Economic literature of the past decade suggests, and most economists would surely agree, that there are two fundamental economic problems: unemployment and monopoly. Together, enforced idleness of resources and maldistribution of resources due to monopolization of all kinds are responsible for whatever gap exists between actual and potential national real income. They account for a good deal of the inequity of income distribution as well. Economic policy has as its chief concern the elimination of monopoly without loss of efficiency, and the elimination of unemployment without inflation or misuse of resources.

The post-war period will present these two basic problems in aggravated form. Exigencies of war have led to increased concentration of industry, which could easily crystallize into enhanced monopoly power. With half our national income now generated by war expenditures, the task of maintaining full employment while shifting production from things that win wars to things that promote welfare will be of unprecedented magnitude. At the same time, vast new holdings of cash and other liquid resources, combined with the backlog of demand for both consumers' and producers' goods that will have accumulated, will constitute a grave threat of inflation. The balance of the economy, which must be maintained by what Professor Lerner has aptly called “functional finance,” will be delicate indeed.

This article suggests an approach to post-war tax policy designed to meet these problems. While the setting is Canadian, the analytical tools and even the policies proposed would be applicable to the British or American scenes with minor modifications.

The bureaucratization of the political process that characterizes twentieth century politics in many countries has not bypassed Canada—as evidenced by skyrocketing rates of government employment and expenditure and, even more dramatically, by the ever-expanding policy-making power of Canadian bureaucracy. One observer sees the civil service as occupying an increasingly strategic role in Canadian politics, a condition that

reflects in part the expanding role of modern government into highly technical areas, which tends to augment the discretion of permanent officials because legislators are obliged to delegate to them the administration of complex affairs, including the responsibility for drafting and adjudicating great amounts of sub-legislation required to “fill in the details” of the necessarily broad, organic statutes passed by Parliament. Some indication of the scale of such discretion is found in the fact that, during the period 1963–8, an annual average of 4,130 Orders-in-Council were passed in Ottawa, a substantial proportion of which provided for delegating authority to prescribe rules and regulations to ministers and their permanent advisers. By contrast, the number of laws passed annually by Canadian federal parliaments is rarely over one hundred.

This paper is primarily an impressionistic sketch of an on-going piece of family research. No conclusions can as yet be offered. Instead, I intend briefly to suggest a frame of reference for the study of family hostility as well as enumerate some of the procedures of field work used in the present project.

Much has been written about the family by many sociologists of various persuasions. Yet a large part of this phase of sociological effort leaves one dissatisfied. Admittedly data on our own types of family structure are hidden from clear view precisely because of their familiarity as well as their privacy. But this fact is not sufficient to account for the disparity between the experienced complexity of family life and the sparsity of published details made significant by a sustained and incisive theoretic orientation. Headway could be made by the use of a frame of reference which combines sociological with psychological considerations, without confusing them, and which draws its vitality from the impassioned analyses of the structure of large-scale social systems and of individual character as begun by Weber and Freud. At the present time family research seems on the whole to have made little consistent use of the leads of kinship analysis and to have by-passed a cumulative effort at spelling out the empirical details of the social structure of various types of American families. As it is, we hear much about the family as a “unity of interacting personalities,” about processes of accommodation or conflict, or about the kinds of valuation that marital partners place upon one another; yet we hear little of the intervening details which, in their fullness, would give us a sense of how indeed a family as an on-going concern functions and how the inherent or emergent demands of its social structure are met, how the social structure of a family is related meaningfully or functionally to the rest of the social system, and how any given family of orientation dissolves into successive families of procreation.

A transformation in the pattern of consumer expenditures has occurred in the nations that have reached high income levels during the past century. Smaller fractions of national income are spent on food, clothing, and shelter; larger fractions on recreation, medical care, education, and luxury goods. Cross-sectional studies of family budgets have been fairly reliable indicators of this trend. As early as 1857 Ernst Engel had pronounced his famous law about food expenditures on the basis of Edouard Ducpetiaux's Belgian budget studies. Similar assertions by others about clothing, fuel, and shelter followed; and in 1919 William Ogburn published his statistics of Washington, D.C., family budgets, indicating, in effect, that income elasticities of demand were highest for amusement and education. As the pattern slowly emerged, economists were not much disturbed. Why should consumers not be left alone in choosing between carrots and bedrooms? Interference with choices among luxury goods and services seemed even less warranted. Advertising posed no problem beyond encouragement of elementary veracity.

