The Competitiveness of Nations in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
Kenneth E. Boulding †
The Economics of Knowledge and the Knowledge of
Economics
American Economic Review
Richard T. Ely Lecture
Mar. 1966, 1-13.
What might be called,
perhaps somewhat grandiloquently, the Epistemological Question has received
rather scant attention at the hands of economists. [1] There are, of course, a number of epistemological questions,
some of which lie more in the province of the philosopher than they do the
economist or the social scientist. The
one with which I am particularly concerned here is that of the role of
knowledge in social systems, both as a product of the past and as a determinant
of the future. There is a little
terminological problem here, that the word “knowledge” in English has some
tendency to approach the meaning of “truth.” We really have no convenient word to describe
the content of the human mind without regard to the question as to whether this
content corresponds to anything outside it. For this reason I have in the past used the
term “image” to mean this cognitive content of the human mind. [2]
But this term also is subject to misunderstanding, so for
the purposes of this paper I will revert to the term “knowledge,” with a
warning, however, that I make no assumptions about the content of people’s
minds being true. We may recall the
classic bon mot attributed to Will Rogers, that “the trouble isn’t what
people don’t know; it’s what they do know that isn’t so.” So little accustomed are we to analyzing this
problem that there is even an ambiguity in the word “ignorance.” It may mean that people have no image at all
about something where an image is possible, or it may mean that they have
images which are false or untrue. The
pursuit of the question as to what we mean by truth or untruth, however, leads
us into a philosophical morass from which, as David Hume suggested, the only escape
is to climb out, clean oneself off, and go home and have a good dinner and
forget all about philosophy. Otherwise
we may be swallowed up in a paralyzing skepticism, and become, like Hamlet, “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”
†University of Michigan
1. Naming names is always a little invidious, but I must give honorable
mention to F. A. Hayek, Fritz Machlup, T. E. Schultz,
and Fred Harbison, as members of the little band who
have taken this problem seriously.
2. K. E. Boulding, The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society (Univ.
of Michigan Press, 1956 and 1961).
I shall become very
pragmatic at this point and consign the philosophical problems to my esteemed
colleagues who make this their specialty, and I shall assume simply that
knowledge, that is, images, exist; they can be observed or at least deduced
through the instrument of language, combined with introspection; and that some
images get us into more trouble than others; and that we tend to revise those
images which get us into trouble. A
decent, orderly, and at the same time imaginative and systematic revision of
images that get us into trouble is a process which edges us, one hopes constantly, towards truth. This proposition, I must confess, is an act of
faith. At its most sophisticated and
orderly, this is the method of science. The
same method, however, also produces images which approximate the truth in both
what I would call folk knowledge, which is the knowledge gained in the ordinary
living of daily life, and literary knowledge, which is folk knowledge chewed
over, reflected upon, digested, and expanded by intakes from the written word.
I must resist the
temptation to be philosophical, however, and come back to business; that is,
economics. The question of what is
economics can be almost as troublesome as what is knowledge? Here again I will be fairly ruthless and
define economics as the study of the “econosphere”
with a view of gaining knowledge about it, and I will go on to define the econosphere as that subset of the sociosphere,
or the sphere of all human activity, relationships, and institutions, which is
particularly characterized by the phenomenon of exchange. One might limit it further and consider only
that part of the sphere of exchange which is subject, in A. C. Pigou’s great phrase, to “the measuring rod of money.” As I am a great believer in making boundaries
of all kinds insignificant enough to be taken off the human agenda, in both the
international system and in the republic of letters, I am not going to bother
very much about where the boundary lies.
