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Subject:
From:
[log in to unmask] (Roger Backhouse)
Date:
Tue May 1 10:05:53 2007
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Humberto Barreto wrote (quoting from Skousen):
>But Roger Garrison notes that the
>Austrian economist Eugen Bohm-Bawerk wrote this sentence in January,
>1891: "One cannot eschew studying the microcosm if one wants to
>understand properly the macrocosm of a developed country"
>(Bohm-Bawerk 1962: 117).


I rather like this contribution to the thread, because it poses the problems
with asking "When did x come into economics?" "Micro" and "macro", which we
think of as the key terms, have been affixed to various
words, -cosm, -econometrics, -economics, or simply to stand alone. Clearly,
Bohm-Bawerk's usage has much in common with modern usage, but it is almost
certainly not exactly the same because the theoretical and cultural context
against which he wrote it was different. Shades of meaning get changed and
this is not necessarily perfectly correlated with changes in wording.

Did Bohm-Bawerk write this in English, or is it a translation, and if it is
a recent translation, when was it translated and what was the original
German?

Roger Backhouse


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