On the Implications of the Conference Discussions

Abstract

I have been pleased and even surprised by the amount I have learned from this conference, and hope that this is also true of others. I have come away with a number of new ideas, and it has led me to change some of my previous views. That, to me, is as much as one can ever hope for from such an enterprise. A conference is not an activity which carries out research. It is an occasion which produces the agenda for further research. This is, indeed, what Lord Kaldor suggested in the letter in which he first described the objectives of the proposed conference, and I think it is precisely what it has been able to achieve. Of course, we did not arrive at nor did we intend to produce a set of firm and definitive conclusions. Rather, we sought merely to explore certain areas. Accordingly, let me try to list a few general interim conclusions which must themselves be considered as hypotheses that constitute items on the agenda for further research. By this I mean genuine research, undertaken with an open mind, whose outcome is not known in advance.