: McGrawHill, 1964) in the Winter 1965 issue of Technology and Culture. The book is indeed a landmark among current treatises on the processes of change that move the 120 nations of the world. I only wish that the strictures that apply to the length of reviews had permitted Evans to expatiate at greater length upon it. For here we begin to deal systematically with the revolution of knowledge that has shaped Western civilization over the past 2,500 years; we begin to understand the mass of individual human beings as carriers of ecumenical and pervasive processes of change. Scholars have expended a great deal of effort on the components of change, ranging from agriculture to law. Harbison and Myers integrate such components into an understanding of the condition of the modern society. They give us a staggering amount of food for thought. By the same token, we may ask if the authors have considered all the implications of their findings. I am particularly disturbed by the obvious exceptions to the authors' rule that there is a very high correlation between the composite index of human resource development and GNP (Gross National Product) per capita in U.S. dollars (p. 40). These exceptions are Thailand, Egypt, India, and South Korea, which rank as Category III or semi-advanced nations in their supply of educated and professional persons, but whose national products rank them low on the scale of economic development. Clearly these must be nations which have made their education dollar go further than most, or which, through historical factors, have a population educated beyond, or skew to, their fundamental capabilities. Or does the answer lie possibly in the fact that primary and secondary education alone are the truest single correlatives of growth (imparting literacy, sense of achievement, discovery of the strange and new)? While in Iran, I became familiar with many of the problems of de-