ABSTRACT
Browning and Henderson’s chapter is an important contribution not only to grants economics but also to the general study of one-way transfers. It also makes an important contribution to the theory of loosely coupled systems, a phenomenon of great importance in social and organizational life, but very much neglected by the social scientists and especially by economists. The chapter also contains an excellent survey of a burgeoning literature that is seldom brought together by social scientists. The anecdotal reports on surveys at the end, while very interesting, cannot claim to be more than a hint at what should be an important but much neglected empirical field. Social indicators in the area of one-way transfers on a mass scale are virtually nonexistent. Our ignorance in this field is a serious handicap and may be very costly. We do not really understand why some societies, like Lebanon, Northern Ireland, Mozambique, Haiti, Madagascar, and so on—the list is a long one—fall into internal violence and disintegration, while other societies that may be just as heterogeneous seem to hold together and prosper. The study of communication is an important clue to this problem and the extent to which a society is loosely or tightly coupled, especially in its component parts, may be a very important clue as to why societies do, or do not, fall apart.
