ABSTRACT
This does not imply that our exercise is a futile one. It can serve two purposes. In the fIrst place it does provide a test of the degree to which suitable, fInely tuned, feedback control rules, if they could somehow or other have been devised, would have been capable of keeping the target variables on their planned growth path - a test that, as will be shown in the next chapter, they pass very adequately. In the second place, the exercise may be regarded as an example of how to use the dynamic relationships and actual conditions of the period 1972-80 to devise rules for the control of the economy in subsequent years. Of course the rules so found would remain valid for future years only in so far as the underlying relationships in the economy remained similar to those assumed in the model for 1972-80. One may hope that they would remain reasonably valid for a few years at least; as far as the more distant future years are concerned, the controllers in the real world would naturally be continually revising and bringing up to date their dynamic model and the rules derived from it, so that the rules actually applied in anyone year would always rest on the relationships and conditions ruling over the immediately preceding years.
