Posted on November 15, 2008 - by Lauren

Militarist Millionaire Peacenik

The Memoir of a Militarist Millionaire Peacenik

This is a story of Alan F. Kay, a man who dared to do. Kay, 82, developed the idea for a shared information exchange for the financial services industry in 1968, well before the Internet and the Bloomsburg news services made it commonplace. His name might be confused with another man; Alan Curtis Kay who conceived the Dynabook, a 1970’s predecessor to today’s laptops, notebook computers and E-books as well as the graphical user interface that we use to work in a Mac or Windows environment. Alan F. Kay is no less inventive, nor his scientific contributions less important. But his contributions to the public interest may be more noteworthy.

{mosimage}In the early 1980’s after, leaving AutEx, a company he had co-founded and led for sixteen years, Kay became one of the national leaders in the nuclear arms freeze movement. While at odds with the Reagan Administration, Kay joined with billionaire Armand Hammer, among others, to found a non-profit institute for U.S.-Soviet relations. His more recent accomplishments are in public interest polling; those had the most interest to me. (Full disclosure: my wife is a programmer for a market research company that conducts public interest polls.)

Kay was trained as a theoretical mathematician, earning a bachelor’s degree from MIT and a doctorate from Harvard. From reading this memoir, Militant Millionaire Peacenik, Memoir of a Serial Entrepreneur, I got the impression that Kay tried to take a rational approach to survey research, at least to the point where questions were carefully designed, as not to be politically biased.

One of his surveys, conducted in 1991 through an entity he created called America Talks Issues (ATI), was quite relevant to today; it was a survey on solutions that could lead to energy independence. This survey asked respondents to consider eighteen proposals for improving the U.S. energy supply. These ranged from expanding fossil fuels to renewable energy sources to conservation measures. Each respondent was asked to determine if each proposal had the potential to improve the economy as well as the environment.

The ATI survey results revealed five “triple winners,” proposals that had more than fifty percent support as positive contributions to out energy supply, as well as the economy and the environment. The most popular proposal was for renewable-energy electric generating systems based on wind, solar, and hydro or water power. The next “triple winners” were fuel-efficient cars, trains and planes, new efficient systems for lighting, for pumping and mechanical processes, and for heating, refrigeration and air conditioning. The fifth was a new fuel—like hydrogen or alcohol—to begin to replace gasoline. And interestingly enough, one of the biggest losers was drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and offshore—nothing close to majority support for a Republican mantra of the 2008 presidential election: Drill Baby Drill.

And I repeat, this survey was taken seventeen years ago. The solutions were available then, but political leadership was not. It is worth reading this book to see the results of the other surveys on such topics as the federal budget deficit, arms sales, and government reform. Kay’s point is that Americans, when surveyed fairly, will accept solutions that are different than the ones that have broad political support. He explains this thought better than academics do, but academics receive more credibility because they have the prestige of their university behind them.     

Alan F. Kay is, by any account, a very successful man and he continues to be a non-partisan advocate for numerous public policy solutions. I could not consider him to be a liberal or conservative as much as a policy wonk. If you have your own wonkish tendencies, then visit www.AlanFKay.com. You’ll learn more from the Web site than you will from the memoir.

Contact Stuart Nachbar at http://www.EducatedQuest.com , a blog on education politics, policy and technology or read about his first book, The Sex Ed Chronicle, a novel on education and politics in 1980 New Jersey, at http://www.SexEdChronicles.com.