Equal Confidence Research Articles

Competition and Welfare

Economic theory has been powerfully advanced within the past decade by its new interest in national income and effective demand, and by its attention to the bearing of such magnitudes as savings, investment, consumption, and money holdings upon the aggregate employment of resources. After the first impact of a revolution, however, the signs of continuity with the past are bound to re-appear. In the field of economic doctrine it may be confidently expected that continuity will be established by exploration as to how particular equilibrium conditions—under the diverse situations of competition, monopoly, oligopoly, and the like—help to account for the behaviour of those large aggregates with which the “modern” theory has too exclusively dealt. With equal confidence one may expect that this synthesis of Marshallian and Keynesian theory will cast new light upon the problems of economic policy.Fortunately, however, it is not necessary to await the full fruition of this cross-fertilization of ideas: its main features are already indicated in a very substantial field of agreement as to policy in all but the most extreme wings of economic thought. The language of popular discussion in America epitomizes this field in two cardinal ideas—the necessity of government action to secure full employment and the desire nevertheless to preserve a private enterprise system. To extremists on either side these ideas represent incompatibilities. But the effectiveness of economics and of economists in the current scene is primarily conditioned upon the elaboration of policies compatible with both of these cardinal requirements.

REFLECTIONS ON ROMANTICISM

T HE following remarks are set down here by way of reflection and suggestion and are not offered in any dogmatic spirit. The whole question being subjective, it capable of being treated only with the greatest latitude, and it will be evident to those who have given the matter a moment's thought that unusual difficulties lie in the path of the historian who would do full justice to the romantic movement. Not the least of the problems meets us as at the very threshold. Probably no two persons have exactly the same conception of what is. Very often one discovers the critic engaged in a search for a concise, yet adequate definition. Most people have a vague idea that the word employed to indicate a work which not classical, but it impossible to proceed far with a negation. We are, therefore, forced to ask with Sainte-Beuve, What meant by a classic? One writer, eschewing this method and satisfied with a grand show of authority, tells us that classicism routine, liberty; another, with equal confidence, that classicism imitation, originality. Stendhal argued that all good art was romantic in its day. Romanticism, he held, is the art of presenting to people the literary works which in the actual state of their habits and beliefs are capable of giving them the greatest possible pleasure; classicism, on the contrary, of presenting them with that which gave the greatest possible pleasure to their grandfathers. In these assertions, as in Victor Hugo's contention that romanticism liberalism in literature, we seem to detect something of the exuberance which characterised the manifestos of the new creed. Such

V.—The Older Deutozoic Rooks of North Britain

It appears to be a common belief that there are two Old Red Sandstones in Scotland, and only two, which are referred to respectively as the Upper and the Lower. It is generally recognised that neither of these can be paralleled with any one of the subdivisions of the Devonian Rocks, properly so-called; though the fact that the Scottish rocks in question occupy a stratigraphical position somewhere between the top of the Silurian Rocks and the base of the Carboniferous System places their Devonian age beyond the possibility of a doubt. The Upper Old Red is considered by most persons to graduate upwards into the Carboniferous Rocks, which, by the way, is by no means universally the case. It is also stated, with equal confidence, and with as little regard to the facts, that the Lower Old Red Sandstone graduates downward into the Silurian Rocks, which it certainly does not, as will be shown more fully in another part of this paper. Furthermore, it is still commonly believed that bands yielding Silurian graptolites alternate with the base of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, and that Lower Carboniferous fossils occur in bands of rock interstratified with true Upper Old Red Sandstone. Both of these ideas are well known to have been due to errors of observation; yet the statements in question, having found their way into the papers set by examiners, seem destined to die a hard death, and therefore need to be contradicted.