Article history: Received 15 December 2008 Available online 3 March 2010 Submitted by D. Waterman

This idea arose out of one of my business lectures at university some years ago in which Peters and Waterman’s famed bestseller, In Search of Excellence (1982), was under discussion. As it happened, I was concurrently reading Jan Smuts’ scientific and philosophic treatise, Holism and Evolution (1926) and was struck by the conceptual parallels between the ‘rational mode’ of business which Peters...

1 This chapter was prepared as part of the Mirrlees Review: Tax Reform for the 21 century. We wish to thank Henry Aaron, Tony Atkinson, Alan Auerbach, Richard Blundell, Malcolm Gammie, Mike Golosov, Jon Gruber, Bob Hall, Dan Halperin, Ken Judd, Louis Kaplow, Gareth Myles, Jim Poterba, Dick Tresch, Aleh Tsyvinski, Iván Werning and Eric Zolt for helpful comments, Ben Etheridge, Catarina Reis, Joh...

Over the past two decades there have been repeated calls for the collection of new data for use in developing hydrological science. The last few years have begun to bear fruit from the seeds sown by these calls, through increases in the availability and utility of remote sensing data, as well as the execution of campaigns in research catchments aimed at providing new data for advancing hydrolog...