Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

Economics 295
There is a great contrast between the paucity of post-war publications and the
famous polemics of older times and the abundant literature even between the
wars. Studies on methodology are being increasingly replaced by more or less
complete inventories of the research techniques available to contemporary
economists, e.g. T.C. Koopmans’ Three Essays GIZ the State of Economic Science
(New York - Toronto - London, 1960) whose purpose was to inform ‘general
economists’ about developments in mathematical economics and the research
instruments employed; W. Fellner’s Emergence and Content of Modern Economic
Analysis (New York - Toronto - London, 1960); and particularly the book by
R. Ferber and P. J. Verdoorn: Research Methods in Economics and Business
(New York, 1962).
What is more, economists do not seem to regret the lack of methodological
discussions which, on the contrary, are considered boring and futile, and regularly
accorded a poor reception. Koopmans starts his famous essay on The
Construction of Economic Knowledge with a fragment entitled ‘The Bad Repute
of Methodology’, whose opening words are: ‘If methods of scaling are ever
applied to measure the relative prestige of various topics in economic research,
methodological discussion wil undoubtedly be found to rank near the low end
of the scale’.I7
Eloquent testimony to the poor reputation of methodology is afTorded by the
monumental Surveys of Economic Theory in three volumes, published by the
American Economic Association and the Royal Economic Society. Of the fourteen
studies devoted to the major branches of economic theory, not one deals
with general methodological problems or attempts a synthetic picture of contemporary
economic theory.’*
b. Another characteristic feature has been the progressive elimination of
social and meta-sociological questions. To the past belong not only the great
tradition of analysing economic and social problems in their organic unity, with
which such names as Karl Marx, Werner Sombart, Max Weber and Rosa Luxemburg
are associated, but also the far less ambitious approach of studying
economic problems at least in a limited socio-historical context (Alfred Marshall).
The very questions which made economic science a social discipline are
now increasingly left to newspaper pundits and mass media experts.
The great depression did admittedly decide many economists to take up urgent
social problems and the comparative analysis of alternative social systemsI9, but
the pragmatic approach of attempting short-term amendments in a given situation,
put forward as a programme in Keynes’ General Theory, seems to be prevailing
again.
Questions demanding radical social reform were in fact taken as the starting
point of the new economic theory. But, following the Marshall tradition or
perhaps taking even a narrower view than Marshall, Keynes takes the social
institutions as a premise in his theoretical economic reasoning rather than as a
subject for systematic analysis.
Because of certain similarities with Marx (macro-economics, refutation of
Say’s law), Keynes is sometimes credited with a return to the older tradition of
economico-sociological analysis. This does not seem to be correct. Talcott