----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- 
 
Further to David Mitch's recent post, Friedman was no doubt thinking of the 
following passage from Marshall's _Principles of Economics_: 
 
"Specialists who never look beyond their own domain are apt to see things 
out of true proportion; much of the knowledge they get together is of 
comparatively little use; they work away at the details of old problems 
which have lost most of their significance and have been supplanted by new 
questions rising out of new points of view; and they fail to gain that 
large illumination which the progress of every science throws by comparison 
and analogy on those around it. Comte did good service therefore by 
insisting that the solidarity of social phenomena must render the work of 
exclusive specialists even more futile in social than in physical science. 
[JS] Mill conceding this continues:-- 'A person is not likely to be a good 
economist who is nothing else.'" 
 
Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics (8th edition, 1920), App.C, "The 
Scope and Method of Economics". 
 
 
Note that Marshall quotes JS Mill on this! Also relevant is the following 
quotation from Keynes, whose views are similarly close to those of Hayek: 
 
The study of economics does not seem to require any specialised gifts of an 
unusually high order. Is it not, intellectually regarded, a very easy 
subject compared with the higher branches of philosophy and pure science? 
Yet good, or even competent, economists are the rarest of birds. An easy 
subject at very few excel! The paradox finds its explanation perhaps, in 
that the master-economist must posses a rare combination of gifts. He must 
be mathematician, historian statesman, philosopher- in some degree. He must 
understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular 
in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight 
of thought. He must study the present in the light of the past purposes of 
the future. No part of man's nature or his institutions must lie entirely 
outside his regard. He must be purposeful and disinterested in a 
simultaneous mood; as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes 
as near the earth as a politician. 
 
J. M. Keynes "Alfred Marshall, 1842-1924" The Economic Journal, Vol. 34, 
No. 135. (Sep., 1924), pp. 321-322. 
 
 
I conclulde that Hayek had a lot of company when he stated that "nobody can 
be a great economist who is only an economist". 
 
Larry Willmore 
 
 
------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ 
For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]