Economic essays

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Monograph

Identifikator:: 1753623200

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-136107

Document type:: Monograph

Title:: Economic essays

Place of publication:: New York

Publisher:: Macmillan

Year of publication:: 1927

Scope:: viii, 368 S.; Ill., graph. Darst.

Digitisation:: 2021

Collection:: Economics Books

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Document type:: Monograph

Structure type:: Chapter

Title:: Land economics / Richard T. Ely

Collection:: Economics Books

122 ECONOMIC ESSAYS IN HONOR OF JOHN BATES CLARK its own sake. It aims to understand present facts in regard to land ownership in all their human relationships, to explain ther development in the past, and to discover present tendencies of growth. As an art, it aims to frame constructive land policies for particular places and times. All our social sciences are a result of evolution characterized by growing complexity, differentiation and integration, to use terms which the student of Herbert Spencer will readily recognize. Many of the topies with which we deal in land economies had received discussion, and some of them elaborate discussion, before we ever heard of land economics. Likewise, before we had eco- nomics as a separate social science, we find discussion of eco- nomic questions, and 2000 years before the time of Adam Smith, Aristotle treated economic ideas in a way that even now is instructive. What land economists have done is to gather together scattered discussions of various topics relating to land as an economic concept; to separate them from other economic dis- cussions; to round them out; and to make thus a separate branch of economic science. The question of what is science is often raised and there can be no doubt that very many will be skeptical as to the possibility at the present time of a science of land economics. It is well, therefore, for the writer to state his position. To him science means generalized knowledge with certain metes and bounds determined by the particular field of knowledge. It deals with phenomena and their causes which are of such a kind that they are capable of being treated as a separate branch of knowledge These phenomena and their causes must have a certain magnitude to form a branch of knowledge. We may get together a small group of phenomena, a dozen or two, and consider their causes. Even if these were interesting and important, the field of knowl- edge would be too small for separate treatment. In economics we take human relationships of a particular kind in their eco- nomic aspects. These relationships multiply and fall into various distinct branches of economics. Some of these relationships of a particular kind may at first be too few really to form a separate branch, but they may increase, absolutely and relatively, and thus acquire the status of a separate branch of knowledge. This is true with respect to those relationships arising out of land as property. Take agriculture, for example. In the self-sufficing

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