So our argument is chiefly a recital of the limitations set by the nature of the data upon the scientific treatment of human problems in general and those of an economic character in particular. In the realm of physical nature, the exact methods of science have carried understanding and control enormously farther than common sense could go. But this was because the data are relatively stable, reducible to classes of manageable number, and especially classes with recognizable and measurable indices. None of these essential features seem to hold good of human data. Moreover, in any deep view of the case, the problem of understanding and controlling human behavior is radically different in character from that of explaining the material world and using it. Physical objects are not at the same time trying to understand and use the investigator! The practical problem of getting along with our fellow human beings must be attacked in the main by a method very different from the technique of natural science, a different kind of development and refinement of common sense, which carries us rather into the fields of esthetics. In a limited field in economic data, due largely to the fact that exchange has reduced the factors to definite measurable quantities, we can have an exact science of the general form of relations. It can tell us little in the concrete, and its chief function is negative-to offset as far as possible the stupid theorizing of the man in the street. The real sociology and economics must be branches of literature as much as of science. In fact they need to be both, and commonly succeed in being neither. It is no wonder that these sciences are still in the stage of violent disagreement among their followers as to what they are and what they are about. The first step toward getting out of this slough, we suggest, is to recognize that man's relations with his fellow man are on a totally different footing from his relations with the objects of physical nature and to give up, except within recognized and rather narrow limits, the naïve project of carrying over a technique which has been successful in the one set of problems and using it to solve another set of a categorically different kind. SOME RECENT DEVELOPMENTS OF ECONOMIC THEORY 1. THE POINT OF VIEW Toward any project of change there are possible three points of view. There is that of the conservative, popularly dubbed the "stand-patter," who, apparently viewing the world and its institutions as having attained their ultimate form, clings tenaciously to the past, resisting all progress. There is also that of the evolutionist. He knows that the world moves onward, but he regards this process as one of orderly growth. Therefore to him progress means no rough breakage with the past, but a gradual modification and development of what has gone before. There is also that of the revolutionist. He sees only the defects of the past and present, and, too eager for future possibilities which he conjures up in his imagination, he would throw away all of the old to substitute in its place something entirely new and untried. Economic theorists to-day find themselves divided into three similar groups. The body of doctrines now set forth in our text-books and taught in our classrooms is a development of the teachings of two or three generations ago, still bearing many of the earmarks of its origin. Many of the exponents of this neo-classical economics, brought up under the old school, have become enamored of its dialectics and Jogical symmetry, and continue to dispense it to their disciples in much of its original form. At the opposite extreme is a group of severe critics. Impatient at the abstractions and strained logic of neo-classicism, enthused with new discoveries in psychology, and with the development of induction in the study of social phenomena, they would throw away much or all of the classical teachings, hoping to substitute for it a new economics, resting on sounder premises and using a better methodology. They are the revolutionists of economic theory. Between these two groups the wise scholar will choose a middle ground. Evolution, rather than inertia or revolution, is the rule in scientific thought as well as in other realms. The body of economic thought that is the developed product of such men as Adam Smith, |