tailieunhanh - History of Economic Analysis part 116

History of Economic Analysis part 116. 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 1112 The fundamental independence from war influences of the developments that brought about a new period of economic analysis can be easily established by listing them. First there was the unprecedented wealth of statistical facts. Second there were new results that grew out of working the old apparatus. Third there was the development of dynamics. Fourth there was the new relation between economic theory and statistical methods Econometrics . It is these four obviously interdependent aspects of contemporaneous work that will be discussed in the chapters that are to follow. The rest of this chapter will be devoted to the discussion of a matter of atmosphere. Our time is one of transition not only in the sense in which any time is of necessity transitional but also in the specific sense defined by rapidity and by universal awareness and expectation of actual and impending social change of a fundamental nature. Few will deny this. It will be convenient to state at once the two ways in which that fact bears upon the scientific work in our field. The first things to occur to most of us are the new patterns and the new problems. But so far as these are concerned it is more important to realize the extent to which they are but old friends in new sociological garb than it is to realize the extent to which we are really facing new scientific problems. For to begin with we may repeat for recent economic history what was said a moment ago for the economic history of the First World War. Social patterns economic and other policies economic situations are all quite different but this does not in itself imply that new economic principles are either suggested by them or required in order to understand them. Thus foreign policies economic and other that strike the good old liberal as novel heresies and more enthusiastic observers as great discoveries would as we have seen have looked very familiar to Malynes and Misselden. The labor contract is no .