History of Economic Analysis part 54 doc

If he lacked the gifts of the creative analyst, he could have used existing analytic tools as did List and, taking up his stand on United States data, could have argued that English view

was independent of its deplorable analytic implementation and capable of being implemented more satisfactorily This, however, is precisely what Carey’s critics refused

to recognize Most of them were more or less well-trained economists They had no difficulty in showing that Carey’s theory was no good at all And, on the strength of this, they condemned his message without making it clear—and presumably without being aware of the fact—that the essentials of this message were beyond the range of theoretical analysis

A comparison of Carey with the English free traders, on the one hand, and with List,

on the other, will bring this out still more clearly The English free traders and List also argued from a comprehensive social and political vision that we may or may not accept; both, moreover, argued from their respective national standpoints; both, finally, advocated policies that suited some group interests better than others In all these respects there is no difference whatever between the cases of Carey and of either the English free traders or List except, of course, so far as our own preferences are concerned But the English free traders implemented their visions and their politics analytically and with success—the theorem of comparative costs was a major contribution to our analytic

apparatus This is the reason why they may claim a place in the history of scientific

analysis—not because of the advocacy of free trade per se List made no original contribution to the analytic apparatus of economics But he used pieces of the existing

analytic apparatus judiciously and correctly And this, too, spells scientific merit Carey’s

case differs from both in that he made negative contributions to analysis And my point is that this was entirely unnecessary either for the analytic implementation of the manner in which he saw American reality and problems or for the formulation of his policies, including protection, balanced economy, and all If he lacked the gifts of the creative analyst, he could have used existing analytic tools as did List and, taking up his stand on United States data, could have argued that English views on many economic problems did not apply to American conditions and had to be modified by introducing other factual assumptions Had he done so with a modicum of competence, his detractors would still have retained all the ammunition in the arsenal of politics, but he would have been all right on the scientific front

He was, however, unable to distinguish the theoretical from the factual element in English free-trade teaching and distinguished neither from the element of political volition He saw only the practical recommendations and nạvely thought that they followed from theoretical premisses which it was therefore incumbent upon him to demolish, root and branch.6 Instead of saying simply that ‘pressure of population’ was, for the calculable future, evidently of no importance in the United States, he entered upon

an infelicitous attempt to refute the Malthusian theory Instead of saying simply that the most important practical—social and political—implications of the ‘Ricardian’ theory of

rent did not apply in a new country, he argued ineptly (in the Principles

6

It will be seen that he thus committed the same mistake that was committed by his free-trade critics

of Social Science, 1858–9, not before) that this theory was totally invalid because

cultivation did not typically proceed from richer to poorer soils, but from poorer to richer.7 Instead of simply emphasizing the fact that under conditions of rapid development, rising cost curves are incessantly shifting downward so that the Ricardian theorem that equates prices to the cost of the ‘least favored’ producer loses much of its practical importance, he discussed decreasing and increasing costs as if they embodied conflicting propositions about the same phenomenon And in his highest flight, his theory

of value, he blundered so catastrophically as to crush its one good point This theory is a labor-quantity theory that contains the improvement that it is not the labor quantity actually invested in a commodity but the labor quantity necessary for reproducing it that determines its value.8 He observed that this quantity falls rapidly in the course of technological progress And from this he inferred that labor’s relative share must increase

