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More and more people are demanding an end to violence as a means of arbitrating international demands and resolving problems between nations. This collection of essays brings social scientific evidence to bear on the question of the "inevitability" of war, and evaluates the potential for managing the international system in the interest of peace instead of war. The contributors discuss methods of lowering distrust among^nations; they consider whether war persists because it has become an economic necessity built into a "military-industrial complex."' They deal with implications of expansion of the military into civilian areas such as education, and into increasingly sophisticated technology such as the ABM Safeguard system. They discuss* the involvement of social scientists in the formulation of "peace" and "war" policy.Collectively, these essays present the most serious questions social scientists have been asking about problems of war and peace, and offer hope that the present international system, dangerous and appallingly costly as it is, may offer enough stability to give us time to transform it into something that bettet serves human needs.

This book is a study of the American economy from 1929 to 1989 through the analysis of national income statistics and other data. It reaches important conclusions regarding the causes of unemployment, the relation of inflation to the stock of liquid assets and the budget deficit, the proportion of the population in poverty, the gap between interest and profit rates, the relation of productivity to income. These conclusions are discussed using graphs and diagrams extensively.

AbstractThe hierarchy of systems is described as parallel to the hierarchy of military titles: general systems as the universe; Major General Systems as the earth; the Major Systems of earth—physical, biological and social—each with its subsystems; 'kernel' systems, which try to describe the 'core of the diverse major systems' (these divide into ecological–evolutionary systems which have the quality of being 'resurgent') and 'corporal' systems, such as organisms and organizations. Then there are the 'private' systems, which are the 'minute particulars' of the real world. Cutting across this hierarchy are the ideologies, which might well be called 'lieutenant' systems, as they are in place of images of the more complex systems of the real world. The General Systems movement might help ideologies to become more realistic; it is showing some ecological resurgence, and it has to sustain both its 'special' aspect as mathematical modelling and its more general, philosophical aspect. It must also be aware that systems emerge from a matrix of chaos, and that all reality is not systematic.

AbstractThe key issue addressed by Kenneth Boulding in this paper is 'How do we create a learning society, in which there is widespread love of learning, in which large numbers of people continue the learning process long after formal education in over for them, in which they raise questions and use encyclopedias, read books, form discussion groups, question authority, are active in the political learning process; and in which formal education is seen just as part of a much larger learning process?'.