riskuncertaintyandprofit英文版(编辑修改稿)

riskuncertaintyandprofit英文版(编辑修改稿)内容摘要：

nt their inpleteness. Only by such approximations, reached by dealing analytically with the more important and more universal aspects of phenomena, could we ever have attained any intelligent conception of the behavior of masses of matter in motion and secured our present marvelous mastery over the forces of nature. In a similar way, but for various reasons not so pletely and satisfactorily, we have developed a historic body of theoretical economics which deals with tendencies。 ., with what would happen under simplified conditions never realized, but always more or less closely approached in practice. But theoretical economics has been much less successful than theoretical physics in making the procedure useful, largely because it has failed to make its nature and limitations explicit and clear. It studies what would happen under perfect petition, noting betimes respects in which petition is not perfect。 but much remains to be done to establish a systematic and coherent view of what is necessary to perfect petition, just how far and in what ways its conditions deviate from those of real life and what corrections have accordingly to be made in applying its conclusions to actual situations.*1 The vague and unsettled state of ideas on this subject is manifest in the difference of opinion rife among economists as to the meaning and use of theoretical methods. At one extreme we have mathematical economists and pure theorists*2 to whom little if anything outside of a closed system of deductions from a very small number of premises assumed as universal laws is to be regarded as scientific economics at all. At the other extreme there is certainly a strong and perhaps growing tendency to repudiate abstraction and deduction altogether, and insist upon a purely objective, descriptive science. And in between are all shades of opinion. In the present writer39。 s view the correct middle way between these extreme views, doing justice to both, is not hard to find. An abstract deductive system is only one small division of the great domain of economic science, but there is opportunity and the greatest necessity for cultivating that field. Indeed, in our analogy, theoretical mechanics is a very small section of the science of physical nature。 but it is a very fundamental section, in a sense the first of all, the foundation and prerequisite of those that follow. And this also may very well hold good of a body of pure theory in economics。 it may be that a small step, but the first step, toward a practical prehension of the social system is to isolate and follow out to their logical conclusion a relatively small number of fundamental tendencies discoverable in it. There is abundant need for the use of both deduction and induction in economics as in other sciences, if indeed the two methods are theoretically separable. As Mill has well argued*3 we must reason deductively as far as possible, always collating our conclusions with observed facts at every stage. Where the data are too plex to handle in this way induction must be applied and empirical laws formulated, to be connected deductively with the general principles of ethology (we should now say simply human behavior). Emphasis being laid on the provisos, in both cases, that in using deduction the conclusions must be constantly checked with facts by observation and premises revised accordingly, while the empirical laws resulting from induction must in turn be shown to follow from the general principles of the science before they can be credited with much significance or dependability, we see that there is little divergence left between the two methods.*4 The method of economics is simply that of any field of inquiry where analysis is in any degree applicable and anything more than mere description possible. It is the scientific method, the method of successive approximations.*5 The study will begin with a theoretical branch dealing with only the most general aspects of the subject matter, and proceed downward through a succession of principles applicable to more and more restricted classes of phenomena. How far the process is carried will be a matter of taste and of the practical requirements of any problem. In science generally it does not pay to elaborate laws of a very great degree of accuracy of detail. When the number of factors taken into account in deduction bees large, the process rapidly bees unmanageable and errors creep in, while the results lose in generality of application more significance than they gain by the closeness of approximation to fact in a given case. It is better to stop dealing with elements separately before they get too numerous and deal with the final stages of the approximation by applying corrections empirically determined. The theoretical method in its pure form consists, then, in the plete and separate study of general principles, with the rigid exclusion of all fluctuations, modifications, and accidents of all sorts due to the influence of factors less general than those under investigation at any particular stage of the inquiry. Our question relates to the advisability of using this method in a tolerably rigid form in economics. The answer to this question depends on whether in the phenomena to be studied general principles can in fact be found of sufficient constancy and importance to justify their careful isolation and separate study. The writer is strongly of the opinion that the question must be answered affirmatively. Economics is the study of a particular form of anization of human wantsatisfying activity which has bee prevalent in Western nations and spread over the greater part of the field of conduct. It is called free enterprise or the petitive system. It is obviously not at all pletely or perfectly petitive, but just as indisputab。