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.

In the 1870's, party attitudes to Canada's nascent labour movement were clearly reflected in the federal legislation of successive Conservative and Liberal administrations. Especially was this true of the Trade Unions Act of 1872 and the Breaches of Contract Act of 1877. The bill concerning trade unions was guided through the House a few weeks before a federal general election by Sir John A. Macdonald, conscious of the special contribution it would make to the success of his National Policy. It was passed in response to organized labour's outspoken demands and in the face of George Brown's determined efforts to destroy trade unionism. The Breaches of Contract bill was driven through the Commons for no clear electoral purpose by Edward Blake and Alexander Mackenzie, conscious of the special contribution they could make to the success of the Grand Trunk Railway Company. It was passed in spite of labour fears and in the face of stiff opposition from Macdonald, Irving and other leading Conservative and Independent politicians. Whereas the famous Trade Unions Act asserted the right of all workers to organize and to strike, the less well-known Breaches of Contract Act denied the right to strike to all employees of public utilities. Thus the seventies, while witnessing some major federal legislation directly affecting Canada's young trade-union movement, also saw labour inevitably moving within the orbit of Macdonald's Conservative party.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the status and functions of the Bank of Canada against the background of the principle of responsible government. The Bank of Canada is not the only agency of the federal government that has been freed from the burden of direct responsibility to Parliament through a minister. But of all these agencies, and they are both numerous and varied, the Bank is the most important from the standpoint of the national economy, and it also enjoys a degree of independence that is quite exceptional. The contention of this paper is that the constitutional status of the Bank, as it currently seems to be, is a gross incongruity in a parliamentary democracy based on the principle of executive responsibility.

A discussion of the relation of responsibility between the government and the Bank of Canada must distinguish two distinct periods in its evolution up to this time. The point which demarcates these two periods is the emergence of “tight money” about the middle of 1955. Up to that time the Bank had not been the object of any significant public complaint or controversy. The hostility in the financial community that accompanied the Bank's founding in 1935 was speedily overcome by the diplomatic skill of the first Governor, and the Bank's handling of monetary problems during the war met with such universal acclaim that by 1945 the Bank enjoyed a reputation that might well have been envied by the older central banks of other countries. In the post-war period, the Bank pursued an easy money policy that placed no restraints on the private banks and, perhaps unfortunately, engendered no criticism from the general public. Not a word was to be heard anywhere against the Bank. When the calm was broken by Professor Timlin's critical paper on monetary policy, which she read to the American Economic Association in December, 1952, one received the impression in Ottawa that an act of blasphemy had occurred.

For most of the first half of this century the dominant figure in Canadian statistics was Robert Coats. The principal facts of his life and career are given in an obituary written for this Journal (August, 1960, pp. 482–3) by Mr. Herbert Marshall. It now seems appropriate to make a first attempt to sum up his effort and achievement. We hope that this brief article will encourage a more detailed account of Coats's work and a more penetrating statement of its enduring effects.

For twenty-five years Coats was Dominion Statistician, a post created for him, whose potential importance he perceived early and whose strategic role he firmly established. He not only shaped Canadian statistical organization; he shaped it in a characteristically self-conscious way, adding to the effectiveness of a practical administrator a sense of the long-range implications of his actions. He has left a number of papers in which some of his philosophy is made explicit in the phrases of a master of essay writing. He had a clear notion of the kind of theory that would help to collect and interpret practical data, in contrast to the many curiosities that were then included in statistical courses. In his presidential address to the American Statistical Association in 1938, he asked for a book that would elucidate statistical theory for the practising statistician, a call that has since been answered in several volumes.

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.

Lorsque les vingt-huit délégations des divers partis socialistes nationaux du monde se rencontrèrent en congrès le 27 avril 1960 à Haïfa, les représentants des sections européennes de la IIe Internationale ouvrière n'y apportaient pas un bulletin de victoire.

