Page "belles_lettres" Paragraph 358

This is an unsolved problem which probably has never been seriously investigated, although one frequently hears the comment that we have insufficient specialists of the kind who can compete with the Germans or Swiss, for example, in precision machinery and mathematics, or the Finns in geochemistry.

We hear equally fervent concern over the belief that we have not enough generalists who can see the over-all picture and combine our national skills and knowledge for useful purposes.

This problem of the optimum balance in the relative numbers of generalists and specialists can be investigated on a communicative network basis.

Since the difficulty of drawing the net is great, we will merely discuss it.