The Economics of the Recovery Program
| Autor: | W. Y. Elliott |
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| Rok vydání: | 1934 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | American Political Science Review. 28:410-423 |
| ISSN: | 1537-5943 0003-0554 |
| DOI: | 10.2307/1947468 |
| Popis: | From Aristotle's day to this, the subject-matter of economics has been recognized by political scientists to affect very greatly the institutions with which the latter deal. In our own time, studies like those of Professors Charles A. Beard and Arthur N. Holcombe have carried the great bulk of American political scientists over to a primarily economic interpretation of political history. It is not too much to say that there has been some danger of political scientists conceding too much common ground to the economist's psychology and methods. The economist, on the other hand, has for some decades at least, both in this country and abroad, had scant patience with political science. He has given even less recognition to the bearing of political factors upon the simple assumptions upon which his economic science too often rested. F. Delaisi characteristically wrote of Political Myths and Economic Realities, without much regard for a test of whether the myths might not be the more powerful realities in terms of survival value. "Politics" was something which, in an annoying and "unscientific" way, occasionally interfered with the operations of man as a profit-making animal. Politics was rarely thought of as a statement of those psychological motives and controlling social institutions which corrected or conditioned at every stage the jejune motivation and the mechanical equations upon which most economic generalizations rested. Within the past years, however, economists like J. A. Hobson and A. C. Pigou have begun to inquire into the nature of "welfare economics." J. M. Keynes, too, has made a notable confession in the August (1933) Yale Review of the necessity of allowing politics some weight in the art of estimating any economic trends. Perhaps it may not be too much to hope that this paper will serve a dual purpose: not only to bring to political scientists a consideration of the economic factors which condition a political program like that of the New Deal, but equally to recall to our brothers among the economists that man is, after all, primarily a political animal. He will try to control events. I propose to take as my text a criticism of the New Deal as given in a rather typical and moderate statement of the economists' |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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