TAILIEUCHUNG - History of Economic Analysis part 6

History of Economic Analysis part 6. 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 12 2. STATISTICS It stands to reason that for economics statistics that is the statistical figure or series of figures must be of vital importance. In practice this has been recognized at least since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when a large part of the work of the Spanish poltiicos for example consisted in the collection and interpretation of statistical figures not to mention the English econometricians who were called political arithmeticians and their fellow workers in France Germany and We need statistics not only for explaining things but also in order to know precisely what there is to explain. But a comment has to be added that is analogous to the comment made in the preceding paragraph on the subject of history. It is impossible to understand statistical figures without understanding how they have been compiled. It is equally impossible to extract information from them or to understand the information that specialists extract for the rest of us without understanding the methods by which this is done and the epistemological backgrounds of these methods. Thus an adequate command of modern statistical methods is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for preventing the modern economist from producing nonsense though very much more so in some fields than in others our stake in these methods is too great for us to leave judgment on the virtues or shortcomings say of the variate-difference method to specialists even if they were unanimous about it. Again we shall not be able to live up to the program that follows from this. But again we shall recognize in principle at least statistical methods are part of the tools of economic analysis even when not specially devised to meet its particular needs and Jacques Bernoulli s Ars conjectandi or Laplace s Théorie analytique stand in the history of many sciences but they have their places also in the history of our 3. THEORY The third fundamental field is theory.

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