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322 Economics
a. They serve to test the sensitivity of the economy to changes in individual
variables and parameters.
6. They provide a means of rapidly illustrating the general consequences that
would result from adopting various alternative assumptions made during the
preliminary discussions about the major options; and several efficient initial
alternatives can be submitted for the policy-maker’s choice.
c. They force the teams of planners to rationalize and to make explicit (sub-
sequently if necessary) all the assumptions and the hypotheses they have incor-
porated by more conventional methods into the plan. This has considerable
educational value, all the more so as, from the practical point of view, we are
more concerned with planning as a continuous process than with successive
plans.
d. They provide a basis for simulation games (whose rble as a substitute for
laboratory experiment was mentioned above).
e. They provide additional equipment for the co-ordination of sectoral plans,
and for the general control of the whole planning process.
This is a spectacular aspect of the mathematization of economics. Its further
development calls for close co-operation between the model-builders and the
planners, and for a prolonged dialogue between economists and mathematicians
that has only just begun but undoubtedly represents a most significant develop-
ment for the future of economics.
III. SOME OF THE MAJOR ISSUES FACING ECONOMICS TODAY
Part I dealt with the internal development of economics or rather, certain trends
in that development. Part II described the ‘workshop’ of economics, i.e. showed
how research methods and techniques developed. Progress in economics will be
bound up with their further development, with the amplification of some cur-
rent theories and the rejection of others, with the use and improvement of exist-
ing methods and techniques and the development of others, new, more efficient
and sophisticated. Progress in the case of political economy (which is devoted
to praxis and has close links with social engineering, a science which has grown
immensely in scope, responsibilities and status in this age characterized by the
unprecedented technological progress that has enabled man to expand his con-
trol over the forces and riches of nature) depends, finally, on the solution of cer-
tain problems implied by praxis in the widest sense.
The section which follows attempts to outline some of the cardinal problems
facing economics today.
A. The factors and conditions of economic growth
Asked to name the main problem in economics today, the economist would
undoubtedly answer: the factors and conditions of economic growth. It might
be pointed out that growth has always been the fundamental issue in economics;