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.

As a civil servant in the East India Company and witness to government expansion and reorganization in the mid-nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill developed an interest in civil service reform. In an essay supporting the 1854 Northcote-Trevelyan Report and his later political treatises, Mill argued for competitive civil service recruitment. These writings have been relatively neglected by Mill scholars, but I posit that they elucidate a contested aspect of his theory. Mill advocated democracy and expert bureaucracy and, although researchers see tension between these systems, I argue that Mill saw them as compatible. Consequently, Mill's theory might be more consistent and complete than many believe, and the public administration debate should perhaps no longer be seen in terms of an opposition between expertise and democracy.

It is the intention in this paper to conduct an inquiry into the relations between general equilibrium analysis and public policy by the indirect method of examining the place of such analysis in the solution of a definite economic problem. The problem selected is the possibility of raising wages without raising prices. Traditional partial equilibrium theory made the solution of this problem a fairly simple one, but modern general equilibrium considerations, dynamic qualifications on these, and institutional changes in the organization of business and labour have opened up such areas of indeterminateness in the formation of prices that we may no longer trust the answers given by the simpler generalizations.

In the development of ideas during this paper, the term “degree of monopoly” will be employed rather frequently. The term will be used in Professor Lerner's sense of the ratio between the excess of price over marginal cost and price itself. In terms of Figure 1, this is the ratio RP/MP. This definition has limitations but it is retained as the simplest to which analysis may be referred and sufficient for the particular purposes for which it is required here.

The idea that the rise of wages in relation to prices may have consequences for the levels of employment and national income is, of course, based upon the Keynesian hypothesis that larger wage incomes in relation to national income as a whole tend to mean a lower level of savings, and the corollary that a lower level of net new investment will be needed to maintain a given level of employment and income where the wage share is higher. There is also some opinion that changes in the degree of monopoly during the business cycle are such as to aggravate the operation of the disequilibrating forces. For example, Dr. M. Kalecki in an article published in Econometrica in April, 1938, suggests that the Keynesian analysis respecting the relation between wages and prices requires emendation and expansion because it appears from his statistical and theoretical analysis that the degree of monopoly increases with recessions of the business cycle and decreases with its upward phase. If this be so, Dr. Kalecki points out that the cyclical redistribution of income carries with it the necessity of attaching a larger quantity of new investment to any given level of national income as the level of national income recedes, though this reasoning is qualified for effects of falling wages on the foreign balance.

Bitter disputes regarding the relation of morals to politics did not begin with Machiavefli but have been almost continuous since his time. No wonder, therefore, that the conflict has broken out in our own day with specific reference to American foreign policy. Now, as in times past, the proponents of differing viewpoints utter harsh and dogmatic judgments concerning one another. This is probably unavoidable if one considers that the issue is both vital and highly controversial, but recent arguments have thrown more heat than light upon the ancient dilemma. It is therefore proposed, in this paper, to ascertain what nub of truth there is in the arguments.

Most jarring to American traditions are the central tenets of what might be called the “realpolitik school” of American policy. There are many advocates of this view, but it finds its most complete expression in the writings of Hans J. Morgenthau. Although the theories of this school have many ramifications, its central position might be stated somewhat as follows:

International politics consists of a struggle for power between nations. This struggle goes on continuously and, apparently, never ends. Since each nation is only interested in maximizing its own power, the one true guide to a successful foreign policy is “the national interest.” Idealism is sentimental and Utopian. The brute facts of power render idealism not only a luxury but a delusion.

Of the forty years of his working life, John Maynard Keynes spent approximately eleven as a public official. These years of public service were broken into three widely separated and differing periods. Of the first two, I know no more than does most of my audience. The Keynes of the third period I had some limited and intermittent opportunity to observe.

