Economists From The United States

":(iii) The next level is that of the control mechanism or cybernetic system, which might be nicknamed the level of the thermostat..."

":(ii) The next level of systematic analysis is that of the simple dynamic system with predetermined, necessary motions..."

":(i) The first level is that of the static structure. It might be called the level of frameworks..."

"A second possible approach to general systems theory is through the arrangement of theoretical systems and constructs in a hierarchy of complexity, roughly corresponding to the complexity of the "individuals" of the various empirical fields... leading towards a "system of systems."… I suggest below a possible arrangement of "levels" of theoretical discourse."

"Two possible approaches to the organization of general systems theory suggest themselves, which are to be thought of as complementary rather than competitive, or at least as two roads each of which is worth exploring. The first approach is to look over the empirical universe and to pick out certain general phenomena which are found in many different disciplines, and to seek to build up general theoretical models relevant to these phenomena. The second approach is to arrange the empirical fields in a hierarchy of complexity of organization of their basic "individual" or unit of behavior, and to try to develop a level of abstraction appropriate to each."

"Knowledge is not something which exists and grows in the abstract. It is a function of human organisms and of social organization. Knowledge, that is to say, is always what somebody knows: the most perfect transcript of knowledge in writing is not knowledge if nobody knows it. Knowledge however grows by the receipt of meaningful information - that is, by the intake of messages by a knower which are capable of reorganising his knowledge."

"General Systems Theory is a name which has come into use to describe a level of theoretical model-building which lies somewhere between the highly generalized constructions of pure mathematics and the specific theories of the specialized disciplines. Mathematics attempts to organize highly general relationships into a coherent system, a system however which does not have any necessary connections with the "real" world around us. It studies all thinkable relationships abstracted from any concrete situation or body of empirical knowledge."

"[Boulding's belief in] the immediate experience of the Holy Spirit, or Inward Light, available to every man to teach, guide, reprove, and draw him up toward goodness."

"The organizer who creates roles, who creates the holes that will force the pegs to their shape, is a prime creator of personality itself. When we ask of a man, "What is he?" the answer is usually given in terms of his major role, job, or position in society; he is the place that he fills, a painter, a priest, a politician, a criminal."

"Almost every organization... exhibits two faces — a smiling face which it turns toward its members and a frowning face which it turns to the world outside."

"In calling society an ecological system we are not merely using an analogy; society is an example of the general concept of an "ecosystem" that is, an ecological system of which biological systems--forests, fields, swamps--are other examples."

"Reality, in its quantitative aspect, must be considered as a system of populations... The general study of the equilibria and dynamics of populations seems to have no name; but as it has probably reached its highest development in the biological study known as 'ecology,' this name may well be given to it."

"I have been gradually coming under the conviction, disturbing for a professional theorist, that there is no such thing as economics - there is only social science applied to economic problems."

"The thing that distinguishes social systems from physical or even biological systems is their incomparable (and embarrassing) richness in special cases. Generalizations in the social sciences are mere pathways which lead through a riotous forest of individual trees, each a species unto itself. The social scientist who loses this sense of the essential individuality and uniqueness of each case is all too likely to make a solemn scientific ass of himself, especially if he thinks that his faceless generalizations are the equivalents of the rich variety of the world."

"In every field there is a need for writing where the main objective is to extend the reader's field of acquaintance with the complex cases of the real world. Such writing does not have to be very exact or quantitative; it does not even have to formulate or to demonstrate hypotheses. It constitutes, as it were, travel over the field of study. Travel is certainly not enough, even for a geographer, but we would feel, I imagine, that a geographer who had never travelled would be under a serious handicap. Similarly the student of organizations who has never, even vicariously through reading, been in a hospital, a bank, a research laboratory, a large corporation, a Soviet factory, a revolution, an Egyptian civil service department, and so on, has missed something. His generalizations are apt to be based on too narrow a selection of the field."

"Accounting for the most part, remains a legalistic and traditional practice, almost immune to self-criticism by scientific methods."

"[There will be movement toward] behavioral economics... [which] involves study of those aspects of men’s images, or cognitive and affective structures that are more relevant to economic decisions."

"[Veblenian institutionalism was] part of a much larger movement of dissent, that includes London School Institutionalists, Oxford Antimarginalists and the German Historical School (especially its second generation."

"The controversy as to whether socialism is possible has been settled by the fact that it exists, and it is a fundamental axiom of my philosophy, at any rate, that anything that exists, is possible."

"Theories without facts may be barren, but facts without theories are meaningless."

"I seem to have come to much of the same conclusion as you have reached, though approaching it from the direction of economics and the social sciences rather than from biology - that there is a body of what have been calling "general empirical theory," or "general system theory" in your excellent terminology , which is of wide applicability in many different disciplines. I am sure there are many people all over the world who have come to essentially the same position that we have, but we are widely scattered and do not know each other, so difficult is it to cross the boundaries of the disciplines."

