Below are some quotations I selected for Alfred Marshall to go on an
economist's calendar. If any of you have any "better" selections
please let me know.
A few ground rules for the discussion:
1. Space is limited, so please accompany any suggested quotation
with a suggestion of which quotation to cut.
2. The new quotation can be no longer than the cut quotation.
3. Please give the source for any quotation you give--I will have to
get permissions for each.
David Colander
Alfred Marshall
Economics is a study of men as they live and move and think in the
ordinary business of life. But it concerns itself chiefly with those
motives which affect, most powerfully and most steadily, man's
conduct in the business part of his life. Everyone who is worth
anything carries his higher nature with him into buskins; and, there
as elsewhere, he is influenced by his personal affections, by his
conceptions of duty and his reverence for high ideals. And it is true
that the best energies of the ablest inventors and organizers of
improved methods and appliances are stimulated by a noble emulation
more than by any love of wealth for its own sake. But, for all that,
the steadiest motive to ordinary business work is the desire for the
pay which is the material reward of work. (Principles, 14)
The Mecca of the economist lies in economic biology rather than in
economic dynamics. But biological conceptions are more complex than
those of mechanics; a volume on Foundations must therefore give a
relatively large place to mechanical analogies; and frequent use is
made of the term "equilibrium," which suggests something of statical
analogy. This fact, combined with the predominant attention paid in
the present volume to the normal conditions of life in the modern
age, has suggested the notion that its central idea is "statical,"
rather than "dynamical." But in fact it is concerned throughout with
the forces that cause movement: and its key-note is that of dynamics
rather than statics." (Principles, xiv).
A man is likely to be a better economist if he trusts to his common
sense, and practical instincts, then if he professes to study the
theory of value and is resolved to find it easy." (368, Principles).
The element of time is a chief cause of those difficulties in
economic investigations which make it necessary for man with his
limited powers to go step by step; breaking up a complex question,
studying one bit at a time, and at last combining his partial
solutions into a more or less complete solution of the whole riddle.
In breaking it up, he segregates those disturbing causes, whose
wanderings happen to be inconvenient, for the time in a pound called
Ceteris Paribus. The study of some group of tendencies is isolated by
the assumption other things being equal: the existence of other
tendencies is not denied, but their disturbing effect is neglected
for a time. (366, Principles).
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