As it is exchange or
potentiality of exchange or relevance to exchange that makes things commodities,
one would think that economists would be interested in knowledge itself as a
commodity. It is certainly something
which is bought and sold. It is a little
hard to put a price on it because of the difficulties of measuring the quantity
of the commodity itself. We can put
prices on the printed page, the hour’s lecture, the newspaper, the tip sheet,
or the newsletter and even perhaps on the golf course or the cocktail hour. The absence of any unit of knowledge itself,
however, and perhaps the intrinsic heterogeneity of its substance, makes it
very difficult to think of a price of knowledge as such, and indeed has
probably contributed to a certain resistance which we feel to thinking of
knowledge as a commodity. One longs, indeed,
for a unit of knowledge, which perhaps might be called a “wit,”
2
analogous to the “bit” as used in information theory; but up to
now at any rate no such practical unit has emerged. It is certainly tempting to think of knowledge
as a capital stock of information, knowledge being to information what capital
is to income, and to use the bit itself in the form of a stock as the measure
of knowledge. Certainly the improbability
of a structure, which is what the bit really measures, is highly related to the
knowledge concept. The bit, however,
abstracts completely from the content of either information or knowledge, and
while it is enormously useful for telephone engineers, who have no interest in
what is being said over their telephones, for purposes of the social system
theorist we need a measure which takes account of significance and which would
weight, for instance, the gossip of a teenager rather low and the
communications over the hot line between Moscow and Washington rather high. Up to now we seem to have no way of doing this,
short of a kind of qualitative guesswork, though even this will be better than
nothing.
Another difficulty is that
only things which are clearly capable of being appropriated are subject to being
exchanged, and if a thing cannot be property, it obviously cannot be a
commodity. While knowledge has many of
the aspects of property, its capacity for reproduction in many minds and its
accessibility in the form of the published word make it a very peculiar form of
property. Thus as Major John Wesley
Powell said to a congressional committee in 1886: “Possession of property is
exclusive; possession of knowledge is not exclusive, for the knowledge which
one man has may also be the possession of another.” [3] In spite of Major Powell’s dictum, some knowledge, of course, is exclusive,
such as trade secrets and patents, and thereby becomes property. What is perhaps even more important, knowledge
which has the capacity of generating more knowledge in a single head is also
exclusive and becomes property to the individual possessing it.
These difficulties may have
led to a certain neglect of the commodity aspects of knowledge, even in
economic theory itself. One notices this
in at least three areas of economic thought: in the theory of the market, in
the theory of development, and in the theory of decision making, both public
and private. In the theory of the
competitive market there is usually made an explicit assumption about “perfect
knowledge.” What this means in effect
is that the acquisition of knowledge of prices or exchange opportunities in a
perfect market is costless, so that knowledge is, as it were, a free good. This assumption might be plausible if there
were only a few buyers and sellers. However, the perfect market also assumes large
numbers of buyers and sellers, and pre-
3. Quoted in Don K. Price, The Scientific Estate, p. 284,
footnote 36 (Belkuap-Harvard. 1965).
sumably large numbers of prices, and the more prices there
are, the more transactions there are, clearly the less plausible becomes the assumption
that knowledge is costless. We can
perhaps wriggle our way out of this dilemma by supposing that the knowledge
problem in perfect markets is taken care of by specialized arbitrageurs, who by
devoting themselves full time to the problem of knowing what prices there are
in different parts of the market and by taking advantage themselves of the
price differentials thereby revealed, reduce these price differentials to so
small a quantity that all the rest of the people in the market are justified in
assuming that the price which they happen to observe at one point is
characteristic of all transactions all over the market. From a social point of view, the income of the
arbitrageurs might be regarded as the cost of acquiring the knowledge which is
necessary to operate the market, and the other people in the market are
evidently willing to pay this rather than become arbitrageurs themselves.
We can then think of the
development of imperfect markets as a result of the fact that when commodities
become extremely diverse and complicated, when we have to know not only their
price but also their quality, arbitrage in effect breaks down, because the cost
of acquiring the relevant knowledge is more than the market is willing to support.
