ABSTRACT
It would be a lengthy and tedious undertaking, and probably not a particularly useful one, to summarize the papers and discussions from such a wide-ranging conference as this one. A summary would also present the difficulty that, to justify the name, the summarizer would have to take immense care to see that each spokesman for the several sides of the relevant issues was presented at something like equal time. While the product of such an exercise might be useful to that apparently large but mysterious group which thrives on “executive summaries,” it would amount to an opportunity lost. One of the reasons for having a conference, instead of merely commissioning a few papers, is to provide a chance for participants to see the authors and spokesmen, to watch them interact, and thus to judge their arguments on the basis of additional information to that available in their prepared papers. The conference audience presumably knows this, and comes, in part at least, because of it. The reader of a proceedings volume is foreclosed from this direct experience but need not be deprived of all its benefits if some effort is made to reflect this extra dimension. This is what I attempt in this concluding essay—a distillation of what I learned in the course of the conference. Therefore, the reader is warned that not every position argued is reported here? and busy executives will be receiving a dose of my interpretation of how the various sides looked and sounded when arrayed together—how they “came off”—in addition to some summarization.