in the course of technological progress—which, besides being actually false, does not follow from the logic of his argument In this case, it is particularly clear that what he strove to express was by no means wholly wrong: a competent theorist could have worked it up into a valuable contribution; but he made it read wholly wrong because he was unable to find for it the correct expression There is no need to go on But one interesting question remains Plenty of people admired Carey’s diagnosis of American reality and shared his views on economic policy and his enthusiasms A prize, in terms of success and reputation, awaited the man who could have weeded the errors from his volumes and put his system into a defensible shape Moreover, this prize was not hidden—and there were followers for whom it would have been the most natural thing in the world to pick it up Why did nobody try? Well, opportunity is only a necessary and not a sufficient condition for a great performance It does not of itself produce the man capable of using it And the brains that could have done the job were producing boots However, though nobody undertook the task in all its wide dimensions and though nobody undertook it effectively even in any of its parts, a number of writers did attempt it within a narrower compass and with inadequate force These writers were not all of them forerunners or followers of Carey Nor did they form any school in our sense of the term But, reasoning as they did on the same data and problems and, to some extent, in the same spirit, they produced publications that have some affinity with Carey’s as well as a certain family likeness between one another Some of them described their economics as American Political Economy, and this phrase may be fittingly applied to all of them They were all more or less protectionist But the family likeness extends beyond this feature to others that are more relevant to us, namely, to the features of their modest analytic apparatus that was for the most part derived, by either acceptance or criticism, from A.Smith There was, however, no first-rate man among them, and they made next to nothing of the great opportunity before them Nor did they attain any dominant position 7

The reader will realize, of course, that it is not his assertion about historical fact that condemns Carey as a thinker—for it is possible to put up a case for his theory that, historically, poorer soils are cultivated before richer ones: this may occur for more reasons than one—but his belief that this assertion, true or false, is relevant to the Ricardian theory

8

This theory, which Carey elaborated in his Principles of Political Economy (1837–40), differs

essentially from Ferrara’s theory of cost of reproduction

Accordingly, they do not dominate the following list, which offers, I believe, a fairly representative sample of that period’s United States economists: Raymond, Everett, Tucker, Bowen, and Amasa Walker.9 If we like, we can include in American performances also List’s early book, which was a typical product of the American environment, and possibly also John Rae’s great work, which was discussed in the first section of this chapter Of course, this excludes writings on money and banking and the still more important factual work that was done by United States economists

8 FACTUAL WORK

In the course of the review above, we have repeatedly had occasion to commend the admirable factual work done by men who are usually classed as ‘general economists’ or even as theorists only but who are not fully understood unless the proportion of their time and energy that went into the hunt for, and the presentation of, facts is taken into account Let us glance once more at a selection of relevant names, great and small: Blanqui, Chalmers, Chevalier, Garnier, Gioja, Malthus, Messedaglia, McCulloch, Mangoldt,

James Mill (History of India), Roscher, Senior, Storch, and Thünen This list, which

could easily be lengthened, suffices to show that the economics of the period under survey, taken as a whole, was anything but the speculative thing it is sometimes made out

to be and that the opinion—the source of much pointless controversy—that the economics profession then neglected factual research is utterly unfounded The opposite opinion would in fact be nearer to the truth: many of the shortcomings of the ‘classic’ analytic apparatus find their most natural explanation on the hypothesis that the amount

of work bestowed upon it was inadequate, whereas it is not possible for us to level the analogous criticism at the period’s factual work, especially if we include, as we must, the work of economic historians and of the students of legal institutions that we have sampled already in the preceding chapter This section will present additional examples

of important types of factual work and thus help to round off our picture and to establish our thesis that the ‘classic’ period fully

9

For a more favorable appraisal than is implied in my way of mentioning Daniel Raymond (1786–

1849), who wrote Thoughts on Political Economy (1820; 2nd ed., entitled Elements of Political

Economy, 1823) see Teilhac, op cit The difference is largely accounted for by Professor Teilhac’s

emphasis upon the economic-thought aspect of Raymond’s work, which is indeed more interesting than is his analysis The presence of analytic effort must, however, be recognized He produced a theory of capital (in the intermediate-goods sense) that, considering its date, is not without merit

On A.H Everett’s chief performance, see below, ch 6 George Tucker (1775–1861) wrote, among

other things, Laws of Wages, Profits, and Rent Investigated (1837); for other contributions of this not insignificant economist, see below, sec 8b and ch 7, sec 3 Francis Bowen’s American