Hence we get imperfect markets facing
both buyers and sellers, in which they face not merely a price at which they
can buy and sell as much as they wish but a function relating the amount that
can be bought or sold to the price at which it can be bought or sold. Once we have imperfect markets, however, the
epistemological problem for the marketers themselves increases enormously. If prices are advertised in a perfect market,
or “cried,” every seller knows his sales function and every buyer knows his
purchase function immediately. If,
however, we have an imperfect market, the problem of knowing what are the sales or purchase functions becomes not only acute
but almost insoluble, simply because in order to know a function we must have
experience with a system beyond its present point. It is this failure to understand the
epistemological problem involved which has vitiated much of the otherwise
laudable attempt to expand the theory of perfect competition into imperfect
markets. This attempt
which began so hopefully in the 1930’s now seems to have petered out in an
epistemological swamp.
When it comes to the theory
of economic development, the failure to recognize explicitly the essentially
epistemological nature of the problem has led to a proliferation of mechanical
models of very doubtful value, and, one fears, the giving of a large amount of
bad advice. The theory of economic
development is part of the general problem of evolutionary change, and its poor
condition reflects the general poverty of
4
the theory of dynamic systems. Throughout the sciences, physical, biological,
and social, we are still really more at home with equilibrium systems than we
are with dynamic systems.
The plain fact is that
knowledge or something equivalent to it in the form of improbable structures is
the only thing that can grow or evolve, and the concept is quite crucial in any
evolutionary theory. As far as matter
and energy are concerned, we are subject to inexorable laws of conservation. Here we are faced with simple exchange: what
one system acquires, another system must give up. In the case of available energy, there is not
even conservation; the second law of thermodynamics informs us there is
constant degradation and decay. From the
point of view of energy alone, the universe is clearly running down into a very
thin brown soup, and all processes in time are seen merely as the exhaustion of
preexisting potential, a kind of squandering of available energy capital. It is only information and knowledge processes
which in any sense get out from under the iron laws of conservation and decay,
though they only do this, as it were, by operating at another level. Two processes may be distinguished here. The first might be called printing, in which a
structure is able to reproduce itself by making a copy of itself out of the
incoherent matter around it. The gene
evidently operates in this way; the mass production of commodities is largely
three-dimensional printing; and even the transmission of a good deal of
knowledge by rote learning in the educational process falls into this category. Printing by itself, however, would never
organize an evolutionary or developmental process. It would merely fill the whole universe with
copies of an initial structure. There
must therefore be a second process to which we might give the name of
organizing. This is the kind of process,
for instance, by which the coded information contained in the gene is able to
organize a phenotype such as a man. This
is the way in which a blueprint organizes the construction of a building. This is the way in which an idea creates an
organization, or an image of the future governs an individual life.
We then see any
developmental process, whether this is the development of a fertilized egg into
a human being, the development of an idea into an organization by an entrepreneur,
the development of a religion out of a “sacred history,” or even the process of
economic development itself, as essentially a combination of printing and
organizing, the one developing rote knowledge, the other new knowledge. Thus we can think of capital essentially as
knowledge imposed on the material world, in the first place by an organizing
process which creates a producing organization and in the second case by a
process akin to three-dimensional printing. In this view, consumption is essentially
consumption of knowledge-structures, either human knowledge
through death or decay, or of the bodily structure through
metabolic processes, or through wear and tear of material structures, or even
through the disorganizing processes which afflict organizations. Production is then seen essentially as a process
of increasing structure, repairing the decay and depreciation of consumption,
replacing the knowledge lost by death, and so on. We could further think of production as having
two functions: one a replacement function, which is necessary to restore an
existing knowledge and capital structure; the other a developmental function
which expands, improves, and reorganizes the structure of knowledge in general
into new forms. If consumption is so
great that all production has to be used for maintenance, there will, of
course, be no development. We also get
certain consumption processes which can be remedied by no known input, such as
aging. Fortunately in society we have
solved this problem by having babies, and in organizations we solve it by
having competition, bankruptcy, and various forms of organizational death. Birth and death, indeed, are the price that we
pay for aging, so that we can have a population that does not age, even though
the individuals do.
