G'day Jim, I'd written: >>Historical dialectics and an invocation of central planning - all from the >>pen of a seminal econometrician. Strange stuff, economics ... and you responded: >Schumpeter was neither an econometrician nor a mathematical economist. He >_was_ a conservative but open-minded economist who learned a lot from Marx. >His belief that socialism -- by which he meant government planning of the >economy -- is inevitable seems quaint these days. Ah, but he was an econometrician - not *just* an econometrician (as the breathtaking sweep and historical complexity of CS&D evinces) but definitely a *seminal* econometrician. He wrote very early in the piece (1906 - in 'On the mathematical method of theoretical economics') that 'I have not heard any objections which appeared sound to me - would have shaken my belief that on this method rests the future of economic theory as science - as Jevons put it "if Economics is to be a science at all, it must be a mathematical one".' He was right of course - it did become a science (well, it became scientistic, at least), and it did follow Jevons and become a mathematical discipline. He was still sufficiently of this conviction to join Irving Fisher and Ragnar Frish in convening the Econometric Society in 1930 (and this after Fisher's abject failure to read the tectonic processes of the economy through '29/'30). I read that in Shigeto Tsuru's *Institutional Economics Revisited*, btw - a bloody good read. Cheers, Rob.
