MILES TO GO: A Personal History of Social Policy.<i> By Daniel Patrick Moynihan (Harvard: $22.95, 245 pp.)</i>

“Recent years, with the steady advance of technology, have given birth to a good number of neo-apocalyptic views of the future of the American economy, most of them associated with the concept of automation. No one should doubt there is something called automation going on, and that it does change things. However, there is no evidence whatever that it is in fact transforming American society, or any other society. It is simply the newest phase in a process that has been underway for at least two centuries. . . . At the same time, there is a good deal of evidence, if that is the term for what are little more than everyday impressions, that in the area of economic policy there has occurred a genuine discontinuity, a true break with the past: Men are learning how to make an industrial economy work.”

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One of America’s brainiest politicians, Moynihan meditates here on his 30 years in public life and challenges ahead. This is not an easy freeway ride toward a certain conclusion, but a lurching taxi race through the traffic and potholes of contemporary culture, politics, history and social science. The New York Democratic senator’s observations are acute and unencumbered by a desire to please or the need to adhere to convention. Which may explain why he remains uncommonly respected and his thoughts so welcomed.