The recognition that
development, even economic development, is essentially a knowledge process has
been slowly penetrating the minds of economists, but we are still too much
obsessed by mechanical models, capital-income ratios, and even input-output
tables, to the neglect of the study of the learning process which is the real
key to development. It is true, of course, that what might be called the “human
resources school” of Theodore Schultz and Fred Harbison
has laid very proper stress on education as the mainspring of the developmental
process. Even here, however, there has
perhaps not been sufficient attention paid to the problem of learning as a
whole, outside as well as inside the institutions of formal education; and
there has been a considerable neglect of the role of the price system as a
teacher.
It is always depressing to
go back to Adam Smith, especially on economic development, as one realizes how
little we have learned in nearly two hundred years. It is, however, perhaps worthy of notice that
our father Adam saw very clearly that the learning process was the key to
development, for if we examine his causes of the increase in the productive
powers of labor, which is what we mean by economic development, we see that
they all involve the knowledge process. The
first of these, the development of skill and dexterity through the division of
labor, is a learning process mainly in the lower nervous system. The second, the gains due to constant
application at a single task and the elimination of “sauntering,” involve the
problem of forgetting and re-learning as we take up tasks intermittently; and
the third, and by far the most important, is the development of machines
(frozen knowl-
6
edge, as I would call them) as a result of the work not
only of specialists in the production of such things, but also as the result of
the work of “philosophers” who augment knowledge in general. Thus even before 1776 Adam Smith had perceived
the enormous importance of what today we would call research and development in
the processes by which everybody gets richer.
The third area of interest
to economists where the epistemological problem is overwhelmingly important is
in the area of decision making itself, in the private sector, in households and
businesses, and in government; for the problem of government policy is just as
much a problem in decision making as is the problem of the behavior of private
persons and organizations. In my book, The
Image, I have sketched what might be called an epistemological theory of
behavior, pointing out that a decision is always a choice among alternative
perceived images of the future. The
study of decision, therefore, must concentrate on how these images of the
future are derived from the information inputs of the past, as this is the only
place from which they can come. That is,
we have to think of our images of the future as essentially learned out of our
inputs from the past, and the nature of this learning process is therefore of
overwhelming importance. Similarly, the
utility or welfare function, which we impose over these images of the future,
is likewise learned, though economists have been surprisingly unwilling to
recognize this fact, perhaps because it was called to their attention in such
strident tones by Veblen, who argued most
convincingly, to my mind, that if we wanted to have a dynamic economics, we could
not simply take preferences for granted but had to regard them as essentially
learned. The process by which we learn
our preferences, however, is mysterious indeed. A substantial monkey wrench is thrown into
dynamic economics by the fact that the price system itself may operate as a
teacher, and preferences may change in response to the price structure just as
the price structure changes in response to preferences. We have, for instance, what might be called
the “sour grapes” principle - that what we cannot get we decide we do not like.
There is also a counterprinciple
that might be called the “Mount Everest” principle, that if something is hard
to get, we want it, just because it is hard to get. Furthermore, if we know somebody else has paid
a different price from what we have paid, our satisfaction may be correspondingly
increased or diminished.
The epistemological theory
of decision making is, of course, pretty empty unless we can specify ways in which
the inputs of the past determine the present images of the future. Unfortunately, the observations of economists
on this question are for the most part simple-minded to the point of
embarrassment. The concept of elasticity
of expecta-
tions, for instance, would only be interesting if there
were any evidence at all that as a parameter it had some stability, or even
that its rate of change had some stability. There may be some stability in expectations
when there is nothing to expect, that is, in a poor, stable environment, but
outside of this the evidence for any simple relationship between present rates
of change and future is not well supported. Perhaps the most plausible theory is that
people tend to interpret the present in terms of the traumatic experiences of
their youth. Thus a generation that was
traumatized by inflation will have different images from one traumatized by
depression. It is clear we are on the
borderline here between economics and psychology, and
it is to the interstitial discipline of economic psychology that we must look for
answers. The trouble is, of course, that
even psychology knows very little about the human learning process, mainly
because it takes place over such a long period and is almost certainly subject
to phenomena such as “imprinting” in which inputs at certain moments of
“readiness” in the development of the person produce effects which far outweigh
their intrinsic importance.
