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This article presents the author's opinion with regard to George Stigler's views on the practice of political economy in the United States. The evidence presented in the paper of Stigler seems persuasive to me. It is difficult to look at this analysis and still subscribe to the widely held view that election results are highly sensitive to swings in business conditions. Once again we seem to have found that what everybody knows to be true is not necessarily true. Since Stigler's analysis on macro evidence is exhaustive and impressive, suppose we turn to micro evidence to see if it provides any clues to an understanding of why the macro results turn out the way that they do. Here we do gain some insight into attitudes pertinent to Stigler's analysis. What the views of Stigler suggest is that within reasonable tolerances, changes in political sentiment are more apt to reflect the myriad of other factors that bear on voter sentiment. If the swing is outside these tolerances, or if the event is sufficiently visible or discrete, economic developments can exert a substantial effect on citizen support or the incumbent. If therefore, the economic indicators start to waver, the economist may sleep well at night, knowing that in all probability it means little, but the politician may for very good reasons remains awake, wondering if this will be one of those cases that transforms him into a statesman.

The article presents summary of articles present at a round table conference on population problems. Joseph J. Springler's paper is concerned principally with the effects of the various population movements now in process in the United States upon the level of employment. Population movements now in process probably exercise a greater influence today than formerly upon the amount of absolute and disguised unemployment in the American economy because of the greater specificity of factors of production today as compared with formerly. Otto Nathan, in his paper, stated that in analyzing the relationship between population movements and the economic development a distinction should be made between the secular trend and the business cycle proper. One of the factors constituting the secular or long-term development is the population movement itself. In his paper, Alan R. Sweezy, expressed that once an investment boom in underway, increase in the labor supply does have an important influence on investment. Wages rise more slowly than they would with a constant labor supply and numerous investment opportunities consequently can be exploited which would otherwise be unprofitable. The boom once started may be expected to last longer if the labor supply is increasing.

The article presents a list that specifies doctoral degrees conferred during the academic year terminating June 1964, and theses undertaken in the same period. For General Economics; Methodology, degrees conferred to James F. Hofheinz for his paper on The evolution of economic philosophy. For Price and Allocation Theory; Income and Employment Theory; History of Economic Thought, degrees was conferred to Cleverland W. Bateman for his paper on Investment behavior and the acceleration principle. For Economic History; Economic Development; National Economies, degrees was conferred to researcher Ralph Anspach on his paper The problem of a plural economy and its effects on Indonesia's economic structure: a study in economic policy. For Statistical Methods; Econometrics; Social Accounting, the degree was conferred to researcher Takeshi Amemiya on his paper Specification analysis in econometrics. For Economic System; Planning and Reform: Cooperation, the degree was con fared to Michael Boreteky for his paper on The Soviet challenge to U. S. machine building: a study in production and technological policy.

The question of outdoor recreation has received considerable attention in recent years. In spite of the growing importance the economics of outdoor recreation have been almost completely neglected except for the relatively esoteric questions of whether the benefits to society from outdoor recreation can or cannot be measured. This is unfortunate, for economic analysis has much to contribute to society's stake in outdoor recreation and, conversely, a thoroughgoing economic analysis of outdoor recreation reveals some very interesting theoretical and methodological questions having ramifications in other areas of social policy. This paper explores several economic aspects of outdoor recreation including: first, the economic rationale for the public provision of outdoor recreation, second, the resource management problems encountered in supplying such services and third, optimum financing policies for publicly-supplied recreation. Outdoor recreation, the great out-of-doors, is an important part of the American heritage and a legitimate concern of government. Public ownership and operation can be justified quite dispassionately and it can be put on a perfectly sound financial basis. Over the long run this approach is more likely to protect and promote this heritage than is the usual wholly emotional appeal to non-economic criteria.

The article presents a paper on economic-demographic interactions and long swings in economic growth. The paper building on the work of numerous predecessors, suggests that one of the mechanisms responsible for long swings in economic growth may involve interactions among aggregate demand, labor-market conditions, and household growth, with a feedback effect from the last to the first. An upswing in the growth of aggregate demand and the growing labor-market tightness induced thereby engenders accelerated marriage, migration, and household growth. These are critical decision points in the life cycle, entailing spending commitments extending over several years as a new home is established and a family started or settled. In effect, such commitments are geared to a notion of permanent income and thus tend to be relatively insensitive to short term income changes. A bunching of such commitments serves to cushion the economy against the usual business cycle and becomes exhausted only gradually. Such a bunching of long term spending commitments may be the key to Kuznets cycle phenomena.

