Bad Master Research Articles

The Market as Mechanism: Review of "Getting Ready for 1999: Ideas for Canada's Politics and Government" by Tom Kent

In Getting Ready for 1999 Tom Kent diagnoses Canadian political and economic ailments in virtually every area of domestic and international affairs. He presents, as well, a host of specific suggestions for their cure, all written in sparkling prose and compressed into fewer than 160 pages. It is a stimulating exercise and a pleasure to read this volume but in some respects, it is an unfashionable book. The current fashion among many commentators is to exalt the role of 'the market' in social decision-making. If one chooses to forget that market outcomes depend upon the distribution of assets which individuals bring to the market and if one chooses to see market processes as highly competitive, well-informed, etc., then one can come to the view that 'the market' should be the primary allocator of resources and rewards in Canadian society. If so, then the appropriate role of government is limited to facilitating the operations of the market for example, by guaranteeing property rights or by supplying necessary public goods. In contrast, in Kent's view the market may be a good servant, but it is a bad master. He asserts that the role of political institutions is to make social judgments about the type of society which we want to live in, and that given these decisions about desirable ends, market processes may provide a particularly effective means for their achievement but the market is never an end in itself. This view of the market as a mechanism does, of course, require that one be willing to state explicitly the social goals which the mechanism should serve. And Kent is not an ethical eunuch who shrinks from inter-

Book review essays: Good servants and bad masters

Book review essays: Good servants and bad masters

Implications for Library Services

T HERE have been radical changes in communication theory and techniques in recent decades, and these changes have been increasing at an almost exponential rate. The theory of binary computers was well known more than a generation ago; yet even fifteen years ago anyone who had forecast that there would now be more than a dozen manufacturers in this field, some of whom are building electronic office machines by the dozen-with a minimum price tag well over a million dollarswould have been considered the most visionary of dreamers. With this example before us, it would be well not to underestimate the potential of technology, and it might be just as well to admit at the outset that whatever one man can dream, sooner or later another man can build. Now, having recognized (or perhaps sensed) that there are no theoretical limits to the capabilities of technology, there are those who have leaped to the advocacy or prediction of the application of technology to all intellectual pursuits -a jump which may well convert a good tool into a bad master. The fact that these new devices do perform amazing feats in the standardized, sequential, manipulative arts to which they can be applied does not justify the conclusion that they are a universal solution for all communications purposes and problems. This transfer from the good to the universal, the search for one quick and easy answer to all problems, is a human trait of long standing. And as one of my old chemistry professors used to enjoy saying, Since earliest times man has searched for the universal solvent, but no one has figured out what he would keep it in if he found it. Leaving aside the problems of documentation, which are handled in Mr. Clapp's paper and which present a number of different facets than do library services in general, our discussion will be confined to the parts of library work which we have come to consider conventional and the ways in which they may be affected by the newly evolving technology. All the conventional arts and services of the library revolve about the (and, to avoid repeated use of modifiers, let us use the term book in a generic sense to cover all types of material normally used in conveying information normally stored and serviced by libraries, including hard covers, soft covers, periodicals, pamphlets, reports, broadsides, films, and recordings of various types, etc.). If we can assume that the form of the will change radically, then we must plan for quite radical changes in library techniques and services.

Bureaucracy and Constitutionalism

There is an old aphorism that fire is a good servant but a bad master. Something like this aphorism is frequently applied to the appropriate role of the bureaucracy in government. Because bureaucracy is often viewed as tainted with an ineradicable lust for power, it is alleged that, like fire, it needs constant control to prevent its erupting from beneficient servitude into dangerous and tyrannical mastery.The folklore of constitutional theory relegates the bureaucracy to somewhat the same low but necessary estate as Plato does the appetitive element of the soul. In the conventional dichotomy between policy and administration, administration is the Aristotelian slave, properly an instrument of action for the will of another, capable of receiving the commands of reason but incapable of reasoning. The amoral concept of administrative neutrality is the natural complement of the concept of bureaucracy as instrument; for according to this view the seat of reason and conscience resides in the legislature, whatever grudging concession may be made to the claims of the political executive, and a major, if not the major, task of constitutionalism is the maintenance of the supremacy of the legislature over the bureaucracy. The latter's sole constitutional role is one of neutral docility to the wishes of the day's legislative majority.

Problems of Ammonite Nomenclature. 1. On the Type of the Ammonite Genus Mortoniceras, Meek

MOST workers on fossils at the present day try to conform to the International Rules of Zoological Nomenclature,1 but there are cases in which even the most conscientious palaeontologist may be in doubt as to whether any given article or recommendation of the International Code can justifiably be applied. Some workers, I may add, are forgetting that this code should be a good servant, and must not be allowed to become a bad master; again, while others are in favour of applying to the International Commission for standardization of almost every problem, many palaeontologists feel that the rules should not be relaxed except in very special cases. It seems to me of general interest to discuss some doubtful cases; for future workers may be guided by our difficulties, and the overworked Commission will eventually benefit by the discussion.

Colour-Blindness: with a Comparison of Different Methods of Testing Colour-Blindness

THAT theories are useful servants but bad masters is borne out by a study of this book. It embodies “the results of research on red-green colourblind subjects,” and “the tests were carried out unbiased by any preconceived theory and no rigid classification was attempted during the experiments themselves.” A mass of observations on ten excellent subjects, eight being students attending the graduating course in experimental psychology, and two science students, has been accumulated. All will admit that such material is of great value, but that alone it is unlikely to afford an explanation of the complex problem under investigation. Its ultimate value will depend upon the deductions drawn from it, and these must necessarily involve theoretical considerations which may support or be adverse to previous theories. In this respect it is essential that the investigator should be fully cognisant of the facts which have been elicited by previous observers, whether they support any such theory or not.

The Relation of Mathematics to Engineering

MATHEMATICS has been described in this room as a good servant but a bad master. It will be my duty this evening to prove by suitable illustration the first half of the proposition, and to show the service mathematics has rendered and can render to engineers and engineering.