The Civil Service was Keynes's first choice as a career—or at least as the beginning of a career. Not achieving the first place necessary for the Treasury, he was assigned to the India Office where he remained from 1906 to 1908. John Morley was the secretary of state for India and the permanent secretary, Sir Arthur Godley, was an experienced and skilful administrator. I mention John Morley because it is well to remember that Keynes knew and understood Morley's generation though the Keynesians do not. I mention Godley because it was under him that Keynes acquired his knowledge of the workings of government and of the official's point of view. He was never thereafter completely an outsider as far as the government service was concerned. There too began his interest in Indian currency and finance which bore fruit in his Essays and in his work as a member of the Royal Commission on Indian Currency and Finance in 1913. To this period too may perhaps be attributed his readier knowledge of India than of the Dominions.

Before attempting to deal with the problems of provincial-municipal relations one might well ponder the following comments of some who have previously delved into the problems of the relationship between governments: “A student should enter the field of intergovernmental fiscal relations with modesty and even humility…. It is a field in which students and committees, one after another, have spoken their piece, registered complaints, made recommendations and achieved no action. It is a field mined with explosives; beneath a placid surface lie some very deep emotions ready to burst into flame at the slightest provocation. If discretion were the determining factor, the student might well choose some other field to conquer.” The problems of provincial-municipal relations are of such urgency and importance, however, that the risks of indiscretion must be incurred. The urgency, from the municipal view point, arises from the increasing pressure on the limited municipal finances; its importance lies in the necessity of preserving the reality of local self-government in a democracy. On the surface the problem appears to be a financial one but the political aspects may be of even greater significance in the long run.

How will the introduction of health insurance influence the demand for health services? In the discussions on the reform of our health services this question has been seldom put and hardly ever answered. Expressly or tacitly the assumption is made that the present demand can be used as a yardstick for measuring future needs under a system which it is thought aims mainly at a more equitable distribution of available services.

The problem is, however, of a more fundamental nature. What health insurance would achieve is to remove the whole field of health care from the automatism of the price system. The fee-for-service system based on the individual's ability to pay for medical care will disappear. A compulsory scheme of prepayments will be introduced which will entitle insured persons to services whenever they need them or whenever they feel that they do. Economic and psychological factors about which very little is known so far will come into play, and are bound to have a profound influence on the demand for health care. Changes may be of a quantitative and of a qualitative nature. Not only may the demand increase but it may also be directed toward other types of health care than in the past.

All these factors have to be considered when the foundations of a national system of health insurance are being laid. They are, of course, decisive for the cost of the scheme and for the supply of health personnel. But the evaluation of the potential demand will also have a bearing on the type of services to be offered, on the form of organization and administration, and above all, on the methods used for making the beneficiaries of the scheme conscious of their responsibilities.

The practice of criticizing political institutions on the basis of their efficiency as pieces of machinery is so widespread in political science today that it is sometimes difficult to remember that institutions may be as important for what they are as for what they do. An elected legislature, in its scrutiny of governmental affairs, not only represents the dominant sections of the electorate that returned it; it also reveals, through the nature of its own organization, their attitudes towards the elected legislature and its place in their society. An appraisal of the capacities and incapacities of a legislature would be at best incomplete if it paid no attention to the beliefs and traditions reflected therein, for it would ignore the obvious truth that the quality of the legislature's work was conditioned by its social environment. In the paragraphs that follow, the emphasis is not upon performance, although that is not overlooked, but upon the legislature as a social entity, as a mirror in which one can see an important part of a community.

The Canadian House of Commons during its early years offered the unusual and interesting spectacle of a legislature engaged in threshing out great issues while the legislative machinery itself was still under construction. Debates on important matters concerning the country at large ran parallel with acrimonious discussions about the nature and function of the House of Commons and its organization, and the government frequently tried (by providing, for instance, that each province was to obtain its due proportion of Commons' clerkships) to make the House a significant factor in the settling of disputes. Many institutions of the House (the speakership, the Hansard, and the Library, to name but a few) took their initial form as a result of forces which often bore little relation to legislation and debate.