Another profitable line of
study lies in economic sociology, in the analysis of the way in which
organizational structure affects the flow of information, hence affects the
information input into the decision-maker, hence affects his image of the
future and his decisions, even perhaps his value function. There is a great deal of evidence that almost
all organizational structures tend to produce false images in the
decision-maker, and that the larger and more authoritarian the organization,
the better the chance that its top decision-makers will be operating in purely
imaginary worlds. This perhaps is the
most fundamental reason for supposing that there are ultimately diminishing
returns to scale. In the most extreme
form of this view, we can suppose that the role structure and communication
network of an organization determine the inputs to each role so completely that
there is virtually no freedom of decision at all, and that no matter who is the
role occupant, the decisions will be much the same. The inference of this theory, of course, is
that fools in high places will make just the same decisions as wise men, and
though there is something comforting in this, one certainly hesitates to
believe it too wholeheartedly.
Let me now focus my
attention even more narrowly on the problem of the contribution of economic
knowledge itself, that is, what economists know, to the processes of operation
of the economic system. We have here a
certain epistemological paradox, that where knowledge is an essential part of
the system, knowledge about the system changes the system itself. This is a kind of generalized Heisenberg Principle,
which is particularly troublesome in the social sciences. What this
8
means, of course, is not that knowledge is unattainable,
but that we must regard it as part of a total dynamic system. That is to say, we are not simply acquiring
knowledge about a static system which stays put, but acquiring knowledge about
a whole dynamic process in which the acquisition of the knowledge itself is a
part of the process. It is quite
legitimate, therefore, to ask ourselves what is the impact of economic
knowledge, that is, of the image of the economic system or econosphere,
in the minds of professional economists, on the dynamic processes of the econosphere itself. The
only point at which knowledge can affect a social system is through its impact
on decisions. This impact can be small
or large, depending on the relevance of the knowledge in question. Thus in the case of the operations of a market
and the behavior involved in buying and selling, it is doubtful whether the
knowledge of economics as such makes very much difference. Economists, for instance, have not been noted
for their success in market speculation, with two notable exceptions of Ricardo
and J. M. Keynes, and even in their cases, they made their major contributions
to economics after, not before, they made fortunes in speculative markets. There are certainly few marketers who have
been assisted in their operations by knowledge of the Wairasian
Equations, just as few tennis players are much assisted by knowledge of the
mathematics of moving balls.
At some points, however,
economic knowledge is showing some danger of being useful. Economists can take a good deal of credit for
the stabilization policies which have been followed in most Western countries
since 1945 with considerable success. It
is easy to generate a euphoric and self-congratulatory mood when one compares
the twenty years after the first World War, 1919-39, with the twenty years
after the second, 1945-65. The
first twenty years were a total failure; the second twenty years, at least as
far as economic policy is concerned, have been a modest success. We have not had any great depression; we have
not had any serious financial collapse; and on the whole we have had much
higher rates of development in most parts of the world than we had in the
1920’s and 1930’s, even though there are some conspicuous failures. Whether the unprecedented rates of economic
growth of the last twenty years, for instance in Japan and Western Europe, can
be attributed to economics, or whether they represent a combination of good
luck in political decision making with the expanding impact of the natural and
biological sciences on the economy, is something we might argue. I am inclined to attribute a good deal to good luck and noneconomic
forces, but not all of it, and even if economics only contributed 10 percent,
this would amount to a very handsome rate of return indeed, considering the
very small amount of resources we have really put into economics.
