Contact! is an annual convention combining anthropologists and science fiction writers. The first one was held in the spring of 1983 in Santa Cruz, California.
I was invited to attend and present a paper. That sounded like fun, but it wasn't easy. As it happened, the previous week I was supposed to go to Houston, Texas for the L-5 Society Convention on Space Development, and from there to Ithaca, New York, where I delivered the annual C. P. Snow Memorial Lecture. I went directly from Ithaca to Santa Cruz. Since I hadn't been home for over a week, my paper was mostly written on airplanes.
That, incidentally, is much easier to do than it used to be, thanks to my NEC PC-8201 portable lap computer.
The first Contact! conference proved to be as interesting as I'd hoped, and the second was in many ways better. The conventions tend to be equally divided between fairly serious analysis and pure fun, with a kind of space-age Dungeons and Dragons game thrown in for free.
Since I wrote this essay, Charles Murray has published Losing Ground, a book that proves, or purports to prove, that most of the welfare policies of the U.S. are having precisely the opposite effect that the social scientists thought they would have. He cites the great Negative Income Tax experiment, which was apparently done quite well, and which seems to show beyond all doubt that if you give people free money, they don't work as much as they do when you don't. Naturally, the book has been either ignored or savagely attacked.
This was written some years ago, in haste, on an airplane, but I see no reason to revise a word of it.