What values should a society seek to maximize? Religious values, as in Calvin's Geneva or Khomeini's Iran? Power and Glory? The Wealth of Nations, the Gross National Product? The greatest happiness for the greatest number? Or, in Humboldt's phrase, ‘the highest and most harmonious development of [man's] powers to a complete and consistent whole?’

There is much to be said for wealth. Quite recently it has been discovered that the pursuit of wealth is a game against nature not a war game, a zero-sum game, with booty as its prize. The distribution of increments of wealth can, under these circumstances, be Pareto optimal. As Marx pointed out, winning the struggle against scarcity is a condition for everything else: men must eat before they can think. Similarly, in ordering a hierarchy of needs, the contemporary humanist psychologist, Abraham Maslow, makes the same obvious point: the satisfaction of physiological needs is a condition for the satisfaction of higher needs, in the end for self-fulfilment – for Humboldt's ‘harmonious development of man's powers’. Wealth gives satisfaction; Bentham believed it was the prime source of happiness. Adam Smith argued that ‘the desire of bettering our condition…[through] an augmentation of fortune’ was the most powerful (and vulgar) of motives, but it was often a mask for a concern for the good opinions of others. So strong a motive lends itself to social control: ‘the steadiest motive in ordinary business work is the desire for pay which is the material reward for work’. Like B. F. Skinner, Marshall held that money is a general reinforcer because of its universal appeal. And it is the foundation of civilization, not only because surplus value may be devoted to cathedrals, but, following Schumpeter, because a society guided by the rationalism of the market's manner of pursuing wealth, is reflected in the high art and science of the West. In the process of maximizing wealth, therefore, a society motivates its members, satisfies them, and provides the basis for high civilization.

If the welfare state embodies a collective obligation to give to those in need, it also attests to the failure of individual, private giving, which from the advent of industrialization has been far too modest and capricious to care adequately for the sick and indigent. Private, individual giving simply cannot compete with state help when it comes to guaranteeing people's welfare. But its failure to do a job better handled by the state does not mean that private giving is an irrelevant anachronism. Even the welfare state's most ardent supporters should appreciate its value. Private giving has intrinsic worth. It reveals how humane society is. Giving and helping palpably enrich public life, although, unlike high per capita income or low crime rates, they elude statistical composites of collective well-being. Private giving also has instrumental value. In so many ways – ranging from assisting an old lady off a bus to saving a drowning stranger – people can help each other when the state may be helpless. Privately-given funds, time, attention and ideas can supplement what the state offers; limited state resources inevitably leave some people with less than they need, and the gaps in state aid can be filled, at least in part, by private efforts.

Once again, Spain is in political transition. The death of Franco in 1975 provided the opportunity for rationalizing an awkward political system. The objective of the politicians who gathered to draft a new constitution was twofold: to organize a state that was to be both modern and legitimate in a society that is still in many ways ‘pre-civic’ but, at the same time, increasingly tied to the industrial and post-industrial West.

Probably no group of political actors is more misunderstood than American assassins. My purpose in this preliminary report is to identify the sources of this misunderstanding and to suggest an alternative interpretation based on a reconsideration of the evidence.

Members of the House of Representatives often forsake re-election to run for the Senate. Do they realize what they might be giving up? In the 1978 elections only 5 per cent of House incumbents who sought another term were denied it, compared with 40 per cent of the Senators seeking to continue in office. While several students of House elections have referred to the few members in serious electoral trouble (and even fewer who actually lose) as ‘vanishing marginals’, the safe incumbent Senator, particularly a liberal Democrat, is an endangered species. In the 1976 and 1978 elections, ten moderate-toliberal Democratic Senators were defeated, five in each election. Over a dozen more faced the electorate in 1980, facing the threat that the liberal majority within the Senate Democratic party would be erased – or at least eroded. While 93·7 per cent of House incumbents seeking re-election won in 1978 (a figure which has changed little since 1968), the Senate figure of 60 per cent is the smallest percentage since the Democratic landslide of 1958. In an era when House seats have become relatively safe by almost any standard, incumbent Senators appear increasingly more vulnerable.

In the section of their book Political Change in Britain entitled ‘The Sources of Uniform Swing’, David Butler and Donald Stokes presented a model to account for an apparent paradox in Britain's electoral geography – the relative uniformity of the ‘two party swing’ between elections across all parts of the country. This uniformity is paradoxical because if the national trend in changes of partisan preferences were to apply equally in all areas then the swing against a party experiencing a net loss of votes should be greatest in those areas where it won most votes at the first election: indeed, as Butler and Stokes show, it may even register a net gain of votes where it was weakest, despite the national trend being against it.

When the results of an analysis fly in the face both of generally accepted theory and the practice of professional politicians, it is usually a good idea to reconsider whether the point is really established. Such is the case with the small literature regarding the effects of nomination strategies on the outcomes of Dáil Éireann elections that has developed in these pages since the publication of an article by Cohan, McKinlay and Mughan (‘The Used Vote and Electoral Outcomes: The Irish General Election of 1973’, this Journal, v (1975), 363–83). The original article made several valuable points, including a demonstration that patterns of transfer votes may be more important than the distribution of first preference votes in determining the result of elections under the single transferable vote (STV) system, and an extension of the wasted vote concept to STV, majority, and proportional elections. Unfortunately, the notes that have followed have all focused on the most questionable conclusion of the original article, that overnomination hurts a party's chances of electing the maximum possible number of deputies.

Professor Katz raises a number of points, but I shall limit myself to four. Firstly, I accept his argument that the way in which parties nominate candidates, even over-nomination, may be functional for party unity. Indeed, nowhere in the previous articles has anything else been suggested.

In the July 1978 issue of this journal McKinlay and Little have written an interesting interpretation of British aid policy from 1960 to 1970, based on a statistical study of aid allocation during that period (viii (1978), 313–31). The purpose of the following Note is to question the adequacy of the support for their conclusion that the foreign policy objectives of aid have been dominant compared to humanitarian motivation. It is not intended to deny the existence of foreign policy objectives in aid giving. Aid policy in the United Kingdom, like most other policies, is not made by one ministry but is a compromise between ministries. The question at issue is the relative weight of different motives in aid allocation. There is no doubt that the authors' study has revealed clearly some interesting statistical associations and non-associations between aid allocation to different countries and, inter alia, their size, degree of poverty, colonial, trading and security links with the United Kingdom, Communist bloc associations, and various measures of their political stability and democratic character. However, the main question which must be raised is whether the statistical evidence amassed and analysed really permits the authors to draw their firm conclusions about the relative weight of different British objectives during this period.