DISCUSSION.

A good survey lecture should provide the listener with a set of intellectual calisthenics, beginning with warming-up exercises and gradually building up to feats of reasoning that stretch the mental capacities of the audience. Judged by that standard, economist James Tobin has provided with a first-class performance. His paper begins with some apparently self-evident commonplaces, which nevertheless effortlessly tidy away many of the conceptual confusions that have plagued current discussions of economic growth as an object of policy, but thereafter his argument becomes increasingly complex, until at the end he is bringing to bear on the question of growth policy the most elegant proposition of modern capital theory — the golden rule of accumulation. In the main lines of his lecture, Professor Tobin presents and defends what may conveniently be described as the position of the two-G growth man, that is, he favors growth, and he favors government action to increase saving and investment as a means of increasing growth. This position he contrasts with what may be termed the no-G growth position, which he describes as the neutrality of government position and holds up to easy ridicule. This article discusses some of the issues and points out that the problem of growth policy raises some deep issues of political philosophy, which Professor Tobin does not adequately recognizes.