,MR. HARROD has collected some of the topical articles which
he wrote between the Autumn of 1947 and the summer of 1950. Most of them are concerned with the economic landmarks of that period—Bud- gets, Economic Surveys, white papers and black disasters. Some of them are con- cerned with questions of more general interest—for example, the profit motive and the possibility of finding an agreed domestic economic policy intermediate between a centrally owned and controlled system and one based upon contract and enterprise. Inevitably these more reflective studies hold a greater interest than the more ephemeral articles in which Mr. Harrod expressed his views on the current events of past years— events which in many cases have since gone cold. It is true that there runs through most of these articles the same thesis of public mismanagement which he stated in his book Are These Hardships Necessary? But that book was written at white heat in ten days and published within ten weeks. This one, it must be said, appears rather warmed up. There is no doubt that some of the articles the book contains are worth preserving, but that is hardly true of all of them, and in any case a paper-covered book is not the best form in which to preserve
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