----------------- 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]
|