Political Economy (1870; first publ as Principles of Political Economy applied to the Condition, the Resources, and the Institutions of the American People, 1856) stands here only because of its

title Amasa Walker’s (1799–1875; father of Francis A.Walker) Science of Wealth (1866) must be

mentioned as a representative performance of the ‘non-American’ line of United States economics Perusal of the book will give the reader a good idea of what this economics then had to offer For the rest, the reader finds all he needs for further study in Seligman, op cit

maintained the tradition of factual research that, as we know, harks back to the sixteenth century

[(a) Tooke’s History of Prices.]

Of particular interest to us is the type of analysis that combines presentation and explanation of facts in such a way that the two cease to be distinct tasks and mutually condition one another at every step: the type of analysis that arrives at its results by means of discussing individual situations We must be content to notice the peak

achievement of this genus, the History of Prices and of the State of the Circulation from

1792 to 1856 by Tooke and Newmarch.1 A better title would have been: Analysis of England’s Economic Processes from 1792 to 1856, with Special Reference to the Condition of the Currency and of Credit Jevons called it ‘unique,’ and so it is Never before or after has that method been used on an equally large scale, or, so far as influence upon purely theoretical research is concerned, with similar effect Whether the authors handled it as well as they might have done is another question I am not alluding to the fact that, of course, they argued for one policy and, still more obviously, against another: this does not impair the value of either their facts or their reasoning, both of which may

be appreciated by any opponent of their views concerning desirabilities Nor am I alluding to the discursiveness and repetitiveness of their work: in ‘realistic’ theory of this type neither is without its function—the method is essentially one of ‘thrashing out’ things, and this cannot be done with Ricardian brevity I am alluding to more fundamental defects of which no trained reader of these volumes can fail to become aware very quickly Both authors were no doubt deficient in command of economic theory Tooke was in addition a somewhat ‘woolly’ thinker—who often impaired his case

by missing the opponent’s point And this told Not only did his arguments sometimes call forth derogatory comment, that was quite justified as far as it went; but also, his authority, great as it was in his day and as it remained for the rest of the century, was never what it might have been had there been more theoretical edge to his thought The work is nevertheless a classic and an example to follow But it seems to cry out for rewriting by a better-trained or else a more adroit hand

1

Thomas Tooke (1774–1858) was the author of all six volumes, if the term ‘author’ is taken in the

sense of the Latin auctor But only the first four volumes (1st and 2nd, 1838; 3rd, 1840; 4th, 1848)

were substantially his work, the collaborators playing the role of research assistants The last two volumes (1857) were mainly the work of William Newmarch (1820–82), who, though greatly influenced by Tooke, holds his place in his own right Newmarch, besides being one of the more important critics of Peel’s Act and the doctrines of the ‘currency school,’ was a leading member of

the Royal Statistical Society, and the originator of the Economist index number and the same

journal’s ‘Annual Commercial History.’ As regards index numbers (which, by the way, were not

used in the History of Prices, a striking example of economists’ resistance to new methods), he was

not particularly original, but the ‘Commercial History’ is an interesting model for an interesting type of work Economists are even today not fully alive to its scientific importance and to the methodological questions it raises, and have hardly succeeded in bringing modern theory to bear

upon it or in otherwise improving upon Newmarch’s performance The History of Prices has been

republished (1928), ed by Sir T.E.Gregory with an introduction that fully discusses its nature and

origin, and should be carefully perused by the reader This reference is to replace a survey of the

various writings of Tooke’s that paved the way toward the History

[(b) Collection and Interpretation of Statistical Materials.]

