tailieunhanh - History of Economic Analysis part 56

History of Economic Analysis part 56. 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 512 But in most cases it is possible to put matters right by means of small corrections. Thus most economists and in particular thought altogether too much of the analogy with the physical sciences which the latter declared to be the proper models for economic theory Autobiography p. 165 a point for critics to fasten on but actually irrelevant since no practical use was made of while correctly emphasizing that economics is an observational science nevertheless called it experimental. But this can be easily corrected into empirical. Furthermore practically all economists used the term Law or even Natural Law the avoidance of which would have saved them much obloquy from philosophy-minded critics. But this habit was quite harmless since what they really meant was nothing but Montesquieu s necessary relations between economic phenomena or Marshall s statements of tendencies. In view of s insistence on the very limited and temporary value of the old political economy there is no excuse for later critics who harped on those words. In fact all the really valid points in the latter s methodological credo could have been copied out from Mill. Again Mill used the term a priori in a misleading sense8 and also placed unnecessary emphasis upon deduction. This was perhaps responsible for the absurd argument of later times about induction vs. deduction but always remembering that he thought of the theoretical apparatus of economics when speaking of methods of political economy we readily see that it never caused any errors in Finally as regards the method of isolating economic phenomena or motives or of abstracting from noneconomic ones not only the practice of the classics but even their methodological rationalization of it was free from serious error. It is difficult to believe that any critic who raises objections on this score can economy in the sense of economic theory. The passages in the Logic