Another point where the
knowledge of economics has had some payoffs in the social system has been through
the development of operations research and management science, with the aid of
computer technology. Here again it is
not altogether clear how much economics itself has contributed to this, as the
basic ideas, for instance of maximizing something under constraints, are so
obvious that it is almost embarrassing to credit economics with them, and it is
the technology that has really made the difference. However, I suppose it can be argued that if
economics had not beaten out the marginal analysis with an intellectual sledge
hammer over a couple of generations, the computer boys might have had to spend
a few minutes in thinking about what they were doing. Some of us, perhaps, still have to learn that
arithmetic is a complement to, not a substitute for, thought, and that what my
spy in IBM calls the “gigo principle” (that is,
garbage in, garbage out) is a sound approach even to the most elegantly
computerized simulation. I confess I am
a little worried about one aspect of this movement, fruitful as it undoubtedly
is. The very power of the computer to
simulate complex systems by very high-speed arithmetic may prevent search for
those simplified formulations which are the essence of progress in theory. I have an uneasy feeling, for instance, that
if the computer had been around at the time of Copernicus, nobody would have
ever bothered with him, because the computers could have handled the Ptolemaic
epicycles with perfect ease.
The general movement
towards the rationalization of decision-making processes in both private and
public life through the use of optimizing procedures applied to complex masses
of information may have some other costs lurking among the benefits,
particularly in regard to political decision making. For one thing, these elaborate procedures may
easily produce a sense of subjective certainty, which is quite unwarranted by
the uncertainties of the actual system. One worries about this particularly in the
international system, where the principle that “he who hesitates is saved” is
usually very sound, and an illusion of certainty can be quite disastrous. The use of political war games and of computer
simulation in the Department of Defense is a genuine cause for alarm on this
score, and one would very much like to see some studies of the effect of
gaming, for instance, on business behavior. It could easily be that the euphoria produced
by these exercises resulted in some disastrous decisions, though I have not
been able to document this hypothesis. The
great danger of rationality is of course suboptimization;
that is, finding and choosing the best position of part of the system which is
not the best for the whole. Too many
people, indeed, and especially too many experts, devote their lives to finding
10
the best way of doing something that should not be done
at all. Decision making by instinct,
gossip, visceral feeling, and political savvy may stand pretty low on the scale
of total rationality, but it may have the virtue of being able to take in very
large systems in a crude and vague way, whereas the rationalized processes can
only take subsystems in their more exact fashion, and being rational about
subsystems may be worse than being not very rational about the system as a
whole. I would not argue, of course,
that rationality about the system as a whole is impossible. On the other hand, the economist has a certain
mind-set in favor of his own skills, and it is easy for him to leave out essential
variables with which he is not familiar. Here, indeed, a little learning may be a
dangerous thing, or even a little rationality.
One area where economists
have a good deal to be humble about is in the field of economic development of
the poor countries. In the rich
countries we have done fairly well; in the poor countries our record is
distinctly spotty. This is almost
certainly because we are dealing in this case with a total social process, and
the economic abstractions are simply not sufficient to deal with the problem. Here what we need is clearly economic
anthropology, and this science, unfortunately, hardly exists. Our great gift to the world is national income
statistics and the percentage rate of growth of GNP. In fact, as every economist knows,
calculations of GNP, especially in the poor countries, are largely exercises in
the statistical imagination, and even if they were accurate, the GNP itself can
be a very poor measure of welfare. The
GNP can rise because of arms races, because of stupid dam-building, or even
through the building of presidential palaces. It can be rising because a small proportion of
a population is getting better off while the vast majority remain in stagnant
misery. Valuable as the GNP is, therefore,
as a rough overall measure of economic success, it can easily become a fetish
and a quite misleading statistic. Economists
certainly should be the first to issue warnings against its misuse.