In the great revival of interest in economic development in the U.S. that has marked the past decade, attention has centered on two main questions: the determining factor of the over-all rate of economic advance; and the optimal allocation of given resources to promote growth. Analysis of the growth rate has relied mainly on the Keynesian tools and has produced a multiplicity of aggregate growth models. In the field of resource allocation, controversy centers around the implications of the classical principle of comparative advantage, according to which growth is promoted by specialization. The present paper discusses the analysis of resource allocation in less developed economies from three points of view. One section tries to ascertain the extent to which the allocation principles derived from trade theory and from growth theory can be reconciled with each other without losing their operational significance. Another section compares various approaches to the measurement of optimal resource allocation in terms of their logical consistency and their applicability to different conditions. One section examines some of the practical procedures followed in setting investment policy in underdeveloped countries in the light of the earlier discussion. Some of the theoretical issues are re-examined to indicate their practical importance.

The widespread tendency in empirical studies of economic behavior to discard war years as "abnormal," while doubtless often justified, is, on the whole, unfortunate. The major defect of the data on which economists must rely on is that the data generated by experience rather than deliberately contrived experiment, encompasses a small range of variation. Experience in general proceeds smoothly and continuously. In consequence, it is difficult to disentangle systematic effects from random variation since both are of much the same order of magnitude. From this point of view, data for wartime periods are peculiarly valuable. At such times, violent changes in major economic magnitudes occur over relatively brief periods, thereby providing precisely the kind of evidence that we would like get by "critical" experiments if we could conduct them. Of course, the source of changes means that effects in which we are interested are necessarily intertwined with others that we would eliminate from a contrived experiment. But this difficulty applies to all our data, not to data for wartime periods alone. To the student of monetary phenomena, the three wartime episodes with which this paper deals the experience of the United States in the Civil War, first World War and second World War offer an especially close approximation to the kind of critical experiment he would like to conduct. As we shall see, in all three cases the rise in prices was of almost precisely the same magnitude, so this critical variable is under control. Yet other crucial features varied, offering the opportunity to test alternative hypotheses designed to explain price changes. Besides their significance for the general understanding of monetary phenomena, the wartime experiences are unfortunately of interest in their own right.

Presents information related to several articles on economics. Economic growth and productivity in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Germany and Japan in the post war period; Dividend policies of electric utility firms; Relationship between the quantity of materials imported by the United States and the level of industrial production and prices of imports.

This article presents a study in economics about the capital market and the dynamics of growth in the U.S. It investigated the effects of introducing an equity security into a money and growth framework. The model was developed explicitly in terms of securities and capital instead of the more traditional treatment in terms of money and capital. The model was reduced to three differential equations in capital intensity, the wealth ratio, and price expectations. Based on the reduced system, equilibrium and global stability were analyzed. The stability of the model was found to depend crucially on whether the direct interest rate effect was greater than the offsetting wealth effect and whether the rate of forced saving was greater than the adjustment in the rate of inflation. It is proposed that the crucial role of financial markets in general, and security markets in particular, is to take the short-run impact of economic disturbances and allow the rate of inflation to adjust slowly to changes in the economic environment.

This article discusses the stability properties of optimal economic policies in the U.S. Stochastic elements have a stabilizing influence, rather intriguing in view of the fact that in purely descriptive dynamic models such disturbances tend to be destabilizing. Basically the reason for this is that the existence of stochastic elements exerts an inhibiting influence on the policy maker, causing him to adjust his instruments more cautiously than he otherwise would, thereby dampening the adjustment and making it stable. At the same time it means that typically there is correspondingly less response in the target so that as in this example it may no longer be optimal to drive it to its desired equilibrium each period. In this sense the stochastic disturbances exert a destabilizing effect, although of course the target still remains stochastically stable. Thus a kind of tradeoff between the two kinds of stability is seen to occur, although overall the entire system is stochastically stable.

