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

Economics 303
fact that the scope and range of research techniques and methods have been
changing and are now extremely extensive.
The changes were necessary because the problems were different at different
times and depended on a varying social demand. The personal attitude of the
economist towards the reality he is dealing with has been and is of the utmost
importance; according as that attitude is critical or favourable, different analytical
methods may be chosen and lead to quite different final conclusions. As
pointed out in the first part of this study, ideological considerations are always
present in political economy, and value judgements are made on ethical grounds.
This, naturally, not only influences the end system but also the choice of the
basic economic categories.
Let us go back, for example, to macro-economic and micro-economic
research. The links, communications and exchanges between them have been
noted, but there are also divergences resulting from the different optics, aims,
rules and behaviour possibilities of economic agents. An example wil help to
illustrate. The famous Kalecki formula (cf. his Theory of Economic Dynamics)
that the profits of capitalists determine the volume of the national income and
not vice versa, could be formulated only on the basis of a macro-economic theory
of the dynamics of a capitalist economy, taking capitalists as a social class,
and analysing the distribution of the national income into wages and profits,
and into consumption and investment. The Kalecki formula does not endorse
the ‘commonsense’ view of the individual capitalist who considers profits as the
difference between the output produced and the cost involved, not as a point of
departure for the process of generating national income equal to the sum total
of profits and wages, the latter being linked to profits by a given relation reflecting
the bargaining power of the opposing social classes. The thinking of the individual
capitalist corresponds with ex post reality, and does not explain the
dynamics of capitalism and the mechanism of investment decision.
Macro-economic~3~ thus frequently borrows methods and concepts from
micro-economics, enriching them with new and different connotations. Macroeconomic
methods of market analysis were perfected at a time when satisfactory
methods of analysing non-market phenomena were still lacking. This, apart
from historic reasons, explains why macro-economics has hitherto concentrated
almost exclusively on market economics. It also explains why macro-economics
has been used for something other than market economics only for certain
theoretical studies of socialist economy problems and in some recent studies of
primitive economies (usually sponsored by historians or anthropologists). On
the other hand, many problems which explicitly belong to micro-economics can
be explained only by macro-economic analysis, i.e. micro-economic decisions
must take account of macro-economic aims and preferences. This impact of
macro-economic aims is reflected in the concept of ‘external economics’, which
is meaningful only in a micro-economic context.
The inter-relations between macro-economics and micro-economics; the
possibility of using analytical toois at various levels of aggregation and generalization
; and the choice of instruments of decentralized economic calculus capable
of ensuring compatibility in decisions that involve macro-economic prefer-
’