Though anything but a novelty, work of the kind of which Tooke’s and Newmarch’s is an outstanding instance was in that period powerfully propelled by the opening up of new sources of statistical figures Those were the times when governments began to establish statistical bureaus and commissions; when the first attempts were made at international co-operation (the first international statistical congress met in 1853); when statistical societies emerged almost everywhere—in England, for instance, several were founded in the 1830’s, of which the Statistical Society of London (1834) was presently chartered as the Royal Statistical Society.2 To a great extent the compilation, from the raw material provided by the official bureaus, of presentable statistical records remained the task of individual investigators, as it had been in the preceding period, especially but not exclusively of the men who by virtue of their official position were able to command the requisite assistance But these investigators were no mere diggers They did not confine themselves to marshalling data and to developing estimates: many of them also offered interpretations And so we find, flowing from this source, another stream of work that differed indeed from Tooke’s and Newmarch’s in that it started from the statistical material instead of from the economic problem and, in consequence, emphasized the statistical information per se more than had Tooke and New-march But, though sometimes only as a by-product, they turned out analytic work as well

Attention has been called, in our survey of pre-Smithian times, to what may be described

as analyses of the economic state of a country In the period under discussion, this line of research produced a number of performances for which Colquhoun’s, Porter’s, and Tucker’s will serve as examples.3 They— and others of the same type—no doubt suffer from the fact that their authors did not know how to use economic theory as a tool of factual analysis; but as far as this goes they are in the same boat with modern publications

of this kind Other types of that period’s statistical economics will be represented by the names of McCulloch, Baxter, Dieterici, Villermé, Le Play, and Wells

McCulloch’s (see sec 2 above) most significant statistical work, his Dictionary, Practical, Theoretical, and Historical of Commerce and Commercial Navigation, 1832—

a heroic labor—is in spite of its dictionary form, a treatise in which facts and analysis 2

The American Statistical Association was organized in 1838

3

Of Patrick Colquhoun’s (1745–1820) many writings, only two need be mentioned, his Treatise on

the Population, Wealth, Power, and Resources of the British Empire …(1814), unintelligently

sneered at by McCulloch, and the anonymously published Considerations on the Means of

affording Profitable Employment to the Redundant Population of Great Britain and Ireland (1818)

The first is particularly important, not so much because of its estimates of national wealth, but because of the economic reasoning, however primitive, which is offered in explanation of the facts presented, and of the attempt to state and to solve problems—to paraphrase factually, as it were, the more popular doctrines of the times

On a larger scale, and with greater success, this was also done by George R.Porter, a civil servant

and for some time chief of the statistical department of the Board of Trade His Progress of the

Nation in its Various Social and Economical Relations, from the beginning of the Nineteenth

Century to the Present Time (1836–43) has received deserved credit as the standard record of

English economic development during the first half of the nineteenth century, i.e as a source book

of economic facts and figures As such it has been remodeled—very freely indeed—and continued

by Mr F.W.Hirst and his associates (1912) But this is not what matters for us The relevant point

is that the work, as originally planned and executed, is really a treatise of general economics,

dealing successively with population, production, interchange, public finance, consumption,

accumulation, moral progress, and colonies in a manner not entirely dissimilar to Mill’s Principles,

of which, in a sense, it ought to be considered as the companion volume: in particular neither Mill’s free trade nor Porter’s free trade is complete without the other

George Tucker has been mentioned already and will have to be mentioned again The work of his

that is relevant here is: Progress of the United States in Population and Wealth in Fifty Years

(1843; 2nd ed., 1855) It is mainly a study in U.S demography For us, however, more important is the fact that it is also a study in economic analysis

intertwine very effectively This was the kind of thing at which he was really good—the

man should in fact not be judged by his Principles alone

Robert D.Baxter (1827–75) was an economist of major importance His careful and competent handling of his figures, and his much quoted estimates (of national income and wealth), admirable though they are, constitute the least important of his services to economic analysis Of much greater interest for us are his bold ventures into the statistical theory of the benefits that accrue to the public from railroads and of the pressure and incidence of taxation (for which purpose he also collected family budgets) These studies are not faultless, mainly because he was weak on the pure-theory side, but the mere fact that he made a serious attempt to answer numerically such questions as how the burden of rates divides itself between landlord and tenant should secure for him a

