Post-war consensus

The post-war consensus is a name given by historians to an era in postwar British political history, from the end of World War II in 1945 to the election of conservative Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister in 1979. The concept claims there was a widespread public policy consensus that covered support for collectivism, a mixed economy, and a welfare state.

Policies inside the consensus

The foundations of the post-war consensus can be traced to the reports of William Beveridge, a Liberal economist who in 1942 formulated the concept of a more comprehensive welfare state in Great Britain. The first general election since 1935 was held in Britain in May 1945, giving a landslide victory for the Labour Party, whose leader was Clement Attlee. The policies undertaken and implemented by this Labour government laid the base of the consensus. The Conservative Party accepted many of these changes and promised not to reverse them in its 1947 Industrial Charter.

The post-war consensus can be characterised as a belief in Keynesian economics, a mixed economy with the nationalisation of major industries, the establishment of the National Health Service and the creation of the modern welfare state in Britain. The policies were instituted by all governments (both Labour and Conservative) in the post-war period. The consensus has been held to characterize British politics until the economic crises of the 1970s which led to the end of the post-war economic boom and the rise of monetarist economics.

Consensus decision-making

Consensus decision-making is a group decision-making process in which group members develop, and agree to support, a decision in the best interest of the whole. Consensus may be defined professionally as an acceptable resolution, one that can be supported, even if not the "favourite" of each individual. Consensus is defined by Merriam-Webster as, first, general agreement, and second, group solidarity of belief or sentiment. It has its origin in the Latin word cōnsēnsus (agreement), which is from cōnsentiō meaning literally feel together. It is used to describe both the decision and the process of reaching a decision. Consensus decision-making is thus concerned with the process of deliberating and finalizing a decision, and the social and political effects of using this process.

Objectives

As a decision-making process, consensus decision-making aims to be:

Medical consensus

Medical consensus is a public statement on a particular aspect of medical knowledge at the time the statement is made that a representative group of experts agree to be evidence-based and state-of-the-art (state-of-the-science) knowledge. Its main objective is to counsel physicians on the best possible and acceptable way to diagnose and treat certain diseases or how to address a particular decision-making area. It is usually, therefore, considered an authoritative, community-based expression of a consensus decision-making and publication process.

There are many ways of producing medical consensus, but the most usual way is to convene an independent panel of experts, either by a medical association or by a governmental authority.

Since consensus statements provide a "snapshot in time" of the state of knowledge in a particular topic, they must periodically be re-evaluated and published again, replacing the previous consensus statement.

Consensus statements differ from medical guidelines, another form of state-of-the-science public statements. According to the NIH, "Consensus statements synthesize new information, largely from recent or ongoing medical research, that has implications for reevaluation of routine medical practices. They do not give specific algorithms or guidelines for practice."

Consensus theorem

In Boolean algebra, the consensus theorem or rule of consensus is the identity:

The consensus or resolvent of the terms and is . It is the conjunction of all the unique literals of the terms, excluding the literal that appears unnegated in one term and negated in the other.

The conjunctive dual of this equation is:

Proof

Consensus

The consensus or consensus term of two conjunctive terms of a disjunction is defined when one term contains the literal and the other the literal , an opposition. The consensus is the conjunction of the two terms, omitting both and , and repeated literals; the consensus is undefined if there is more than one opposition. For example, the consensus of and is .

The consensus can be derived from and through the resolution inference rule. This shows that the LHS is derivable from the RHS (if A → B then A → AB; replacing A with RHS and B with (y ∨ z) ). The RHS can be derived from the LHS simply through the conjunction elimination inference rule. Since RHS → LHS and LHS → RHS (in propositional calculus), then LHS = RHS (in Boolean algebra).