Arrow’s Vision of the Economic Process

The concept of

vision

is due to Schumpeter (1954). A writer reveals his vision through his approach to economic problems and by the problems which he selects for close investigation. It follows that a vision is not typically located in the explicit assumptions of economic theory, although its trace can be seen there, but more typically it is to be found in the unstated assumptions, what critics often call the ‘implicit assumptions’, which characterize a writer’s work. As Schumpeter (1954, p. 41) puts it:

Obviously, in order to be able to posit to ourselves any problems at all, we should first have to visualize a distinct set of coherent phenomena as a worthwhile object of our analytic effort. In this book, this preanalytic cognitive act is called Vision.