The attractiveness of fiscal controls as policy instruments lies essentially in the fact that they provide a means of direct attack on the root cause of economic instability. The accepted policy design is indicated by the textbook maxim that governments can remove excess demand during inflation by raising taxes and lowering expenditures, while in depression governments can generate additional demand by spending more and taxing less. A frequent claim is that this simple formula--which is supported and expanded in the literature with the help of an elaborate theoretical apparatus based largely on the Keynesian multiplier--offers sufficient protection against economic disturbances to make violent boom-and-bust cycles in this country a thing of the past.
In the first years the Soviets may have acted on the assumption of a pending peace treaty that would reunite the truncated country and formally restore its sovereignty under common Allied supervision. While they were greatly interested in influencing both the structure and the initial policies of a restored Germany, for this very reason they were cautious not to create conditions in East Germany that would provoke the unanimous opposition of the population of West Germany.
The million-odd autochthonous inhabitants of Western New Guinea, generally referred to as Papuans, live widely scattered in a great variety of tribal societies that are in fact so many distinct cultures, which only in the present century have begun to experience steady contact with Western civil and missionary agencies. This contact has tended to make even more unstable the Papuan social structures, which because of a combination of external and internal factors, like war and depletion of natural resources or indigenous changes in communications and technology, have always demanded of their members a high degree of cultural improvisation.
The tragedy that men see as the greatest tragedy of statesmen, of kings and conquerors, who bring guilty and innocent alike down with them in their fall, who move, in the span of a single lifetime, from the zenith to the nadir. And as this is the stuff of tragedy, its antithesis often seems to us the stuff of greatness, and we speak with admiration, though sometimes grudgingly, of those who move from nadir to zenith, bring order out of chaos, create where nothing was before--even though the order may be set in violence and justice created in injustice.
Review of book by Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1956. 346 pp.
Review of book by Sidney A. Burrell, Robert A. Kann, Maurice Lee, Jr., Martin Lichterman, Raymond E. Lindgren, Francis L. Loewenheim, and Richard W. Van Wagenen. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Review of book by Klaus Knorr. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1956. 310 pp.
Review of book by Henry Grayson. New York: Rinehart. 1955.172 pp.