ALTERNATIVES SEEN AS BASIC ECONOMIC FACTS
Franklin H. Giddings

In the early eighties a young newspaper man following his
craft at Springfield, Massachusetts, had the good fortune to
become acquainted with Professor John Bates Clark, then of the
Faculty of Smith College at Northampton. Opportunity favoring,
 the acquaintance became intimate, and developed into a
life-long friendship. The newspaper man was presumptuously
writing daily editorials on the tariff, money, and labor troubles.
Professor Clark had formulated his Philosophy of Wealth and
was working out its implications. The younger man fell under
the spell of it, and, encouraged by his preceptor began making
excursions of his own in the domain of theory. At Professor
Clark’s suggestion four articles were written, two by himself and
two by the novice, presenting four aspects of economic distribution
 under changing modern conditions. These papers, published
first in the Political Science Quarterly, afterwards appeared in
book form as The Modern Distributive Process. The younger
writer from time to time made further small contributions to
journals and to the programmes of the American Economic Association,
 nearly all of them studies in theory. Because of that
episode, perhaps, it is now his privilege, after many years of
activity in another field, to contribute a few pages to this volume
of tribute.
Acknowledging myself to have been the party of the second
part, I may perhaps be indulged in a further prefatory word. I
have now and then been asked why I deserted economics for
sociology. The answer is that I did no such nefarious thing. The
truth is that I came near deserting sociology for economics. My
interest in sociology had been awakened by Herbert Spencer’s
chapters on “The Study of Sociology,” published serially in The
Popular Science Monthly. They had convinced me that whether
or not sociology could become an acknowledged science, it should
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