Epilogue

For most economists, at least in the US, economics is a science, at once technical and mathematical, abstract yet empirical — although ‘empirical’ has a very special meaning. Empirical studies are conducted in armchairs, with computers and data banks; no empirical investigator, say of production, ever has to visit a factory or construction site. And no serious economist ever has to think about history or the changing meaning of the activities under investigation, any more than the physicist or chemist has to worry about the history of the atoms or molecules being studied. This may be economics, but it is not worldly philosophy.