Prices and Progress

Abstract

It May have been the ingrained pessimism of Bentham and McCulloch that provoked Carlyle to dub economics the dismal science. It surely must have been economists' concern over price theory, which they regarded and still regard as the central core of economics, that made the name stick. Studies of the role of prices in history are no less tedious and technical than price theory, and in hands no more skillful than mine they can be even more dreary. But this is not the worst of my worries. The evidence that I shall sketch supports the pessimistic hypothesis that during certain germinal periods price and wage behavior of the type that is now taking a distressing percentage of real income from all of us who live on our salaries has proved beneficial to society in the long run and that the type of price and wage behavior which would benefit most of us in the short run has had serious disadvantages. Yet I have the inner satisfaction of appearing to be objective in my thinking and fearless in airing my conclusions in a gathering of some of the worst aggrieved.