This article reports on techniques and findings of a two-year econometric study devoted to development planning in the Elk River area, a subregion of the Tennessee Valley. The area is one of a number of economically lagging regions in which local development efforts have been receiving concentrated planning assistance from the Tennessee Valley Authority. Certain of the socio-economic problems confronting the study area are mentioned but this paper's principal concern will be with the rationale and application of the planning model itself. The eight-county Elk River area occupies some 3,850 square miles in south-central Tennessee and northern Alabama. The population, now increasing slowly after two decades of decline, is about 200,000. The Elk River provides the unifying feature and drains a little over half of the region as it flows southwest to meet the Tennessee, just east of Muscle Shoals. The area lies in the interstice of four centers of commercial and cultural activity: Nashville, Huntsville, Chattanooga and the Muscle Shoals region. Interaction is greatest with rapidly industrializing northern Alabama; of the one-third of all area factory workers who commute to jobs outside the Elk River area, most are employed in, or near, Huntsville.

During 1880's, more striking new departures occurred in the U.S. economics than in any other comparable period. At that time the conflict between the established laissez-faire orthodoxy and the newly imported German historical ideas, reached its climax. A wave of public interest in economic problems provided an opportunity for several able young men who came to dominate the U.S. economics for the next three or four decades to obtain their first professorial appointments. Academic economists, as a body, slowly but surely divested themselves of the accumulated propaganda and theological trappings of their subject and secured its recognition as the leading independent social science discipline. The first professional economic journals appeared and the foundation of the American Economic Association on September 9, 1885, approximately the midpoint of the decade, symbolized the birth of an indigenous national tradition of economic scholarship. Although the concluding stages of this long period of gestation have repeatedly been subjected to close scrutiny, the process is intrinsically so interesting that it would be unwise to neglect any new evidence, which has a bearing on it.

This article presents a list of new periodicals related to economics published in the March 1960 issue of the journal "American Economic Review." The periodicals in the general economics section include "Theorie und empirische Forschung in der Sozialwissenschaft," by B. Fritsch, "Professor Shackle on Time in Economics," by B.S. Keirstead, "Les objectifs de la politique économique," by E.S. Kirschen and L. Morissens, "Professor Shackle on the Economic Significance of Time," by L. Lachmann, "The Present Position of Economics," by L. Robbins, "The Methodology of Positive Economics," by E. Rotwein, "The Politics of Political Economists," by G. Stigler and "Science and Welfare in Economic Policy," by F. Zeuthen. The periodicals in the price and allocation theory, income and employment theory, related empirical studies and history of economic thought sections include "Shackle's System and Theories of Business Cycles," by J. Aenman, "Utility, Risk, and Linearity," by G.C. Archibald and "Formal Criteria for Investment Decisions," by M.J. Bailey.

The staying power of the employment problems of Appalachia or urban ghettos demonstrates that there is no easy solution for spreading economic growth to all parts of the nation. The authors develop a procedure to facilitate effective search for manufacturing jobs. The ideas described will assist regional groups in directing their investment of time and money into resources that will achieve goals depending on an expanded manufacturing base. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the history, goals, and aims of the U.S. foreign assistance program in 1968. The program began with the post-World War II Marshall plan to rebuild Western Europe. The U.S. AID budget was decreased ten percent in 1968 in response to escalating costs in the Vietnam War. Governments throughout the world have come to rely upon foreign financial assistance. However, the use of such funds lacks oversight in developing nations. The author suggests implementing strategies of direct aid to help build infrastructure and improve education.

The article discusses business climate and industrial location specifically in California in 1964. It has been contended that the high rate of economic growth experienced by California has been dictated primarily by both the high income character of its large population and the high rate of government expenditures within the state. According to research California has 10% of the national population, 10% of the annual national and personal income, and 25% of the annual government expenditures on prime defense contracts. Considering the size and character of California's industrial economy the number of firms going out of business or otherwise reducing employment is small.

There is a pattern to urban growth which makes it possible to forecast booms in industrial areas and spot high rent residential areas in the making. Underlying principles are topography, transportation, and the uneasy dynamics of the high income class seeking better, more exclusive residential sites. Time maps, sector analyses, input-output forecasts are tools used to predict change in the megalopolis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The road to complete business recovery and faster economic growth for the United States is not the path of tax cuts and heavy stimulus to consumption. It is built instead upon a combination of expanded public and private investment resulting in a deepening of capital investment in new plants, technologies, and productive facilities that will increase this nation's future capacity to produce. That is the new economic frontier, this authority, one of the President's advisers, states. Will we be able to cross it successfully? Probably, he thinks, but outlines some of the challenges which must be met soon, if we are to hold our own against other countries whose economies surpass us in rates of growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explains how industrial growth is related to expanding metropolitan areas and sets forth specific recommendations for assuring balanced growth of the two. Two specific questions which are which are fundamental to an understanding of the problem are discussed. First, what is the relationship between the expansion of manufacturing and population growth in metropolitan areas? Second, how can the available resources of an area be most effectively managed as population expands? These questions are considered as they apply to several developing metropolitan areas in California.