Au Royaume-Uni, les Travaillistes avaient essuyé trois défaites électorales successives. En Allemagne occidentale, le parti social-démocrate n'avait fait qu'aller d'échec en échec depuis le rétablissement de la démocratie. En France, malgré la participation au pouvoir, le parti socialiste se désagrégeait. En Italie, la division du parti paraissait insurmontable. En Belgique, le parti socialiste ne parvenait pas à s'assurer des votes de nombreux ouvriers et employés flamands. Aux Pays-Bas, les clivages religieux continuaient à l'emporter sur les clivages politiques, bloquant le parti travailliste. En Suisse, on observait une situation analogue. Quant à la forteresse de la IIe Internationale ouvrière en Europe, la Scandinavie, elle ne tenait bon qu'en Norvège. L'électorat suédois glissait en effet peu à peu vers la droite, l'électorat danois continuant à se montrer instable. Et pour la Finlande, le parti social-démocrate ne parvenait toujours pas à retrouver sa prééminence de 1939. Quant à la Péninsule ibérique, les dictatures de Franco et de Salazar semblaient encore interdire tout retour immédiat de formations socialistes agissant au grand jour.

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?

The purpose of the paper is to provide more firmly based estimates of some aspects of Canadian population growth. In Part I estimates are derived of the natural increase in the Canadian population by decades from 1851 to 1931 based on survival rates derived from life tables. The figures on natural increase then permit the derivation of net migration estimates. In Part II new estimates of immigration are developed that, together with the net migration figures of Part I, yield estimates of emigration by decades. Part III tests some of the results by an examination of the limited information available on other aspects of Canada's economic development in the period.

The life table is a basic tool of population study. The most recent application of the life table to the problem of the reconstruction of Canadian population growth was made by Nathan Keyfitz. While the same method is used here, we feel that we have made more realistic assumptions in deriving a life table designed to represent the mortality characteristics of early Canadian populations.

Ricardo offers us the supreme intellectual achievement, unattainable by weaker spirits, of adopting a hypothetical world remote from experience as though it were the world of experience and then living in it consistently. With most of his successors common sense cannot help breaking in—with injury to their logical consistency. (J. M. Keynes, The General Theory, p. 192.)

What was the contribution of Lord Keynes to the development of general equilibrium theory? It is becoming possible now, with the passage of a quarter-century, to view Keynes's General Theory as an (important) episode in the continuous development of general neo-classical systems. From one vantage point, it is paradoxical that his work should have been accepted as the Grand Departure from its neo-classical progenitors—even though Keynes presented it in that light—since his interpretations of these systems are almost always kept visible for purposes of comparison. On the other hand, Keynes's impact on economic policy, on the methodology and analytics of quantitative economics, and on the working economist's “vision” of reality, may be seen even today to be of that order of power rightfully termed “revolutionary.”

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.

This paper provides a reconciliation of the Marshallian and Slutsky theories of demand. Incidentally, it also demonstrates that vertically parallel indifference curves involve unitary price elasticity and clarifies Marshall's analysis of consumer's surplus.

In Figure 1 the consumer is assumed to be initially in equilibrium at A, where he purchases OA′ of X (a composite commodity) at a price of P, as indicated by price line FA, and devotes OM of his given money income to all uses, Y, other than expenditures on X. Thus Y represents dollars spent on all uses other than X. The price of X is then allowed to decrease to (P − ΔP) as indicated by price line FB and the quantity of X increases to (X + ΔX), or to OB′, while the price of Y remains constant at unity, and the quantity of Y decreases to ON. Since the consumer's money income remains constant, any change in the total amount spent on X must produce an equal and an opposite change in the total amount spent on all other goods. The change in the total amount spent on all other goods is defined as the difference between the amount spent on X in the initial position at A and that spent on X in the new position at B, or as:

.

I propose in this paper to examine majority voting with the tools of elementary game theory. This, in itself, represents nothing new. The “majority game” has been analysed by numerous game theorists. I propose, however, to derive certain implications from the analysis for the utilization of resources in the public or collective sector of the economy.

