International trade

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Monograph

Identifikator:: 1758394757

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-136209

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Taussig, Frank William http://d-nb.info/gnd/120199459

Title:: International trade

Place of publication:: New York, NY

Publisher:: Macmillan

Year of publication:: 1927

Scope:: XXI, 425 Seiten; graph. Darst.

Digitisation:: 2021

Collection:: Economics Books

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Document type:: Monograph

Structure type:: Chapter

Title:: Part II. Problems of verification

Collection:: Economics Books

CHAPTER 14 INTRODUCTORY THE preceding chapters have been almost without exception heroically abstract. They have dealt with the “pure theory” of international trade. To many a reader the assumptions and con- clusions will have seemed to be no more than intellectual play- things. These calculations of the possibilities of gain from exchange of goods between the trading countries, these figures on the barter terms of trade and their limits, this analysis of the forces that determine the precise terms at which the terms settle them- selves — all have an air of unreality. They resemble those cal- culations of barter rates between individual exchangers which appear in the books on pure economics, and the calculations which analyze utility, marginal utility, marginal pairs, the familiar A’s and B’s, the Primus, Secundus and Tertius of economic lore. Thruout we seem to be dealing not with living human beings but with puppets moved by the economist’s sleight of hand. A similar air of unreality pervades our calculations on the flow of specie from country to country, and the consequent changes in prices and money incomes. True, these are not quite so ab- stract as the calculations on the barter terms of trade. They seem to come nearer to the actual world ; and it is precisely because they have at least the appearance of a closer approach to reality that the figures on prices and money wages have here been worked out more elaborately than has been the practice in previous expositions of the subject. Yet even so, the results have a smoothness, a neatness, a specious conclusiveness, that must lead the man of affairs and the economic realist to pause. Can things work out quite so easily and automatically? Do the conditions of produc- tion and exchange respond to changing prices in accord with this 151

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