In the past decade, however, this unconcern has faded. Several economists have joined sociologists, moralists, and general philosophers in questioning trends in consumer expenditures. Their concern is less with morals and social repercussions than with optimum consumption patterns in terms of economic value and resource allocation. Advertising in particular is no longer reproached merely for a bent towards mendacity. It is seen as more insidious, as manipulating consumers' choices by kindling subconscious anxieties. It puts consumers in a squirrel cage in which production and the want-satisfying process create wants that would otherwise not exist.

This case study of union-management co-operation at the Toronto factory of Lever Brothers Limited was undertaken for several reasons. It is an example of the union-management co-operation in which increases in productive efficiency were brought about solely by savings in man-power requirements. Further it is a case of the fulfilment of a collective bargaining demand by co-operation. These two facts, in themselves, are highly unusual. Although this case of co-operation took place during the war and was influenced by war-time conditions, it is in no way a part of the general war-time pattern of labour-management co-operation, stimulated in Canada by the Industrial Production Co-operation Board and in the United States by the War Production Drive.

Historically, industrial relations can be divided into an area of conflict of interest or collective bargaining and an area of mutuality of interest or co-operation. Employee representation tried to integrate these areas, but without the presence of an independent union, management tended to determine unilaterally the conditions of employment. Union-management co-operation later developed the area of mutuality in parts of the railroad, clothing, steel, and printing industries, but with the exception of the clothing industry, little integration was affected with the area of bargaining. During the recent war labour-management co-operation had a mushroom growth, but little attempt was made to integrate the two areas of industrial relations. In Canada, particularly, the role of the union on the co-operation committees was largely undefined. Co-operation at Lever Brothers is significant because it provides a clearcut case of integration between co-operation on productive efficiency and bargaining on wages and hours. Co-operation arose as a result of a demand by the bargaining agency for increased wages and shorter hours, while their achievement was brought about by the joint action of union and management. This, then, provides an example of union-management relations which may have profound implications for the achievement of industrial peace.

On March 9, 1964, the Hon. J. W. Pickersgill moved in the House of Commons the second reading of the Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Bill, a step of major constitutional importance which not only made provision for the first redistribution of Canadian federal constituencies since 1952, but provided that, for the first time, this task of redistribution would be taken out of the hands of parliamentary committees and entrusted to independent representation commissions. All this was long overdue and there was broad, if not unanimous, agreement that the creation of impartial representation commissions was a desirable reform. As Mr. Pickersgill said in the House next day:

The first and by far the most important of these [principles] was that we should not follow the pattern that had been followed in the first ninety years since Confederation, of having the readjustment of representation in this place done in this place by its members directly, but that it should be done by some body which would be as impartial as we in our collective ingenuity could provide and who would be as competent as we could find means to provide through legislation and subsequent appointment.

All administrative structures are affected by their cultural, social, economic, and political environments. The daily interactions between the two sectors comprise the substance of the administrative activity. In 1973 Zaïre's local administration was subjected to a reform which centralized and standardized its structures. This article examines the reform of the administration from the perspective of social underdevelopment. The local administrative cadres appeared to emerge from the reform with more power and prestige in social planning. However, the actual outcome of the reform in terms of development was doubtful since the authorities who acquired politico-administrative functions were engaged in their own lucrative activities and the public had little control over their administrative actions. Thus the administrative structure became an instrument which the dominant class—the bourgeois politico-administration—could use to strengthen its power over the economy. It could scarcely be otherwise in a situation in which underdevelopment creates and sustains a continual crisis. The consequences are inequalityx in the distribution of public goods and inequity in public decisions. All of these factors produce real stagnation in the society, in spite of the apparently revolutionary upsets which have occurred from time to time. They permit external domination to strengthen its hand and allow internal domination to carve out a suitable empire. To change the situation and free up local administration would require a genuine revolution in the devolution of power to the whole public.