Factors in economic development

This volume is intended as a kind of gladiatorial salute by one on the point of academic death and is addressed not so much to a professional audience as to that larger assembly of informed onlookers for whose attention and favour applied economists like to contend. As a gesture to such onlookers it is no doubt a little clumsy: the score of articles and essays selected for inclusion were written for different types of occa sion, are reprinted virtually as they were originally delivered or published, and are, at times, obscured from the layman by a thick varnish of jargon and technical detail. Some have been written, as it were, in the margin of other occupations, with out leisure to reconsider style, form or content as they took shape. Yet whatever their defects, on which my mind is con centrated wonderfully by an increasing awareness that it is too late to remedy them, they have the merit of dealing for the most part with issues of public importance in terms that are as a rule within the reach of public understanding.