tailieunhanh - History of Economic Analysis part 28

History of Economic Analysis part 28. 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 232 But in capitalist society they are but different aspects of one and the same process the bulk of capitalist incomes is formed in the course of the transactions that constitute production in the economic as distinguished from the technological sense. Nevertheless the realistic idea of income formation the realistic virtue of which moreover does not carry any disadvantage that might justify its neglect has come to the fore only 11 With the French economists the physiocrat idea of distribution prevailed throughout and the same holds true of English economists who adopted it perhaps under the influence of at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The concept of total annual output and its value valeur de la reproduction annuelle has of course its uses independently of this. It was adopted by . Second the simplification of the analytic pattern achieved by the tableau method opens up great possibilities for numerical theory. Quesnay was more alive to these possibilities than had been Cantillon and in this particular respect he carried the latter s work much further. He troubled himself about statistical data and actually tried to estimate the values of annual output and other aggregates. That is to say he did genuinely econometric work. This aspect too has acquired new actuality in our time through the great work of Leontief 11 which entirely different though it is from Quesnay s in purpose and technique nevertheless revived the fundamental principle of the tableau method. Marx who stands between the two did not attempt to make his schema statistically Third and most important the Cantillon-Quesnay tableau was the first method ever devised in order to convey an explicit conception of the nature of economic equilibrium. It would seem impossible to exaggerate the importance of this achievement if admiring disciples had not actually succeeded in doing so. Economics like every other science .