Economics Principles, Vol. 1 of 2 (Classic Reprint)

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The general texts in political economy from the middle of the nineteenth century have been to a remarkable degree conventionalized. The ambition of successive writers has been to modernize Mill rather than to modernize economics. Books continue to appear, repeating with little essential change the theoretical system of the English classical school. Their innocuous references to more recent constructive criticism have little purpose but to evidence the erudition of the authors and their spirit of Christian charity. Meantime, from 1870 on, critical studies had shown not only the historical relativity but the logical fallacy of a large part of the older treatment. A body of esoteric economic doctrine developed, discussed only by the initiated, and merely hinted at in undergraduate instruction. So far as this newer thought affected the presentation of economics in the general texts and to college classes it was only in negative and superficial ways, such as substituting the novel soporific locutions of the marginal utility school for the older catch-words of cost of production Indeed, it was impossible for the individual teacher of economics to incorporate the newer ideas into his elementary courses, except in this desultory way, until they had been put into more positive, stematic, and teachable form. It seems to have been for lack of this essential development that many virile teachers have made the laudable tho vain attempt to teach the fundamental to beginners by a method misnamed inductive. This has involved a false analogy with the natural sciences, in which induction is the method of advanced research, and not of elementary instruction.

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