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

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Title:: Alternatives seen as basic economic facts / Franklin H. Giddings

Collection:: Economics Books

ALTERNATIVES SEEN AS BASIC ECONOMIC FACTS 195 be possible to study human society in a scientific spirit and by scientific methods, and I had resolved to attempt to do at least that. My interest in economics was at first wholly practical. A trifling contribution that I made to newspaper discussion of the protective tariff happened to be read by David A. Wells who wrote me a kindly letter and sent me a generous gift of his publications. Professor Arthur Latham Perry also wrote to me and his text book was my first systematic reading in Political Economy. Subsequently, to qualify myself as best I could for editorial writing I read Francis A. Walker on The Wages Question and on Money, and Jevons on Money and the Mechanism of Exchange. After that I worked through Adam Smith, Ricardo, Cairnes, and Jevons. That was my mental preparation for the stimulation which I was destined to get from Clark. So almost I was persuaded to be an economist. I taught economies for six years at Bryn Mawr College, and at Barnard College three years more, after I had joined the Columbia Faculty. The man who more than any other was responsible for holding me to sociology was that prince of counsellors, the lamented Herbert B. Adams. But that is another story, which I must not linger over here. When I was compelled by the limitations of human energy to curtail my working day and to discontinue writing on economic topics, my scheme of theory was left at loose ends. All that I attempt now as my small contribution to this Festschrift is to show, with extreme brevity, that these threads weave together in a pattern. I conceive the pattern as emerging from certain alternatives of practical choice and behaviour by which man in his struggle for betterment is confronted; and the alternatives I see as basic economic facts, upon which economic theory must build. The first of these alternatives curtly stated is, Be helped or perish; or, yet more curtly put in the tart language of slang, “Be cared for or be done for.” From the standpoint of the classical economics this proposition is rank heresy. To the late William Graham Sumner, whose hard-headedness was almost genius, it was anathema. Man he admonished us, can have nothing to enjoy or to save one moment before he has earned it. But look at the most obvious facts. The chick can “scratch gravel” and begin to pick up digestible bits a few hours after breaking its shell. The human infant must

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