Restoring a Healthy Economic Environment

There is a growing interest in the problems caused by instability and change* The interest in change and the type of society in Which we will live in the future reflects more than the general requirements of men in every period to plan for the future with the anticipation that there will be a future. The current concern about instability reflects more than the general interest of existing institutions or groups that find planning easier in periods of stability than in periods of marked instability. Many of the arrangements that we call society rest on the presumption that the frequency with which disasters have occurred in the past is a reliable guide to the future and that these frequencies can be expressed as probabilities of occurrence or reoccurrence in the future. If change is so frequent and changes are so disruptive that the past provides no reliable guide to the future, historic frequencies no longer provide a useful base for assessing the future.