This article presents a study on the accounting of growth output in the U.S. for the period of ten years, from1950 to 1960. The major sources of economic growth in manufacturing during the 195O's were increases in capital, increases in the number of employees, and structural changes that affected the occupational, age, and educational makeup of the labor force. Changes in the sexual and racial structure were very slight and thus had no substantial impact on the growth of output. The isolation of these elements as the sources of growth was due to the combination of having extremely disaggregated data and having a practical rule of thumb for estimating the effect of disaggregation.

The article presents the author's reply pertaining to capital supply and national well-being. Referring to Mr. Keirstead's questions, Snyder remarks that they are derived from a widespread belief that Great Britain's "periodic break-downs" are "inherent" in the present capitalistic system. So the evidence that has been building up in the last 15 years seems to portray an inherent stability and persistence of industrial growth unimagined by most economic and socialistic writers. The forces "inherent" in industry seem admirably adapted to maintain such an equilibrium as Professor Cannon depicts in the human body. It seems only when the body economic is invaded by "infection," such as credit inflation, speculation and booms, that breakdowns occur. Snyder adds that in another 10 or 20 years it is possible that the Soviet experiment will reveal much. But it still may remain open whether the drastic methods it has employed would be feasible in a highly developed industrialized system like in the United States or Great Britain. The capitalistic system has been in a continuous process of transformation and development, pretty much ever since its latest phase began 150 years ago with the introduction of the steam engine and the coming of the Power Age. Snyder predicts that cooperative kind of socialism would be perhaps far more efficient and beneficent than most of its critics can believe.

Features a study on the relation of railroad establishment to the economic development in the United States. Technological innovations in the railroad industry; Contributions of railroads to national income; Estimated costs of transportation services; Construction and maintenance of railroads.

It is widely recognized that one of the important factors promoting economic growth in the U.S. during the first half of the nineteenth century was an increased degree of regional specialization according to the comparative advantage of each region. The existence of an extensive system of canals prior to railroad construction has caused a revived interest in the role of canals in economic growth. This article is concerned with the issues which are raised in attempting to assess the contribution of the canals to the economic development of the U.S. The article concludes that the role of canals in contributing towards the economic growth of the U.S. is far from obvious. A substantial number of the canals constructed before the war were clearly not profitable. The gains from regional specialization in the U.S. during this period were substantial. But the evidence indicates that the market could have been widened to allow much of this specialization at a cost well below $190 million. Far too much attention has been paid to the regional benefits rather than the increased efficiency of the economy as a whole.

The discussion in this article presents three aspects of economic effects of capital gains taxation that are of major policy importance. This article addresses the impact of capital gains taxation on economic growth, the impact of capital gains taxation on stabilization of the economy at full employment, and the impact of the tax on efficient use of our economic resources. In discussing the effects of capital gains taxation, the article refers to the differential behavior of the economy under two tax systems — a tax system yielding revenues equal to those collected under the present system but without the preferential features for asset transactions and a tax system such as is actually in effect. The comparison does not refer to the difference between the present tax structure and the same structure with preferential capital gains tax provisions deleted because a closing of all capital gains loopholes would generate different amounts of revenue. The desirability of alternative levels of revenue and their economic effects are issues that need not be discussed in this article.

The article focuses on Edward Denison's book "The Sources of Economic Growth in the United States and the Alternatives Before Us," which addresses the issue of the objective analyses of grounds for dissatisfaction or coherent and comprehensive program for accelerating the economic growth in the U.S. His work is, in fact, a notable contribution to a vexed and difficult subject. In astonishingly brief compass, Denison presents a picture of past trends in output growth and in the development of various sources to which the growth of productive capacity can be traced, a projection of the probable future flows from these sources and a measured evaluation of the possible steps that might be taken to make flows still larger. Moreover, in grappling with these complicated and still largely unexplored issues, he has achieved a quite remarkable combination of technical finesse and depth with clear and almost deceptively simple exposition. The book is, therefore a minor miracle of lucidity and persuasiveness which calls for the most serious study by economists while it engages the attention of a much wider audience.

