It is human nature to wish bad luck on one's enemy, and that seems to be the basis for the current suggestion that Afghanistan will become for Russia what Vietnam was for America. But a year after Russia's invasion it is time to realize that this has not happened— and will not happen It is not merely because, as Richard Pipes has pointed out, the Soviet Union has experience in putting down Moslem uprisings in Central Asia, and the Afghan rebels have received nothing like the massive aid that North Vietnam got from the USSR and China. Those are important reasons, but they are not the main ones. Even if the Soviet Union lacked such experience and even if Zbigniew Brzezinski's military mission to Pakistan had been successful and America had managed thereby to deliver to Afghanistan as many weapons as the Viet Cong received, the Soviet Union would not disengage Let us go even further and assume that the war will last for more than a decade and cost the Russians 55,000 lives (the sort of “body-count” familiar in the Vietnam war). Still the Soviet Union would not withdraw For the USSR, 55,000 lives are not what they are for America.

War and peace. Jimmy Carter's aides called it “the Tolstoi issue.” The incumbent hammered at it endlessly. The differences between the candidates were “stark,“ he said: Trigger-happy Ronald Reagan would lead America into war; he, the president, would be prudent and safeguard the peace.

The economy. Ronald Reagan blamed the Carter administration for rising unemployment and recordsetting inflation. The free-spending Democrats would lead us into a depression, Reagan warned; the thrifty Republicans would stop inflation and “put America back to work.”

Yet not once during the long campaign did either of the main candidates mention the link between the two. Not once did they discuss how the military budget affects the civilian economy. The American electorate was offered a choice between spending a little more on the arms race or spending a lot more. Carter and Reagan were as one, though, in assuming that military arms equal national security and that arms spending equals a strong economy. In fact, both assumptions are wrong.

Fear of massive unemployment have greeted technological changes ever since the Industrial Revolution. Far from destroying jobs, however, rapid technological advance generally has created many new ones. In the quarter-century following World War II, for example, the industrial economies were flooded with new technologies, while unemployment shrank to exceptionally low levels Yet there is good reason to take seriously the recent outpouring of concern that microelectronic technologies will have a fundamental impact on both the numbers and types of jobs in the industrial world in the coming decades.

Central to this concern is the pervasiveness of microelectronics The microelectronic revolution could affect employment in enterprises ranging from steelworks to banks since no technology in history has had such a broad range of potential applications in the workplace. For another thing, goods that incorporate microelectronic devices generally require significantly less labor to produce than the goods they replace, a fact that extends the employment implications of the technology well beyond its direct impacts on automation. And a third cause of apprehension is the speed with which the technology is advancing. Although microelectronic controls will not sweep through the industrial world overnight, most experts expect them to be firmly established in production processes, products, and daily activities over the next two decades.