"We all, or nearly all, consent If wages rise by ten per cent It puts a choice before the nation Of unemployment or inflation."

"Economic problems have no sharp edges. They shade off imperceptibly into politics, sociology, and ethics. Indeed, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the ultimate answer to every economic problem lies in some other field."

"The should not be confused with the profit system. By the profit system, of course, we mean the institution of private property in capital goods and the free private enterprise that goes along with it. There is no reason why the "profit motive" should be necessarily connected with the profit system. In a profit system there is nothing to prevent anyone acting on altruistic lines; there is no law that says a businessman must maximize his profits. If a businessman chose to operate with outputs, prices, and wages that yielded him a smaller profit than the maximum, but which he felt were socially more desirable, there is nothing in the profit system that would prevent him from doing this. Nothing in the profit system would prevent the most ardent liberal from refusing an increase in wages, or from accepting an unpleasant and poorly paid job. At the other extreme, there is nothing in a communist system that would do away with the profit motive, or the "advantage motive.""

"Thus we seem to be on the verge of an expansion of welfare economics into something like a social science of ethics and politics: what was intended to be a mere porch to ethics is either the whole house or nothing at all. In so laying down its life welfare economics may be able to contribute some of its insights and analytical methods to a much broader evaluative analysis of the whole social process."

"We have defined the main task of economic analysis as the explanation of the magnitudes of economic quantities. The student will find also that the main part of this, as of most other works on the subject, is concerned with the theory of the determination of prices, wages, interest rates, incomes, and the like. He may well inquire, therefore, in the midst of so much mathematics, whether the first task of economics is not the investigation of wealth, or welfare. Some economists have endeavored to restrict the boundaries of the science to the investigation of those quantities which are numerically measurable. Well-being, under such a restriction, would not be part of economics at all."

"A distinguished economist, on being asked to define the subject matter of his science, once replied, "Economics is what economists do.""

"The task of presenting a systematic, orderly, and accurate account of economic analysis is identical with the task of preparing the material for teaching. It must be emphasized, however, that the purpose of this work is not primarily to entertain the student, or to enable him to regurgitate appropriate material into examination books, or to learn a few pat phrases, or to indoctrinate him with an abstract discipline which he will never use. Economics is like photography in this respect, that under-exposure is less desirable than no exposure at all."

"Conventions of generality and mathematical elegance may be just as much barriers to the attainment and diffusion of knowledge as may contentment with particularity and literary vagueness... It may well be that the slovenly and literary borderland between economics and sociology will be the most fruitful building ground during the years to come and that mathematical economics will remain too flawless in its perfection to be very fruitful."

"The greater the penalties laid on sellers in the ... the higher the black market price."

"The ultimate "causes of price" - to use a Classical term - lie deeply embedded in the psychology and techniques of mankind and his environment, and are as manifold as the sands of the sea. All economic analysis is an attempt to classify these manifold causes, to sort them out into categories of discourse that our limited minds can handle, and so to perceive the unity of structural relationship which both unites and separates the manifoldness. Our concepts of "" and "supply" are such broad categories. In whatever sense they are used, they are not ultimate determinants of anything, but they are convenient channels through which we can classify and describe the effects of the multitude of determinants of the system of economic magnitude."

"We are not sent into this world to walk it in solitude. We are born to love, as we are born to breathe and eat and drink. The babe is hardly separated from his mother’s womb before he stretches out a tiny clasping hand, and from that time forth he will constantly stretch out to touch the world that lies about him and the folk that dwell therein. The purpose of our growth in life is to bring us into unity with the universe into which we are born, to make us aware that we are not lonely individual meteors hurtling blindly through an abysmal dark, but living parts of a living whole. As we grow we learn to love more and more: first ourselves; then the family within the small kingdom of the home; then the school, the wider circle of friends, the home community, the college, and the still wider community of the nation; and finally, the greatest country of all, which has no boundaries this side of Hell, and perhaps not even there."

"Reconstruction is merely a special case of economic progress. If we are to understand its problems thoroughly, we must examine what is meant by economic progress and try to discover how it comes about... Economic progress is not altogether easy to define and is even more difficult to measure. Nevertheless, the phrase clearly corresponds to a meaningful idea. We have only to contrast a savage society with our own. In a savage society, the same customs, the same techniques, the same ways of doing everything, from ploughing to praying, are maintained generation after generation, son following exactly in the footsteps of his father and daughter in the footsteps of her mother, without deviating an inch from the well-trodden way. In modern civilized society, on the other hand, there is constant change and flux; we are constantly improving on the methods of our ancestors, and indeed one of the surest ways to discredit anything is to call it "old-fashioned!""