From one of the outstanding theorists in the field of economics to-day, Professor Pigou himself, we have the statement that, if economics is to be more than “merely an amusing toy”, it must be “realistic”, in the sense that its “interest is concentrated upon the world known in experience”, and “fruit-bearing”, in the sense that its ultimate objective is to contribute to the attainment of “practical results in social improvement”. Few will disagree with a general statement of this sort; yet none of us can fail to be conscious of the difficulties involved in maintaining a really close and useful relationship between our theoretical analyses and the most urgent practical problems of the economic world around us. It is with these difficulties and with the effect upon them of recent theoretical developments that this paper is primarily concerned.

A comparison of international capital flows which are occurring today to economically undeveloped areas, with similar international investment in economic development which occurred prior to World War I is almost inevitable and indeed has often been made more or less explicitly. The obvious differences between the two periods lie in the proportion of private capital in the total of international investment in undeveloped areas, and in the pace of economic development then and now. Capital flowing to undeveloped areas today is preponderantly from public bodies: various agencies of the United States Government, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, or the United Nations. By contrast, international capital invested in economic development prior to World War I was exclusively from private sources. Then, too, the areas which were developed prior to 1914 experienced within a decade tremendous increases in population of 30 to 50 per cent and increases in the output of their major industries of 200 to 400 per cent. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of private enterprise and initiative in the international investment in undeveloped areas in the period from 1875 to 1914 and the reasons for the relatively unimportant position of private international capital in economic development today.

In an earlier article, it was noted that a change in automotive policy might possibly meet the approval of both protectionists and free traders: the change might lead both to an increase in the volume of domestic production of the item in question, and to a decrease in the total excess costs of production. (In the event of both these results being achieved, the percentage decrease in per unit excess cost would of necessity be greater than the decrease in total excess costs.) This paper evaluates the probable effects of the US-Canadian automotive agreement of 1965 on the basis of these two criteria. In addition, the distribution of efficiency gains from this agreement will be discussed. Equity is an obvious consideration here, and there is also some question whether the division of gains may jeopardize the competitive position of the Canadian industry after 1968.

The theory of prices developed by Keynes in the General Theory is always likely to appeal strongly to the student approaching the subject from the side of value theory for in his analysis customary supply-demand categories are reaffirmed. Yet, despite its insights, his analysis here is incomplete: although there is a fairly detailed account of the supply curve the chapter is vague on the exact composition of the corresponding demand function. This paper reviews the problem, constructs an appropriate demand-supply apparatus, and uses it to analyse the determination of the price level of consumer goods, as measured by index numbers. It appears, however, that the same technique can be extended to explain the price level of investment goods if certain of the functional connections are modified.

The essential distinction between the analysis of the firm (or industry) and the analysis of the economy is that in the former supply and demand can be regarded as independent, whereas in the latter interdependence must be stressed from the very beginning. Causally, however, it is usually argued that the initial impetus comes from the supply side. Factors are viewed as being paid for by reason of entrepreneurial decisions to hire them for productive uses, and resource owners as thereafter expending these earnings, in whole or in part, on the forthcoming consumer good output. Viewing this as the essential proposition descriptive of the economic process, let us develop its implications for the theory of the price level.

The present paper is intended as the background to a more detailed discussion of the facts of agricultural debt adjustment. I propose to discuss briefly the nature and objectives of our machinery of agricultural debt adjustment, the background against which it works, and some of the more important difficulties encountered in practice. The observations are based largely upon experience acquired in the West, although the setting concerns the country as a whole.

