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History of Economic Analysis part 25

History of Economic Analysis part 25. At the time of his death in 1950, Joseph Schumpeter-one of the major figures in economics during the first half of the 20th century-was working on his monumental History of Economic Analysis. A complete history of humankind's theoretical efforts to understand economic phenomena from ancient Greece to the present, this book is an important contribution to the history of ideas as well as to economics. | CHAPTER 4 The Econometricians and Turgot1 THE INDIVIDUALS and groups to be discussed in this chapter were also Consultant Administrators though not of the academic type and some of them qualify in addition as philosophers of natural law. Nevertheless it was not only to relieve a chapter already overloaded with names that they have been reserved for separate treatment. Except for the great figure of Turgot which is to come in at the end of the chapter they have something in common that makes it desirable to marshal them into a connected array the spirit of numerical analysis. They were Econometricians. In fact their works illustrate to perfection what Econometrics is and what Econometricians are trying to do.2 1. POLITICAL ARITHMETICK Repeatedly we have had occasion to observe that with economists of all types but especially with the Consultant Administrators factual investigation was the primary task that absorbed most of the available manpower and progressed more satisfactorily than did such theory as there was. This was so from the first as such representative examples as Botero and Ortiz suffice to show. However in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a type of teaching developed especially at the German universities that specialized in purely descriptive presentation of the facts relevant to public administration. A German professor Hermann Conring 1606-81 is usually credited with having been the first to give lectures of this kind. Another Gottfried Achenwall 1719-72 who did the same introduced the term Statistics. These statistics did not present figures primarily but rather non-numerical facts and therefore had nothing to do in the hands of those professors with what we now call statistical method. But the purpose of this information was much the same as that which our figures treated by somewhat more refined methods are calculated to serve. The definition of statistics adopted as late as 1838 by the Royal Statistical Society to give it its present title