C IR ISAIAH BERLIN, in his essay on J Tolstoy and de Maistre, quotes a saying of an ancient Greek poet: fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing. This distinction serves Sir Isaiah as a guide to an intellectual typology, a distinction between those minds who seek and sniff out many little things and those whose intellectual ears pick up out of the multifarious sounds of the world surrounding them one big recurring thing the melody not yet audible to the ears of the foxes. Ideally the security analyst should be both a fox knowing many little things and a hedgehog knowing one big thing: he should combine the knowledge and experience of all the little everyday things that establish the criss-cross pattern of economic and financial affairs with the sensitivity of a mind listening to the rhythm of a distant drum. Like most other professionals, security analysts do not usually possess such an ideal cast of mind, able to combine the clear-sightedness of the microscopic eye with the distant sweep of telescopic vision. The knowledge of the fox is as essential as that of the hedgehog. Concentrating on one and losing sight of the other will lead to a crazy-quilt picture of reality. This occurs particularly when an intoxication with numbers and the many little things that may be dredged up in their nets causes the practitioners to overlook the imprecision of the seemingly precise. The hedgehog with his knowledge of one big thing telescopes terrestrial time into tiny little dots on an epochal scale and, so, frequently loses his knowledge in a cloudland casting only a fleeting shadow on the world of economic affairs. The risks and difficulties arising from their self-appointed tasks have never yet deterred either the fox or the hedgehog. Other professions have met with similar obstacles and have not allowed themselves to be inhibited by the difficulties. The inherent imprecision of economics has taught the economist to be satisfied with broad statements and to claim the right, by the knowledge of the fox, to make short-term forecasts, aware that change takes time and that there is a momentum in human affairs arising out of the finite nature of the mind of man. Because of this, to modify men's beliefs and motives for action is a complex and multi-faceted matter-even to convey an understanding of the significance of current news events at times raises nearly insuperable obstacles. It becomes difficult to determine the intersection between the things seen by the fox and the foreknowledge of the hedgehog. To combine the active pursuit of the many little things with the perspective of the one big and essential thing is the never-ending task of security analysis as a profession. At times the active pursuit of the many little things appears as the all-absorbing task; at others the wide sweep of new horizons opening attracts attention. It seems to me that, at the current juncture, the hedgehog deserves to be accorded a greater authority by the profession than in the past. The widening and deepening of science and technology in their application to more areas and broader segments of economic and financial life tends to lower the significance of the old guideposts so carefully described and numbered by the analyst and to lead into territory the geography of which can be charted in outline only. It has become trite to say that we have entered a period of accelerated technological change and that such change will necessarily affect all areas of everyday life and their interrelationships. As the recent report of the National Commission on Technology, Automation and Economic Progress put it: Past trends and current prospects suggest that the present is, and the near future will be a time of rapid technological progress.... It is beyond our knowledge to know whether the computer, nuclear power and molecular bilogy are quantitatively or qualitatively more 'revolutionary' than the telephone, electric power and bacteriology. . . . Our broad conclusion