The Main Problem of Economics and Its Origin in Everyday Life

“For three hundred years”, Hippolyte Taine once said, “we have been losing more and more the ability to look at things directly. Weighed down by tedious miscellaneous booklearning we find ourselves studying not the objects themselves, but mere representations of them, maps rather than the actual landscape”. It is certainly true that every science and every culture, as it develops, comes in danger of losing its direct grasp. When this happens, it is time to put verbal arguments on one side, to forget about empty conceptual systems, and really to study the field itself. Economics is now in this position. It can only find a firm foundation by looking squarely at the facts and by putting simple decisive questions about them.