"Poets" said Shelley "are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." How easy is it for economists to fall into the same delusion! That they do, on occasion, influence events is not to be denied; but that their own work is conditioned by events, byevents which have come about quite independently of their work, they find harder to recognise. The essays that are included in this book are representive of the author's later wirk, which he desired to distinguish from his earlier work that has become part of an economic orthodoxy.