What I have to say will, I fear, be either obvious or presumptuous. However, what is obvious is worth looking at occasionally, and presumption is not a new phenomenon in university circles. I hope it may be agreed that the purpose of social studies is to acquire a better understanding of society in its widest sense, with a view to the formulation of policy, individual or collective. Dr. W. A. Mackintosh, in his presidential address to this Association, said that “any social science must ultimately be justified by the basis which it affords for policy,” and Father G.-H. Lévesque, “Les sciences sociales ont pour objet la connaissance de ce que sont et doivent être les sociétés.” What I suggest is obvious is that the intelligent formulation of policy almost invariably involves more than one and often several of the social studies.

All too frequently we find experts in particular studies, or in particular aspects of them, who might profit by a knowledge and understanding of what others are doing, becoming so absorbed in what they themselves are doing as to neglect, or dismiss as irrelevant, everything else. This Association is an excellent example of what can be achieved by co-operation, and attracts political scientists, economic theorists, economic historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and statisticians. In some countries, there are six separate associations, and I am sure something important is lost as a result. My own department at Toronto includes all of these except anthropologists, and adds commerce and finance as a branch of economics.

Political opponents of Mr. Norman Manley, Jamaica's able chief minister, whose party has supported federation, once quoted against him a speech in which he referred to The West Indies as “the most improbable federation ever conceived.” Even its friends must admit that the original federal agreement lent colour to his description, by establishing a central authority which the Prime Minister, Sir Grantley Adams, recently characterized as both weak and poor. The constitution of 1958 gave the national government very limited jurisdiction and no power to tax. Its main sources of income were contributions from the unit governments, which produced an annual revenue of some nine million West Indian dollars—less than one-fifteenth of that in Trinidad or Jamaica. Profits on the currency issue yielded an additional three million dollars.

Thus the political framework of The West Indies resembled the American Articles of Confederation or the Federal Council of Australasia far more closely than that of a genuinely federal state. West Indians have sometimes said that their constitution was modelled on the Australian, because each assigned residual powers to the units. This view, however, is misleading, since in Australia as in Canada the national government has paramount power to tax and thus authority has inevitably gravitated to the centre.

Discussing the economic backwardness of Ireland in the late seventeenth century, Sir William Petty delivered himself of an apt, if indelicately worded, opinion. “Their Lazing,” he wrote of the Irish, “seems to me to proceed rather from want of Imployment and Encouragement to Work, than from the natural abundance of Flegm in their Bowels and Blood.” He continued this somewhat unorthodox analysis by listing the factors which destroyed or frustrated the incentives to increase production in Ireland; and, in the process, he succeeded in anticipating more than one modern idea on the subject. He even dealt with visible and disguised unemployment, and recommended, along lines fashionable today, that the surplus labour be employed in the creation of capital: improving rivers and constructing roads, bridges and buildings–“works,” as he succinctly put it, “of much labour and little art.”

Although this article concerns neither Petty nor Ireland directly, the former's observations on the latter provide a useful introduction to its principal topic–the historical nature of economic underdevelopment. If we study the earlier history of today's highly developed economies, what sort of economic and social landscape do we find, and how does it compare with the structure of preindustrial economies in the mid twentieth century?

This paper is an attempt to offer a functional theory of the mass media, and to suggest criteria for evaluating the media which emerge from it—criteria which are not taken from other disciplines or from the technology of the media. First, the present stage of communications research is considered; second, the contributions of Marx and Freud; and third, an alternative hypothesis is suggested.

Urban sociologists ought to be parties to any discussion of the mass media, for it is difficult to imagine anything more symbolically urban than the mass circulation daily newspaper, the car radio, or the TV antenna. Yet judging from books on urban sociology interest in this aspect of urban life has, in recent years, dwindled to almost nothing. Neglect here is matched by the peculiar evasion in communications research of the urban context. Comparisons are routinely made between rural and urban populations with respect to readership, audiences and programme preferences, but these tabulations are not weighted any differently from comparisons along such dimensions as marital status, sex, education, and others in our standard repertoire. The two bodies of knowledge, then, have developed independently of each other despite the common-sense observation that they are inextricably related.

If this paper were not too slight it might have been given a sub-title: a note on cultural lag in political science. For one of the things I want to suggest is that political scientists, whether out of envy or pure admiration for their economist colleagues, have in recent decades increasingly taken over an equilibrium-market concept from economics without realizing that they have been taking cast-off clothing. The epithet is perhaps unfair. But it does seem that just when economics has been moving away from its concept of the economy as a pure price system and turning to a notion of the economy as a system of power, carried on by power blocs rather than by maximizing individuals, political theory has been taking over the concept of the equilibrating price system and working it into a general theory of the political process. As economics adopts power concepts in a search for realism, political science adopts market concepts in a search for theoretical elegance. In this curious double process of transvestism I do not think political science has been the gainer. Economists may object that they have not abandoned marginal equilibrium analysis, and I would not insist that they have. Certainly they have not abandoned the search for elegance, and if their elegance is getting a little lumpier they are to be applauded for their greater realism. But the political scientists' use of market concepts is clear enough to be a matter of some concern.

Important changes were made in the Combines Investigation Act in 1952, and again in 1960; the intervening period provides a suitable unit for the study of operations under the Act. We shall try to account for the changes that were made in 1952 and for the manner in which the Act was administered thereafter, in terms of some basic propositions about the process of government in Canada, which are well known though perhaps not universally accepted. We conclude with a brief discussion of the 1960 revision of the Act.

Canadian governments of both parties must try to avoid policies that will antagonize large blocks of voters. They must also steer clear of policies that will lose them the support of substantial business interests, not only because they depend on business groups for campaign funds, but also because the environment in which government operates is influenced, in a great variety of ways, by the actions and attitudes of the major business groups. Many policy decisions, particularly in non-economic fields, do not involve a conflict between these two objectives. Where there is a conflict, the policy decisions that emerge represent a compromise.

The theory of employment that grew out of the Great Depression was not long in influencing government policy-makers and revolutionizing older concepts of fiscal policy. The most important of Keynes's practical lessons, that policies which promote investment and exports and inhibit saving and imports increase employment and output, has now hardened into a dogma and filtered down into almost all the elementary textbooks. The lesson, by and large, was a good one, but the dogma presents the danger that the lesson might be uncritically applied in situations where other government policies render it invalid. This paper is concerned with the most important exception to the rule.

The mercantilist element in Keynesian policies is definitely inapplicable to countries whose central banks do not peg the price of foreign exchange or gold. Tariffs, trade controls, and export subsidies are likely to worsen employment and output in all those situations in which, with a fixed exchange rate, they would improve employment and output. Moreover, if exchange rates are flexible, an increase in investment or government spending, and a reduction in saving or taxation, will have a substantially different effect on employment than that predicted by the traditional foreign trade multiplier. The reason lies in the fact that equilibrium in the balance of payments is automatically maintained by variations in the price of foreign exchange.