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John Kenneth Galbraith’s social balance theory is an important theme in many of his books, particularly The Affluent Society, The New Industrial State, and Economics and the Public Purpose. Galbraith’s social balance theory states that forces driving private consumption in an industrial society will outpace the development and provision of public goods and services with consequences on the well-being of society (Stanfield, 1996, p. 49). The theory leads to several questions: (1) What is the specific relationship between private and public goods and consumption? (2) What is optimized with social balancing? (3) Does the relationship between private and public goods change over time? and (4) How do we evaluate the types of public goods we need? This chapter explores these questions and examines the type of public goods we need today to serve our communities better. For example, police presence and activities in many minority communities are now viewed negatively, as evidenced by the “defund the police” movement. Conversely, some have advocated for greater public spending on community mental health programs and new initiatives to deal with racism in communities.

I have been asked to explore how James Buchanan’s work on public finance and constitutional political economy might have emerged out of themes present in Frank Knight’s oeuvre, especially his Risk Uncertainty, and Profit. Buchanan’s body of work has inspired the development of a style of political economy sometimes described as Virginia or Constitutional Political Economy to distinguish it from the Chicago Political Economy with which George Stigler is associated, and with Stigler and Buchanan both being students of Knight. While Buchanan, unlike Stigler, did not write his dissertation under Knight’s supervision, this is a minor distinction because Buchanan regarded Knight as his de facto supervisor even though Roy Blough was his de jure supervisor. The author explains how Knight’s scholarly oeuvre can in large measure be detected in Buchanan’s effort to fashion an alternative approach to public finance and to articulate the field of study now called constitutional political economy.

A review of Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America focuses on the implications of her historiographic method in reading Jim Buchanan’s work and the resulting failure to take seriously the underlying framework of constitutional political economy that informed both Jim Buchanan’s and Frank H. Knight’s work. MacLean’s historiography is that of social movement history, which sublimates the interests and motivations of the individual to that of the movement. The real scholar disappears into simply an agent of the movement’s master plan. Because MacLean is suspicious of the movement she believes Buchanan to be part of, his work is interpreted solely in light of what she assumes to be the master plan. In particular, she ignores Buchanan’s habit of returning to key themes in order to develop new modes of analysis. MacLean focuses solely on his public choice work, ignoring the latter developments of constitutional economics and even moral order.

Two issues in MacLean’s account are the focus on the review. The first is simply a research mistake that she drew unwarranted conclusions from regarding Buchanan’s connection to the “massive resistance” movement against desegregation of Virginia public schools. The second issue reveals MacLean’s unwillingness to consider the changes in Buchanan’s scholarship over his career. Taken together, the issues indicate that she refused to read Buchanan on his own terms in order to understand the progress of his work, even if she disagreed with him at the end.

Delivered recently to an audience of information scientists and librarians, Dick Buchanan's paper has implications no less for archivists. For two questions are at issue. First, given the acknowledged presence of both factual error and patent conjecture in official records concerning private individuals in our own time, what percentage of the files left in copperplate script from earlier ages conceal comparable unreliability? Secondly, if as Richard Buchanan urges, the record of past transgressions be expunged from official files for the living, what will be the consequences for historians of such de mortuis deletions? For librarians as information middlemen, there remains the disturbing possibility that they will increasingly be invoked as intermediaries between the individual as client and the authority as funding agency.

This article has been withdrawn as it was published elsewhere and accidentally duplicated. The original article can be seen here: 10.1108/EUM0000000002726. When citing the article, please cite: Martha Rogers, Richard W. Buchanan, (1989), “Creating the marketing receptive environment: overcoming the two year hatchet limit for a firmʼs first marketing director”, Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, Vol. 4 Iss: 2, pp. 17 - 25.

This chapter discusses the evolution of German views on public debt 1850–1920, referring to three strands of secondary literature: (1) German retrospectives on public finance, (2) the historical literature with a public choice perspective, and (3) contributions to public/constitutional law, mainly referring to Lorenz von Stein. The skeptic view of public debt endorsed by authors of the second half of the period is shown to be related to politico-economic issues of state agency combined with new state functions, rather than to the rejection of Dietzel’s Proto-Keynesian macroeconomic reasoning.

Discussion of scientific progress in science philosophy texts suggests that aggressiveness and selfishness on the part of scientists is associated with high productivity. It is argued that the behaviour that appears to be the most improper actually facilitates the manifest goals of science. This article shows that the making of the 1930s generation of a sample of eminent economists was shaped by a high sense of co‐operation; continuing collaborative contact in the form of dual authorships of books and articles, joint teaching assignments, and review and support of each other′s writings, but very little of the intensive, relentless competition one finds among natural scientists. The difference stems not so much from the fact that economics is a soft science, but rather from the degree of maturity of the discipline. The 1930s generation of economists was fortunate to enter the field at a time when it was ready for its take off.

Discusses the reasons for the high number of failures of first marketing directors within organizations. Analyses the problems involved in hiring first‐time marketing directors and offers solutions that increase both the chances of survival of the marketing director, and the firm′s marketing effort. Concludes that survival depends on the creation of a marketing‐receptive environment through training, recruitment, management structure, and well‐defined marketing expectations.

Examines the problem of selecting new marketing directors and the high failure rate among new marketing personnel. Contends that the failure of first‐time marketing directors is not automatic; identifies the problems involved in hiring first‐time directors and offers specific steps that a first‐time marketing director can take and that a firm can support to increase the possibility of success for the new marketing executive, as well as the firm′s overall marketing effort. Concludes that first time marketing executives are not doomed to fail.