Problems of debt adjustment are primarily problems in the economics of distribution. Measures taken in this direction affect transfers of income between individuals, groups, and sections of the country. Their chief objective is to relieve the pressure on exposed groups and to allay the tensions created thereby. They constitute a part of the machinery of adjustment so essential in an economy subject to extreme variation of income and afflicted with rigidities which obstruct or divert forces tending to equilibrium. The tendency has been to concentrate upon the economics of the long run and to ignore obstacles to the free play of such forces. The importance of these obstacles is most manifest in the lower phases of the business cycle, and the presence of corrective or compensatory measures is in large part due to the cumulative effects of the inflexibility characteristic of a continental type of development and to the difficulty of planning for an economy in which variability is so marked. The results are seen in a wide range of expedients of which debt adjustment is an example. Difficulties arise owing to the failure to distinguish between social and pecuniary costs, to the widely different interpretations of what the term “justice” implies, and to differences in points of view which range from an insistence upon a strictly legal interpretation of rights and obligations to demands for debt reductions upon the basis of present income.

The conditions under which a man is entitled to inherit the estate of his father play an essential part in two of Locke's principal arguments in the Second Treatise of Civil Government. First, in criticizing those who contend that birth, not consent, makes man a member of an established civil society, Locke argues that inheritance, rather than birth, determines membership, and that consent is a condition of inheritance. Second, in rejecting the view that conquest in a just war confers political power upon the conqueror, Locke argues that this would be incompatible with the right of the descendants of the conquered to their inheritance.

These two arguments appear opposed. If consent to established government is a legitimate condition of inheritance, then is consent to the government of a conqueror not also a legitimate condition? Or, if the right to inherit cannot be limited by requiring obedience to a just conqueror, then can this right be limited by requiring obedience to any existing authority? A close discussion of Locke's arguments should reveal the extent of this opposition, and so determine the consistency of his account of inheritance.

Locke first introduces inheritance in distinguishing paternal from political power. His treatment here anticipates his later account of the relation between inheritance and consent, and so is worth brief attention.

What Mr. King said and did about parliamentary government constitutes his most important and distinctive contribution to the development of our constitution, and to Canadian political ideas. This is partly because parliamentary government is the very essence of our constitution; partly because Mr. King had an enormous amount to say about it, and an unrivalled opportunity to put his ideas into practice; and partly because this is the one field in which his ideas were completely original.

This is notably true of his theory of the Crown. Two facts about it are unmistakable. First, he did not believe in the “rubber stamp” theory. In the 1926 crisis, he said three times, once in the House of Commons and twice in his opening campaign speech, that there would be circumstances in which the Crown would be justified in refusing dissolution. He also said, before the vote on the Robb motion, that if Mr. Meighen's Government were defeated, and did not resign, the Governor-General should dismiss it, and he himself would take responsibility for the dismissal. This is about as far from the “rubber stamp” theory as anybody could get. Second, except in its remoteness from the “rubber stamp” theory, Mr. King's theory was startlingly different from the received doctrine of British parliamentary government. A single example will dispel any doubts. If there is one firmly established point in British constitutional practice, it is that a retiring Prime Minister has no right even to offer advice as to his successor, let alone have it accepted.

“If we introduce overmuch idealism into explaining the formation of either of the North American polities, the record of mankind is against us. So is our own history. The thirteen colonies came together not primarily because of the joy in making a great free American community, but because disintegration stared them in the face and men of substance saw in union salvation for their fortunes. It is no reflection on British North Americans that they too made their union under duresse.”

The establishment of a wider Canadian union had been discussed for a number of decades before Confederation but the motivation in a common allegiance to Great Britain and in intermittent flashes of national sentiment had proven wholly inadequate to overcome the obstacles of provincial particularism and cultural differences, of paucity of communication and contact among the colonies, and of the contrasting economic orientation of central Canada and the Maritime region. In the years immediately prior to Confederation these divisive elements were finally outweighed by the mounting pressures of political dead-lock, economic uncertainty, and fear and jealousy of the United States. The leaders of the Confederation movement variously gave expression to these pressures. National sentiment was still a distinctly secondary factor, however, and only a few of the leaders betrayed in their speeches evidence of a broad vision of Canadian nationhood.