place in the history of econometrics I want to refer especially to: The Budget and the Income Tax (1860); Results of Railway Extension (1866); National Income: the United Kingdom (1868); The Taxation of the United Kingdom (1869) In Memoriam by his

widow is well worth reading

Karl F.W.Dieterici (1790–1859) was a professor of Political Economy

(Staatswissenschaft) and director of the Prussian Statistical Bureau in Berlin Statistische Übersicht der wichtigsten Gegenstände des Verkehrs und Verbrauchs im preussischen Staate und im deutschen Zollverbande…(1838–57) Also important: Der Volkswohlstand

im preussischen Staate…(1846) and Über preussische Zustände, über Arbeit und Kapital

(1848) His delightful serenity in matters of ‘method’ deserves to be recorded His lecture

De via et ratione oeconomiam politicam docendi (1835), though stressing quite

reasonably the fundamental importance of the historical aspects of the economic process, arrives at the result which might be said to sum up, by anticipation, all that ever came of

the methodological squabble of a century: et mere philosophando et mere experiendo erratur And he showed his good sense by extolling Ricardo’s attention to facts Though

he never embarked upon a venture as comprehensive as Porter’s, his neat and trustworthy publications of the results of the statistical bureau he directed are glorified by his grasp of the needs of scientific economics that enabled him to pick out fertile projects Thus, his statistics of consumption continue to this day to render assistance to analysis.4

The work that justifies the inclusion in our sketch of the name of Louis R.Villermé (1782–1863), who was not exclusively, or even primarily an economist, is his investigation, undertaken as a research project (quite as such things are done today) under the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, into the conditions of labor in several

French manufacturing industries: Tableau de l’état physique et moral des ouvriers employés dans les manufactures de coton, de laine, et de soie (1840) His

recommendations (protection to children) do not interest us here The work is important

as an outstanding instance of a large class, in which method of procedure has hardly made any progress at all since that time

P.G.Frédéric Le Play (1806–82), mathematician and mining engineer by training and professor of metallurgy by vocation, figures here and not in the next period although some of the publications and activities that made his international fame belong to the latter The Société Internationale des Études Pratiques d’Économie Sociale, which was

founded by Le Play in 1856, started the publication of a fortnightly review, Réforme sociale, in 1881 The work that is relevant to our purpose was done during the period under discussion: Les Ouvriers européens (1st ed., 1855; 2nd ed., 1877–9) He was not a

technical economist and heartily despised the misunderstood bits of economics he knew Nevertheless, he deserves a place in the history of economic analysis because of his method of studying family budgets that may some day help to bring into existence a theory of consumption worthy of the name It consists in an immensely painstaking investigation of a limited number of individual cases, each considered as intensively as possible, in the whole setting of its social, moral, and cultural conditions We cannot go into the program of social betterment that is associated with the name of that great man But he formed a school that is associated with that program and continues work along that line

As has been mentioned already, statistical economics flourished in the

United States, and from the famous Hamilton Report on Manufactures

(1791) to the end of the period we observe an ever-broadening stream of

such publications However, we shall be content to add another illustrative

instance, namely, the earlier work of D.A.Wells—his later and much better-known work belongs to the next period.5 He turned to eco- nomics

in his early middle age, attracted by his interest in the practical questions

of his day and country, and our analytic apparatus owes nothing to him

4

Among other things, they established the fundamental fact that the consumption

of the masses may fall in cyclical upswings (that it may fall in prolonged spells of

inflation is of course common knowledge)

