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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360 APPENDIX Re TT es of expression, of style; the clarity of it charmed everyone who dipped into its pages. But more than that, it was, as President Butler has so truly said, the work of a philosopher, a man who took a broad view of every- thing that his mind encountered and who could not be content with merely marshalling facts and drawing the ordinary inductions from them. It was the work of a man who had seen that the whole subject of values needed complete revisualization and restatement, and who having under- taken so to view it, had stated all the fundamental problems of economic theory with such thoroughness, with such originality, that all who became interested perceived at once that here was a leader of thought, destined to work great reconstructions in our scientific view of the industrial life of our time, and of economic theory and of social progress, in general. The remark has often been made that Professor Clark’s work has been a masterpiece of lucid abstraction. We usually make a mistake when we so interpret him. He has given us abstractions, that is true, but not the abstractions which come when one starts from premises abstract to begin with, and by logical deduction creates a framework into which he brings concrete facts by way of illustration and exemplification. Professor Clark’s work has been something entirely different. From earliest manhood his mind has been informed and enriched with concrete material, with knowledge of the world in which he lives; and his abstractions, far from being a mere logical framework, have been an essence distilled from the concrete facts with which he has been familiar and with which he has worked. That is why his work has had such marvelous vitality. That is why it has charmed men. That is why it has caught attention and held it. His interest from the time of our first acquaintance has lain in further development of the views at which he had then arrived. He was already busy with the problem of the limitations of competition which he saw arising on every hand, with the problem of what, in those days, was called the “pool” and was beginning to be called the “trust,” the problem of combination. He was already forecasting restatements of fundamental theory, the theory of value, the theory of production, the theory of dis- tribution, to which he was destined to make enduring contributions. I remember distinctly an afternoon when we drove from Northampton to Amherst, when we went over a plan which he had outlined and which he presented to me, that he and I should write certain complementary articles, which we afterwards did. These were published in the Political Science Quarterly, and afterwards as a small book on The Modern Distributive Process. One article dealt with the limitations of competition, another with the persistence of competition; one dealt with the concrete facts and the theory of profits, another with the concrete facts and the theory of wages. That writing was the beginning of efforts which led Professor Clark on in one direction, and led me on perhaps in another direction ; but, as our Chairman has said complimentarily, it was in a sense cooperative work. A characteristic feature of economic theory at that time was its academic quality. Professor Clark was working along lines which many men thought were simply a projection of Professor Jevons’ concept of “final degree of

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