Conservationists have long argued that the free market neglects the needs of future generations. Economists who have examined this argument have stressed the dubious realism of any rigorous formulation of the conservationist position, but relatively little attention has been paid to the implications of policies designed to increase the weight given to future demands. Scott has conjectured that such policies might speed exhaustion of mineral resources. If he is correct, the usual conservationist argument that neglect of the future is equivalent to a too rapid use of resources would no longer hold. This article seeks to provide a rigorous proof of Scott's hypothesis.

The economic literature has shown that all rigorous definitions of neglect of the future involve the use of higher than “desirable” interest rates. To explore the consequences of such interest rates, one requires a theory of how resource producers act. Such guidance is provided by the Gray-Hotelling pure theory of exhaustion. A simple test of the basic question is provided by showing how an industry that behaves according to theory would alter its actions if interest rates were lowered.

Section III of this paper provides such a test. The first two sections provide the necessary preliminaries—examination of the justifications given for the contention that interest rates are too high, and a brief explanation of the pure theory of exhaustion. The final section discusses further implications of the basic theorem set out in Section III.

The language of political discourse abounds in metaphors and laments. The general tendency to make abstract ideas more intelligible by expressing them through concrete analogues accounts for the former. The latter are most commonly the reaction to disenchantment with conditions that have failed to come up to expectation.

From the dictionary definition of a metaphor as “the figure of speech in which a name or descriptive term is transferred to some object different from, but analogous to, that to which it is properly applicable” (OED), it follows that the function of a metaphor is to express similarity rather than identity. In practice, however, the degree of similarity implied by a metaphor has a wide range of variation from the most far-fetched comparison to so nearly complete an identification that it is difficult to distinguish the metaphor from a literal description. Thus, for example, a fringe of organismic thinkers—though not the mainstream of political organicism as T. D. Weldon has suggested—maintained that the state was not merely like an organism but was in fact an organism, and therefore imagined that the laws which control a biological organism should apply equally to the political or social organism.

Ambiguity may stem either from imperfections inherent in a particular metaphor or from lack of precision in establishing the extent of identification implied. In addition, the assumption of similarity between two objects or two ideas which have many, but not all, of their attributes in common may serve to withdraw attention from their unique attributes which, on occasion, may prove to be the most significant ones.

In the United States, organized socialism is dead; in Canada socialism, though far from national power, is a significant political force. Why this striking difference in the fortunes of socialism in two very similar societies?

Any attempt to account for the difference must be grounded in a general comparative study of the English-Canadian and American societies. It will be shown that the relative strength of socialism in Canada is related to the relative strength of toryism, and to the different position and character of liberalism in the two countries.

In North America, Canada is unique. Yet there is a tendency in Canadian historical and political studies to explain Canadian phenomena not by contrasting them with American phenomena but by identifying them as variations on a basic North American theme. I grant that Canada and the United States are similar, and that the similarities should be pointed out. But the pan-North American approach, since it searches out and concentrates on similarities, cannot help us to understand Canadian uniqueness. When this approach is applied to the study of English-Canadian socialism, it discovers, first, that like the American variety it is weak, and second, that it is weak for much the same reasons. These discoveries perhaps explain why Canadian socialism is weak in comparison to European socialism; they do not explain why Canadian socialism is so much stronger than American socialism.

In analysing the American and Canadian federal systems it is possible to stress the trends common to both systems or, alternately, to emphasize the differences that distinguish the Canadian from the American experience with federal institutions. Both political systems have persisted with recognizable federal features even while substantial nationalizing developments have occurred in the economies and cultures of the two nations. One leading authority characterizes the kind of federalism that results as “co-operative” in contrast to the older “classical” variety. Others, while noting common trends, stress the greater degree of resistance to centralization found in Canada by use of such labels as “pluralistic federalism,” “double-image federalism,” and “peri-pheralized federalism.” While briefs can be made for affixing one or another label to a system, it seems more useful at this stage to study some of the array of differences between the Canadian and American federal systems. One way to get a rough measure of differences and similarities is to pose a set of questions on federalism to comparable groups of Canadians and Americans. These questions can be designed to determine the respective orientations to their federal systems and their opinions on various provincial (state)-federal problems. In this study the questions were put to members of the Ontario Legislative Assembly and the Michigan Senate.

The tradition of presidential addresses before this Association is a varied and extremely democratic one, offering no set pattern for the guidance of a president-elect. My immediate predecessor in the presidency, who has honoured me by agreeing to take the chair tonight, last year offered us his reflections on one of the fundamental concepts in his field of sociology, the myth. His predecessor applied the tools of his trade as a political theorist to a dissection of the political assumptions of contemporary economics—not entirely, it must be confessed, to the comfort and satisfaction of the economists present in the audience. Previous presidents have frequently employed the occasion to collect in one intellectual basket the fruits of a lifetime of serious scholarship in their own particular vineyard. For my own address tonight, I have chosen to speak on the contemporary position, prospects, and problems of the social sciences. This choice reflects in part a feeling that an address on the kind of professional subject to which I have been devoting my attention in recent years—a topic in the pure theory of international trade—would be of such limited general interest as to strain even the tolerance of this audience. My main reason, however, for choosing to talk about our profession, rather than to exemplify its work in one specific area of economics, is that I think that I can contribute most usefully to fulfilling the purposes of this Association by attempting to place the manifold problems with which its members are currently confronted in a broader historical perspective.