The models of collective decision-making that must be employed are necessarily abstract; so much so that the analyses may seem to appear to some observers as caricatures of actual political processes. Analysis must start somewhere, however, and even the most abstract of models, by isolating specific features of real-world institutions, may prove helpful to our over-all understanding. I shall introduce a model of pure democracy. That is to say, I shall assume that all collective decisions are to be made by a simple majority voting process in which all citizens participate. All problems of representation, leadership, parties, and coalitions shall be left out of account. Furthermore, I shall assume that the individual citizens in the model are motivated by utility-maximizing considerations; that is, each individual is assumed to vote in such a manner as to maximize his own utility. This assumption allows numerical values to be placed in the expected pay-offs that individuals receive through political processes. If the expected pay-offs can be numerically correlated with observable economic quantities or magnitudes, some provisional and tentative implications may be drawn concerning the tendency of majority voting rules to “over-extend” or to “starve” the public sector of the economy relative to the private sector.

Economists have never had much influence on legislators or electors regarding the issue of protection. In part this may be because they have seemed to talk about different things. Economists have traditionally urged free trade as a way to reallocate domestic resources more efficiently in the long run. Legislators, concerned with an immediate and adverse effect of cheaper imports on some of their constituents' incomes, have usually reacted as though domestic resources were forever immobile among different occupations. But it would be wrong to infer that the economist's case for more open trade does not also apply to such extreme short-run situations.

Accordingly, to demonstrate that a powerful case can be made for freer trade under extremely short-run conditions, the following analysis assumes that no factor of production can be transferred by its owner to another employment. The resultant gains from trade must then arise because the outside world places different relative values on domestically produced goods than does the home economy. Of course the altered international distribution of the fixed domestic output that results from trade is both a cause and an effect of the increases and decreases in personal incomes that accompany trade. The prices of traded goods will be more drastically altered by increased trade if domestic resources are immobile. So will their owners' incomes. However, even when resources cannot be reallocated, the redistribution of their output through trade provides a gain.

Since Professor Leontief published his study of American foreign trade factor requirements in 1953, much has been written about the problem. This paper reviews the discussion briefly, and provides some data indicating the factor requirements for Canada's foreign trade.

This paper uses conventional input-output methods; one may criticise input-output results in a number of ways, the most obvious of which is to say that the algebraic solution does not represent the total picture. Professor Leontief, in a reply to Professor Granick and others, willingly admitted that the total picture includes resource endowments in each trading country, primary factors of production, shapes of production functions, input-output relations which govern the transformation of resources into goods and services, and consumer preferences for different bundles of production which can be supplied with alternative combinations of factor inputs. But in addition to this general limitation of the approach there are several specific criticisms.

Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon, was born in 1760; his writings date from 1802 until his death in 1825. He is widely regarded as perhaps the most enthusiastic of all scientistic writers, and one of the most influential, but the nature and motivation of his scientism have been frequently misunderstood. Scientism I understand to be the belief that all, or virtually all, moral and political problems can be solved by methods similar to those used in the natural sciences. Historicism, a form which scientism very often takes, I would define as the revealing of laws of history by which, it is claimed, the future of man can be predicted. Exponents of scientism appear to have one or more of three different but related objectives: one, the pursuit of truth about man and society; the second, the acquisition of techniques to cure social ailments; the third, the re-establishment of ideological uniformity.

In view of the approaching revision of the Bank Act in 1964, it may now be appropriate to re-examine contemporary opinion and practice concerning commercial bank capital. It is tempting to inquire whether there is an optimum ratio of capital to assets towards which commercial banks should aim. The traditional economic function of capital accounts has been to protect bank depositors against loss caused by depreciation of bank assets. “Bank capital is in effect a first line of deposit guarantee. Any supervisory standard for measuring capital adequacy should be expressed in terms of the function of bank capital. The function of bank capital is to protect the bank creditors, mostly depositors, against ultimate loss.”

Taking a literal view of this function, supervisory authorities in the United States came to apply a standard ratio of capital to deposits of 10 per cent; “there appears to be no scientific basis for this particular ratio. It is simply a good round decimal, easy to calculate at a glance.” Then, as the capital: asset ratio fell substantially with the increase of bank holdings of government securities, a capital: asset standard was suggested. Since losses result from asset depreciation, and bank assets do not all involve the same degree of risk, assets seemed a more relevant guide to capital requirements than deposits. Such an assets standard would not indicate a need for more capital until earning assets of some inherent risk were being acquired. Incidentally, if protection of assets were the accepted function of bank equity, it would only be that portion of capital funds in excess of fixed assets which would be relevant for the numerator.

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.