The Social Framework

Abstract

A NEW way of handling elementary economics is badly wanted-a really new approach to the subject which will bring it into living connexion with contemporary realities. The traditional 'shape' of the subject, worked out during the second half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century and thereafter modified only in detail, was the product of an age which had, except in the realms of foreign trade and public finance-and even there the data were scanty and often misleading-o no statistical basis for study of the essential facts. This is not the sole explanation of the highly abstract and deductive methods which were employed by the classical economists ; but it is a large part of the explanation. Their successors took over from them the apparatus they had devised, and have in the main continued to use it right up to the present time, partly because it had acquired a certain sanctity as the biblical justification of free trade and laisser-faire and partly because it provided the readiest means of teaching economics as an academic subject, without too much soiling of the brain by contact with the sordid doings of the business world.

The Social Framework

An Introduction to Economics. By Prof. J. R. Hicks. Pp. xii + 212. (Oxford: Clarendon Press ; London: Oxford University Press, 1942.) 7s. 6d. net.