There are several aims and standards that may be set for an economy and the article proposes to consider three of them, to maximize consumer satisfaction, to promote growth and to provide economic security. To regard the satisfaction of the consumer as the aim of economic organization and conformity to consumers' preferences as the standard by which to judge the performance of an economy these are precepts of neoclassical economics, which still dominate most of thinking. Not the least reason for this is the attractiveness of the neoclassical precepts. Their use has encouraged economists to look upon their subject as an objective science and in some sense, a democratic one. Economics is objective, in as much as the criterion of consumers' preferences is given from the outside, treated by the economist as a datum and revealed to him by consumers' actual behavior in the market. The democratic nature of economics derives from the economist's habit of identifying the consumer with the people and consumers' sovereignty with the sovereignty of the people.

The article discusses problems of economic growth in the poorer nations that became a major foreign policy concern of the wealthy and powerful nations of the world. The relative progress in the development of the two countries, India and China, is of great significance. There were strong parallels in their preplan structure and strong contrasts between China's totalitarian and India's democratic programs. Their performance relative to one another may influence the programs adopted by other, now less advanced, countries. It will certainly bear upon the United States and Soviet foreign policies. Furthermore, the record of the course of development in these two lands provides a unique opportunity for examining the process of development as such. Structural unemployment, underutilized resources, overurbanization, nonmonetized savings and investment flows-these are illustrative of the types of problems that must be understood and treated if there are to be steady output gains in most of today's underdeveloped areas.

To make an appraisal, it is first necessary to have some standard by which an evaluation can be made; in this case a satisfactory definition of economic progress. Beyond the definition of a standard, an appraisal involves the application of yardsticks which can be used to measure achievement or lack of achievement in terms of the accepted standard. Progress means movement toward some particular goal or objective. The difficulty comes in the selection of the goal. Goals are determined by philosophical and ethical considerations and in the final analysis are based upon group or individual preferences. There is no appeal beyond the point of the statement of such preferences. No one can prove by an appeal to logic the superiority of one preference over another. For one thing, a failure to understand the relative nature of individual and social goals accounts for a considerable amount of confusion which arises over the meaning and content of progress. As the attitude of many Americans toward the economic depression in Great Britain demonstrates, there can be sharp differences in the interpretation of progress and the means of obtaining it even between two countries that share a common cultural heritage.

Explores the preoccupation of economists and other social scientists with the phenomenon of economic development in the U.S. Display of an extraordinary diversity of interpretations and hypotheses regarding the development; Areal differentiation of economic conditions and prospects; Role of natural resources in economic development.

One of the major problems confronting mankind today concerns the fact that roughly two thirds of the world's population lives in countries that are characterized by extremely low levels of economic and social well-being. In contrast to an annual per capita income of $1,864 in the United States, recent estimates indicate that about 70 per cent of the countries in the world have annual per capita incomes of less than $400. The economic development of any given country is a process which entails changes in nearly every aspect of economic and social life. The article makes an effort to compare the annual rates of increase in population and per capita income for selected underdeveloped countries during the period 1952 to 1958. For those countries which have been growing at a rate of less than 1 per cent per year, the annual rate of increase in per capita income has ranged from 3.1 per cent to 7.5 per cent, with an overall average of 5.9 per cent a year. In contrast, the average annual rate of per capita income increase has been only 2.4 per cent for countries whose annual rate of population growth has been between 1 and 2 per cent, and only 1.7 per cent for those countries which have been growing at a rate in excess of 2 per-cent per year.

The article presents a report of the American Economic Association to the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). A number of committees of the Social Science Research Council continue to be active on matters of interest to the members of the American Economic Association, and a brief progress report on the work of these committees may be in order. The Committee on Economic Growth, under the chairmanship of Simon Kuznets, is continuing its far flung activities. Its foreign studies are well along and arrangements were made this past autumn for work on the Australian national accounts. A conference on the recruitment of a stable labor force in undeveloped areas is planned for the spring of 1958. The Committee on Business Enterprise Research has been inactive but an attempt is being made to reactivate it. In short, the SSRC continues to be active in a range of matter of interest to economist and continues to show a gratifying interest in economic issues for their own sake and in the interrelation between economics and the other social science.