If the establishment of the John R. Commons Lecture is a new experiment for Omicron Delta Epsilon, so is its preparation for me. For these “Reflections” are not a research paper but a discourse. They contain no formulas, mathematical appendixes, statistical tables, and footnotes, the indispensable props of my other efforts. I believe that it behooves an economist between ages of maturity and senility to engage in such a discourse occasionally, and Commons' words give me the courage to try. But they do not remove my fear that this discourse, like many such, will be trivial.

In a game of free associations among economists, the expression “economic development” is likely to be followed by “model” and “plan.” A plan usually aims at maximizing the rate of growth of consumption or income either by solving an explicit system of equations (and inequalities), or by selecting a preliminary target rate and adjusting it by iteration. In either case, a so-called bill of final goods (or its equivalent) is customarily drawn up and is combined with a matrix of input coefficients to find the required inputs (labor, capital, materials, foreign exchange), and the resulting outputs.