Economic essays

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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

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Title:: The relation between statics and dynamics / John Maurice Clark

Collection:: Economics Books

70 ECONOMIC ESSAYS IN HONOR OF JOHN BATES CLARK tion.® Such verification will, of course, always reveal the presence of other forces than the purely static ones, modifying the results in any given case. Inductive studies will deal, not only with the trend-values around which actual values fluctuate, but also with the forces setting limits on their oscillations. Here the static forces, corresponding to the force of gravity in mechanics, are at work, but under conditions which differ from the complete static picture, and require correspondingly different methods of study. And finally, in the inductive study of actual conditions, there will always arise the difficulty that a mere description of facts does not afford an explanation or interpretation of them. The question will still remain why they behave as they do. And here again the static approach will prove useful and effective, chiefly in the form of inverse deduction, which has already been men- tioned. The reasoning takes the following form. If the facts were found to behave in certain simple ways, we should infer the presence of static forces only, acting under static conditions only. Since the facts behave differently, we infer the joint action of static and dynamic forces, and attribute the departures from the static model to the dynamic elements in the situation. And the nature of these departures are, if properly understood, such as we should expect from the nature of the dynamic forces. Thus brief reversions to the static method of isolation will help us to separate out the forces acting under actual conditions, and to make of dynamics an explanation, rather than a mere description of economic behavior. 1 See “Partial Elasticity of Demand,” Quar. Jour. Econ. XL, 393-401, May, 1926; “A Theory of Economic Oscillations,” XLI, 1-29, Nov., 1926.

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