THESE essays have been written for various occasions during the years since my retirement from the Governorship of the Reserve Bank in 1968. Since then my primary concerns have been with policies relating to the arts and the Aboriginal peoples of this continent, and I have refrained from public discussion of issues bearing upon day-to-day economic management. At the same time I have become increasingly conscious of long-term structural changes in our own and the world economy - especially those arising from the interaction of ecological and economic concerns. These essays reflect my anxiety as a private citizen and a member of the academic community about the threat to our society and its future arising from the failure of economic and political analysis to deal effectively with those long-term problems occasioned by that interaction. Collectively the essays attempt to identify the origins and nature of those problems and to explore what simple economic theory can contribute to the design of policies which might mitigate their impact.

Being written about closely related topics but at different times for different audiences and occasions, there is overlap and repetition in the various chapters and some inconsistencies and contradictions and, no doubt, simple errors. No attempt has been made to remove these. There is, I believe, some advantage in presenting them substantially in their original form as a record of changes in thinking in response to developments in external events and to the influence of contemporary views of others sharing the same concerns.