"… a rather different class of applications of the idea of best allocation of scarce resources... usually referred to as the theory of optimal economic growth. In most studies of this kind made in the countries with market economies there is not an identifiable client to whom the findings are submitted as policy recommendations. Nor is there an obvious choice of objective function, such as cost minimization or profit maximization in the studies addressed to individual enterprises. The field has more of a speculative character. The models studied usually contain only a few highly aggregated variables. One considers alternative objective functions that incorporate or emphasize various strands of ethical, political, or social thought. These objectives are then tried out to see what future paths of the economy they imply under equally simplified assumptions of technology or resource availability."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Tjalling Koopmans Three essays on the state of economic science. Vol. 21. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1957. p. 244
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Social_theory
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Social theory
15 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Social theory →
Related Quotes
"Widely dispersed knowledge concerning the important role of basic cooperative processes among living beings may lead …"
"Saint-Simon leaves a legacy which affects all socialisms, for he introduces into social theory (he theme of idleness …"
"Writers are greatly respected. The intelligent public is wonderfully patient with them, continues to read them, and e…"
"The merit of Marx is that he suddenly produces a qualitative change in the history of social thought. He interprets h…"
"I have tried to show that psychiatric research can be empirical and experimental, controlled, and operational and not…"
"The great attraction of cultural anthropology in the past was precisely that it seemed to offer such a richness of in…"
"Jurgen Habermas is widely considered as the most influential thinker in Germany over the past decade. As a philosophe…"
"Whoever saw, as many did, a whole city reduced to rubble — kilometers of streets on which there remained no trace of …"
"Democracy and socialism are means to an end, not the end itself. We talk of the good of society. Is this something ap…"
"A theoretical system does not merely state facts which have been observed and that logically deducible relations to o…"