Who wants to be Secretary of the Future? Everyone, apparently.

• Author: Bailey, Ronald
• Position: Columns - Column

"I'll tell you... one thing that no Cabinet has ever had is a Secretary of the Future, and there are no plans at all for my grandchildren and my great grandchildren," the novelist Kurt Vonnegut once groused. Vonnegut's comment came up on the public radio show Marketplace this March, when the program asked, "What if we had a Secretary of the Future?"

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Well, it would be a disaster. Human beings are terrible at foresight, and marrying our purblind premonitions to government power would be more terrible still.

Vonnegut was far from alone in pining for some sort of far-seeing federal planner. For the past half-century, the chief motive for establishing planning bureaucracies has been an allegedly impending ecological and economic catastrophe. For example, in the 1968 book The Population Bomb, the Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich proposed a new Bureau of Population and Environment. The tasks of this "powerful governmental agency," he wrote, would include determining "the optimum population size of the United States and devis[ing] measures to establish it." One such measure would be research on sex determination, so as to guarantee that first-born children were always male, thus satisfying the cultural demand for male heirs.

Ehrlich doubled down in Ark II: Social Response to Environmental Imperatives, a 1974 book that called for a Federal Planning Branch. He and his co-author proposed headquartering the new agency "not in the nation's capital but in some relatively pleasant location that would induce talented young people to choose careers in public service." The planning board would, as Kirkus Reviews noted, be "composed of enlightened fellows" like Ehrlich. Its overall goal: to "curb individual appetites" and persuade the population to adopt "the lost tribalism of preindustrial society."

Two years later, in The Genesis Strategy: Climate and Global Survival, climatologist Stephen Schneider and his co-author advocated the creation of a "Truth and Consequences Branch," a fourth branch of government whose members would be appointed for 20-year terms. The Truth and Consequences Branch would work with the Institute of Imminent Disasters, founded to "assess the probable costs of avoiding any and all perceived disasters impending." The fourth branch would also engage in propaganda, pushing the public to "question present value systems and adopt a new political consciousness. Such a consciousness would move us away from narrow and...