tailieunhanh - History of Economic Analysis part 98

History of Economic Analysis part 98. 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 932 simple reproduction. However independently of him it began to be used in the period under discussion for the purpose of singling out for preliminary analysis a set of particularly simple problems as such it was recognized for example by Marshall 6 who spoke of the famous fiction of the Stationary state though as a methodological fiction the stationary state was not at all famous in 1890 used it repeatedly and was so far as I know the first to point out that we may increase its usefulness for analysis by defining it differently more or less strictly for different purposes. Also he gave the lead followed by many and especially by Cassel 7 for an extension of the idea to the case of balanced progress that is to the case of a society in which population and wealth grow at about the same rate and in which methods of production and the conditions of trade change but little and above all where the character of man himself is a constant quantity a conception which has acquired additional interest in our own day owing to its bearing upon the problem of full employment in the models not only of a stagnating but also of an expanding This extension of the concept of stationarity should have separated out neatly the phenomena of evolution in the narrow sense of the term and so it did. But with all the leaders of the period this meant setting these phenomena aside rather than constructing a comprehensive theory of them. Neither Walras who used the phrase point de vue statique nor Marshall who used the phrase statical method failed to distinguish static theory from the theory of the stationary state. But most writers confused them witness the growing popularity of the phrase static state 9 which is the hallmark of this confusion. Nevertheless though more clearly visualized than rigorously defined the system of economic statics did emerge during the period and in fact constitutes its great achievement. But the nature of economic dynamics