tailieunhanh - Luận án kinh tế - "Human and action" - Chapter 38

XXXVIII. THE PLACE OF ECONOMICS IN LEARNING 1. The Study of Economics natural sciences are ultimately based on facts as established by laboratory experiment. Physical and biological theories are confronted with these facts, and are rejected when in conflict with them. | XXXVIII. THE PLACE OF ECONOMICS IN LEARNING 1. The Study of Economics The natural sciences are ultimately based on facts as established by laboratory experiment. Physical and biological theories are confronted with these facts and are rejected when in conflict with them. The perfection of these theories no less than the improvement of technological and therapeutical procedures requires more and better laboratory research. These experimental ventures absorb time painstaking effort of specialists and costly expenditure of material. Research can no longer be conducted by isolated and penniless scientists however ingenious. The seat of experimentation today is in the huge laboratories supported by governments universities endowments and big business. Work in these institutions has developed into professional routine. The majority of those employed in it are technicians recording those facts which the pioneers of whom some are themselves experimenters will one day use as building stones for their theories. As far as the progress of scientific theories is concerned the achievements of the rank-and-file researcher are only ancillary. But very often his discoveries have immediate practical results in improving the methods of therapeutics and of business. Ignoring the radical epistemological difference between the natural sciences and the sciences of human action people believe that what is needed to further economic knowledge is to organize economic research according to the well-tried methods of the institutes for medical physical and chemical research. Considerable sums of money have been spent for what is labeled economic research. In fact the subject matter of the work of all these institutes is recent economic history. It is certainly a laudable thing to encourage the study of economic history. However instructive the result of such studies may be one must not confuse them with the study of economics. They do not produce facts in the sense in which this term is .