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History of Economic Analysis part 59

History of Economic Analysis part 59. 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. | History of economic analysis 542 intermediary stands out with unmistakable clearness in Say s Traité. Among leading English authors Lauderdale Malthus and Senior came more or less near to grasping this idea. But only Say made something like a success of it. It is nothing short of pathetic that owing to a complete lack of understanding on the part of opponents and owing to complete ignorance of even the most elementary mathematical tools on the part of exponents this promising start not only was left to hibernate for decades but also acquired a reputation for superficiality and sterility. On the other hand we have the type of analysis of which the Ricardian detour is the outstanding example. It would of course be an exaggeration to say that Ricardo was entirely blind to the aspect of the economic process described above. He had glimpses of it now and then and Professor Knight went perhaps too far if he accused Ricardo of not having seen the problem of distribution as a problem of valuation at all2 But it is true that Ricardo failed to see the explanatory principle offered by the valuation aspect. This failure is intimately related to a peculiarity of the Ricardian work that is essential for understanding him and proves better than does anything else that this work constitutes in fact a detour and falls out of the historical line of economists endeavors. For A.Smith A.Marshall and ourselves the factors that explain the size and rate of change of the Social Product or National Dividend or Total Net Output are of primary significance. This was not Ricardo s view. On the contrary in his preface to the first edition of the Principles he tells us To determine the laws which regulate this distribution of total product between landowners capitalists and laborers J.A.S. is the principal problem in Political Economy. That is to say he all but identifies economics with the theory of distribution implying that he had little or nothing to say about to use his language the laws .