5

David A.Wells (1828–98) was a geologist and chemist who had published a

successful textbook in each of these subjects before he took to economics and the

civil service during the Civil War The two publications that should be mentioned

here

Yet he was a significant economist whose works repay study even today He was a master of the art of making the most of imperfect material.6 Moreover, his sound and conscientious mind enabled him to represent the elements of a situation in their right perspective without precisely knowing why: his was that sound practical judgment in which many of the best theorists are woefully deficient and which was to show

up to still greater effect in some of his later publications

Of course, all that I have been able to present in this section is a scatter

of instances that in addition may not have been the best to choose Thus, barring what is implied in mentioning Tooke and Newmarch and also

Senior, I have entirely neglected all the scientific economics to be found

in English official reports It is hoped, however, that even these bits of information will help the reader to form a correct idea of the scientific situation of that period But the question must, I suppose, arise in his mind

how, under the circumstances described, it was possible for even the most

unfair of critics to speak of undue preponderance of ‘theoretical speculation.’ The only answer I have to offer is this Criticism of scientific economics comes to a great extent from ignorant outsiders, and these ignorant outsiders include many individuals who call themselves economists This fact alone makes it understandable that criticism mistook the significance of a feature of that period’s economic work that we have noticed before Economics then gained the status of an established field This meant, among other things, greater specialization not only of individuals but also of publications and the emergence of purely theoretical treatises It is hardly possible to overlook the factual

complement in the Wealth of Nations—though some critics seem to have

accomplished even this feat—and it is still less possible to overlook the

factual work in Vauban’s Dixme royale But if an economist, such as

Senior, chooses to deal with the analytic apparatus of economics separately, then it is much easier to overlook his factual work—especially

if it be hidden in commission reports—and thus, comparing the Outline with the Wealth (which is of course absurd), to arrive at the discovery that

there is a methodological gulf between the two and that Senior was indulging in pure speculation whereas A.Smith was keeping his eyes upon historical fact

6

Professor Kuznets has told me that Wells’s estimates of national income are deserving of confidence which, considering the data at his disposal, represents an even greater feat than

Baxter’s, who had at least income-tax data to go on are: the famous Our Burden and our Strength (1864) and his Reports of the Special Commissioner of the Revenue (1866–9)

[(c) Development of Statistical Methods.]

The groups of workers in any department of scientific knowledge should not perhaps be compared to the corps of an army For the latter, at least in principle, move according to some plan, whereas the scientific groups are essentially unco-ordinated: one group rushes

on, the others lag behind, and each fails to give support to the others or to avail itself of the possible support it could derive from them The progress in statistical method illustrates this We have already noticed that there was considerable advance on the probability front We should add to this the Gaussian law of error and the method of least squares, achievements that meant an important addition to the economist’s box of tools However, nothing to speak of came of this opportunity during this period in which, on the contrary, the statistician’s pure theory and the economist’s pure theory were almost completely divorced—to remain divorced until our own day I wonder if I can create in

my reader’s mind the proper feeling of surprise at this Let us for this purpose transfer ourselves into a better world and, from this better world, look at the situation of economics We then behold a field in a large part of which reasoning is essentially and inevitably quantitative—surely all economists would have acquired a saving knowledge

of mathematics But even if they failed to see the necessity of doing this in order to improve their pure theory, would they not surely do so in order to improve their handling

of statistical figures, to the importance of which, as we have just seen, they were fully alive? They would be on the lookout for new tools of statistical research and, of course, rush to use them if they were proffered, as they were being proffered, from outside And

we should expect the author of the period’s leading treatise, J.S.Mill, laboring in the sweat of his brow, to acquire and to teach command of those tools Observe that, with a profession intellectually alive and moderately conscious of the scientist’s duties, there would have been nothing impossible in all this But as a matter of fact, if we let our glance shift back to the real world, we see nothing of all this until about a century later, and even then all we see is a painful struggle to realize it What we do see, for the period under discussion, is ignorance born of intellectual inertness or else, which comes to much the same thing, preoccupation with the practical problems of the day that life itself solved without needing any assistance It was not quite so in demography or what is usually understood by social statistics This is our only opportunity to mention the name of Quetelet

