Suchergebnisse

Dwight Waldo, Stephen Bailey, and I, among others who have from time to time expressed admiration for certain litterateurs as sources of wisdom and understanding of the art and science of public administration, will undoubtedly ponder at length a statement in W. Somerset Maugham's latest collection of imponderabilia, Points of View. Maugham says:Only the very ingenuous can suppose that a work of fiction can give us reliable information on the topics which it is important to us for the conduct of our lives to be apprised of. By the nature of his creative gifts the novelist is incompetent to deal with such matters; his not to reason why, but to feel, to imagine, and to invent. He is biased. The subjects the writer chooses, the characters he creates, and his attitude toward them are conditioned by his bias. What he writes is the expression of his personality and the manifestation of his instincts, his emotions, his intuitions, and his experience. He loads his dice, sometimes not knowing what he is up to, but sometimes knowing very well; and then he uses such skill as he has to prevent the reader from finding him out. Henry James insisted that the writer of fiction should dramatize. That is a telling, though perhaps not very lucid, way of saying that he must so arrange his facts as to capture and hold his reader's attention. This, as everyone knows, is what Henry James consistently did, but, of course, it is not the way a work of scientific or informative value is written. If readers are concerned with the pressing problems of the day, they will do well to read, as Chekhov advised them to do, not novels or short stories, but the works that specifically deal with them.

The major problems of financing both multi lateral and bilateral technical co-operation derive from the precarious year-to-year underwriting of the programs and from the organizational and administrative separation of technical and economic co-operation, including investment. Congres sional attitudes toward continuing commitment to the United Nations Expanded Program, plus annual reauthorization of the bilateral program, create uncertainties which prevent technical co-operation staff from going forward with the re cipient countries in the formulation of long-term national eco nomic and social development programs. The lack of such long-term programs, moreover, prevents the development of bench marks and priorities for the proper planning and budg eting of both technical and economic assistance. Technical co-operation is in consqquence largely occupied with a string of accidental, ad hoc, opportunistically undertaken projects, few of which relate themselves effectively to major ongoing influences in general economic and social change. This situa tion is exacerbated by the complete separation of technical and economic co-operation in the United Nations system and the substantial separation of technical and economic co-opera tion in a large part of the Mutual Security Program. The financing problems of technical co-operation will not be solved apart from the solution of the larger problem of financing economic development and until it is properly reintegrated into multilateral and bilateral programs of economic assistance.

In 1866 an uncommonly knowledgeable gentleman, Alexis de Tocqueville by name, wrote as follows: "Je pense que dans les siècles démocratiques qui vont s'ouvrir l'indépendence individuelle et les libertés locales seront toujours un produit de l'art. La centralisation sera le gouvernement naturel." Four score and five years later a distinguished compatriot documented the triumph of nature over art which de Tocqueville contemplated as a possibility, and analyzed at some length the instrumentality through which le gouvernement naturel has established its primacy over les libertés locales. Professor Jean Boulouis has recently pronounced a plaintive requiem for French local self-government culminating in these words: "On pourrait presque avancer, sans beaucoup d'exagération, qu'il n'existe plus de finances locales, mais tout au plus une localisation des finances nationales."The two most striking phenomena of local government finance in recent decades are, first, the absolute increase in the amount of money disbursed by local governments, and second, the substantial expansion in the proportion of local government disbursements financed from intergovernmental transfers of funds—grants-in-aid, shared taxes, and various other devices by which money is shifted from one level of government to another.

Adapted from paper read before the Am. political science association, Buffalo, N.Y., Aug., 1952.