"This concept of capital-rebuilding is so important that it may be desirable to digress for a moment. In the broadest sense of the word, capital means the sum total of the valuable things possessed by the individuals of a society, excluding "claims," that is, mere titles to property. The word is used to mean both the inventory of these valuable things; the houses, factories, machines, livestock, stocks of raw materials, and goods in all stages of completion; and also to mean the sum of the values of these things. It should generally be clear from the context which of these two meanings is intended."

"The main key to the economics of the postwar world is a simple truism — that the rate of accumulation is equal to the rate of production less the rate of consumption. This is the "Bathtub Theorem." Production may be likened to the flow of water from the faucet, consumption to the flow down the drain. The difference between these two flows is the rate at which the water in the bathtub - the total stockpile of all goods - is accumulating. War drains the economic bathtub in a great waste of consumption. The first problem of reconstruction is to rebuild the stockpile. It can be rebuilt only by widening the gap between production and consumption, or, in the case of a single country, by importing more than is exported. It is difficult for a ravaged country to increase either its production or its net imports. Unless it can obtain outside help, therefore, it must suffer a drastic restriction of consumption. Frequently the only way consumption can be restricted is by inflation. Here, therefore, is the key to the most fundamental problems of reconstruction."

"The use of isoquants to describe the production function did not develop to any great extent until the thirties."

"[The theory of the firm] is exactly analogous to the analysis of the reactions of a consumer by means of indifferent curves. Indeed, a consumer is merely a ‘firm’ whose product is ‘utility’."

"The discounting presumably is to be done for each period of time at that rate of interest which represents the alternative cost of employing capital in the occupation in question; that is, at the rate which the entrepreneur could obtain in other investments"

"It is probable that when future historians of economic thought look back over this century, the thirties will appear as an era of rapid development in economic theory. Not only has there been unusual activity in monetary theory, theory of value. but extensive transformations have also been made in the basic theory of value. The outstanding publications in this field are, of course, Joan Robinson's Theory of Imperfect Competition and Chamberlin's Theory of Monopolistic Competition, the first produced in Cambridge, England, and the second in Cambridge, Massachusetts. These volumes mark the explicit recognition of the theory of the firm as an integral division of economic analysis upon which rests the whole fabric of equilibrium theory. General equilibrium is nothing more than the problem of the interaction of individual economic organisms, under various conditions and assumptions; as a necessary preliminary to its solution, an adequate theory of the individual organism itself is necessary."

"There is reason for this shift of emphasis from any actual price to a hypothetical 'equilibrium' price. It is usually more interesting to know where a train is going than to know exactly where it is at any moment. The 'equilibrium' position of any price, wage, firm, industry, or system is the position toward which it is tending. The importance of equilibrium analysis, then, is that it enables us to discuss the directions of change. If a train is in New- York and its 'equilibrium' position is in Chicago, we are reasonably confident that the general direction of its motion will be westward, even if it unaccountably decides to travel north for the first hundred and fifty miles."

"The process of ... is the final act in the economic drama"

"[The is] the supreme mover of economic order... for whom all goods are made and towards whom all economic activity is directed."

"Just as there are inputs which are supplied by the owner of a business, and whose value therefore is a "virtual," not an actual, expense, so there can be outputs which are consumed by the owner of a business, and whose value therefore forms."

"A firm may be defined as an institution which buys things, transforms them in some way, and then sells them with the purpose of making a profit. The things a firm buys we shall call "inputs." The things it sells we shall call "outputs." The process whereby the things it buys are transformed into the things it sells we shall call the "process of production." In any process of buying to sell again a process of production is always involved..."

"Mathematicians themselves set up standards of generality and elegance in their exposition which are a bar to understand."

"[In this we may expect the article to be sold to] "the most eager buyer at a price which is just about the highest he is willing to pay, for in this case the most eager buyer does not know what prices the other buyers are willing to give [and] … each buyer fear that someone may slip in ahead of him."

"In common with other men, the business man is moved by ideals of serviceability and an aspiration to make the way of life easier for his fellows... Motives of this kind detract from business efficiency, and an undue yielding to them on the part of business men is to be deprecated as an infirmity. Still, throughout men's dealings with one another and with the interests of the community there runs a sense of equity, fair dealing, and workmanlike integrity."

"The walking stick serves the purpose of an advertisement that the bearer's hands are employed otherwise than in useful effort, and it therefore has utility as an evidence of leisure."

"The superior gratification derived from the use and contemplation of costly and supposedly beautiful products is, commonly, in great measure a gratification of our sense of costliness masquerading under the name of beauty."

"The requirement of conspicuous wastefulness is... present as a constraining norm selectively shaping and sustaining our sense of what is beautiful."