Adolph Quetelet’s (1796–1874) importance for our subject is small—I know of no

economist of that period whose economics shows any traces of his influence He was a

mathematician and astronomer, and entered the field of social statistics by the door of probability Here, so far as I can see, his merit is confined to meritorious propaganda:

there is nothing original in his Lettres à S.A.R le due régnant de Saxe-Coburg-Gotha sur

la théorie des probabilités, appliquée aux sciences morales et politiques (1846) But he

joined the brilliant band of statistical administrators who during that period led and inspired the new statistical bureaus and, with indefatigable energy, did much to improve methods and projects and especially to promote international cooperation

He was much more than that implies, however His vigorous and original investigations into the distribution of human characteristics mark a step in advance that had never to be retraced and, as an example to follow, had eventually also some importance for economics But he took another step that, after a brief success, had to be

retraced: he plunged into a philosophy of a sort of statistical determinism by conceiving the theory that those investigations were revealing a stable type of average man whose properties linked up with simple general ‘causes,’ deviations being of the nature of errors

of observation in the Gaussian sense He thus hoped to reduce, on a statistical basis, the methodology of the social to that of the physical sciences The development of thought in this matter went wholly against this theory, and many serious workers came to consider

it, perhaps more than is justified, as a mere freak His merits concerning anthropometry

are of course not affected thereby See especially his Sur l’homme…(1835; English trans., 1842), later expanded into his Physique sociale…(1869) and, for criticisms, G.F.Knapp, ‘Quetelet als Theoretiker,’ and several other notes, Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik (1871–2) and Maurice Halbwachs, La théorie de l’homme moyen (1912)

Economists even failed to avail themselves of the most primitive devices for presenting figures All the more necessary is it to notice the fact that at least simple charting—line, bar, circle, and pie graphs—had been introduced into economics right at the beginning of the period by Playfair.7 Moreover, there is no excuse for the hesitation with which fact-presenting economists took to the use of price index numbers or theoretical economists to the task of providing a theory for them We have seen that the idea had emerged before A.Smith A great step toward full realization of the importance of the method was made

in 1798, when Sir George Shuckburgh Evelyn presented a paper to the Royal Society in which, with apologies for treating a subject so much below the dignity of that august body, he used an index number—of a primitive kind no doubt but which was superior to Carli’s—for measuring the ‘depreciation of money.’8 Lowe9 added nothing to the idea of

a ‘tabular standard’ beyond Evelyn’s, but he improved the technique and recommended the use of index numbers for the purpose of ‘lessening the injury from fluctuations and giving a uniform value [over time] to money income,’ that is, of creating a stable unit of deferred payments—the idea that was to become so popular in the next period and still more so in the 1920’s and 1930’s G Poulett Scrope seems to have been the first to introduce the subject into a general treatise (1833)

7

William Playfair, brother of the physicist, John Playfair, to whom he gave credit for having suggested his graphical methods, was a man of varied experience in business and economic

journalism He first introduced those methods in his Commercial and Political Atlas (1786), which

contained 44 charts and was translated into French His most telling graph, however, was used to

illustrate his argument in A Letter on our Agricultural Distresses; it displays the course of the price

of wheat and of wages over 250 years See Funkhouser and Walker, ‘Playfair and his Charts,’

Economic History, February 1935, with illustrations I owe my acquaintance with Playfair’s work

to this article, and know only the two publications mentioned For others, see the bibliographical note appended to the article

8

Philosophical Transactions, 1798, Part I Arthur Young (Enquiry into the Progressive Value of Money in England, 1812) was the next to follow him and the first to attack him

9

Joseph Lowe, The Present State of England in regard to Agriculture, Trade and Finance (1822), a

book that seems to have met with some success and contains many interesting discussions, e.g on population The author is, however, very unfair to Evelyn’s pioneering attempt