Let me conclude with some
brief notes on the state of economic knowledge in the United States. At the moment I get the impression that
economists in this country are bathed in a warm glow of self-congratulation,
rising out of the long Kennedy-Johnson upswing and the successful tax cut, and
they are all climbing onto the bandwagon of the Great Society, waving flags and
tooting horns. That we have some causes
for self-congratulation I would not deny, and I hate to seem like a skeleton at
the feast. There is real danger,
however, that our current euphoria will prevent us from seeing the immensity of
our unsolved problems and the enormous intellectual task that still awaits us. It is not much to the credit of the economics
profession, for instance,
that it took an engineer, Seymour Melman,
[4]
to call our attention to the fact that our obsession with being a great power
and our neurotic masculine compulsions about military strength are seriously
depleting the technical resource base in the civilian sectors of the economy. The nonsense which is talked about cyberculture and the hooting and hollering about automation
at a time when substantial segments of the economy are technologically stagnant
or even deteriorating is another tribute to a major intellectual default on the
part of the economics profession. The
plain fact is that economists have neglected the study of technical change at
the structural and micro level to the point where we are quite incapable of
answering many of the most important questions of our day. We have been obsessed with macroeconomics,
with piddling refinements in mathematical models, and with the monumentally
unsuccessful exercise in welfare economics which has preoccupied a whole
generation with a dead end, to the almost total neglect of some of the major
problems of our day. Almost the only group of economists who have much sense of realism are the
agricultural economists, and these are dealing with a vanishing sector that is
now only 5 percent of the total economy. The whole economics profession, indeed, is an
example of that monumental misallocation of intellectual resources which is one
of the most striking phenomena of our times. It would be an interesting exercise to compare
the distribution of economists specializing in different sectors of the economy
with the contribution of these sectors to the GNP. I would not be surprised to find 75 percent of
the economists are concentrated in 10 percent of the GNP. Where, for instance, are the economists who
are really studying the service trades and the
tertiary industries? Where are the
economists who are really studying the 10 percent of the economy devoted to the
space-military complex? Where are the economists even who are really studying the impact
of automation? And the answer is,
practically nowhere. Far from being in a
mood of self-congratulation, we should be in a mood of repentance.
A mood of repentance,
however, implies a hope of salvation. It
is on this note that I would like to conclude. In almost every generation, the oldsters mourn
that things are not what they were in their young days. I remember Hicks once telling me that he heard
Foxwell’s last lectures at London School of
Economics, in which he commiserated with the young men of the 1920’s that they
lived in a dull age of economics, and that they could never hope to recapture
the enormous thrills of the bimetallism controversy. One is tempted to sing the same song today, in
describing the Keynesian raptures of the 1930’s. “Bliss was it in that dawn to
be alive, but to be young was very heaven,” as the aging
6. Seymour Meiman, Our Depleted Society (Holt,
Rinehart, and Winston, 1965).
12
Wordsworth wrote about the French Revolution. Little indeed did Foxwell
know. It is
tempting to say, “Those were the days,” and leave it at that. But these are the days too. It may be, of course, that the intellectual
fervor which in the 1930’s we devoted to the problem of unemployment must now
be devoted to the graver problem of human survival in an international system
which has clearly broken down. It may be
that intellectual excitement has shifted from economics towards political
science or towards social psychology. Let us not think, however, that all our problems have been solved. An enormous intellectual task still awaits the
economist. We are a very long way from
writing finis to this chapter of the human enterprise. We still cannot handle some of the most
elementary problems regarding economic development, economic dynamics, the
function of the price system, the relative merits of centrally planned as
against market economies, the economics of distribution, the development of the
“grants economy,” the behavior of economic organizations of all types, from the
corporation to the foundation, the role of the price system in the developmental
and learning process, the learning process itself by which we acquire our
images of our economic environment. We
are still, like Isaac Newton, only a boy playing on the seashore, and the great
ocean of Truth still lies all undiscovered before us. That undiscovered ocean is Man himself. What we discover about him, I hope, will be
for his healing. I did not become an
economist for anybody’s applause; I became an economist because I thought there
was an intellectual task ahead, of desperate importance for the welfare and
even the survival of mankind. A mere
thirty-five years have not been long enough to change my motivation. Something has been accomplished; a great deal
more remains to be done. To this
unfinished task I commend us all.
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