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The Interplay Between Institutional and Material Factors: The Problem and its Status

In: Barriers to Full Employment

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  • N. Georgescu-Roegen

Abstract

When Egon Matzner suggested the topic for my contribution, Lord Keynes’s pronouncement that economics is a ‘dangerous science’ came to me in a flash. ‘It is indeed’, Joseph A. Schumpeter (1954) added his approval as he quoted it. And in the last section of his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, Lord Keynes supported this theme by pointing out that ‘practical men … are usually the slaves of some defunct economist’, so, it is the ideas of economists, not the vested interests, that ‘are dangerous for good or evil’. Instructively, Robert K. Merton (1981), recently related those thoughts to President Richard Nixon’s ‘public confession that he was a Keynesian’. It thus seems that Lord Keynes’s remark was either an implicit admission of the political ineffectiveness of any economic doctrine or a verdict about the inability of political men to understand economics rightly. Be this as it may, any economist who has ever stopped to ponder about the epistemological foundation of the economic discipline would certainly agree that economics is a dangerous discipline precisely because of the interplay between the institutional and the economic factors.

Suggested Citation

  • N. Georgescu-Roegen, 1988. "The Interplay Between Institutional and Material Factors: The Problem and its Status," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: J. A. Kregel & Egon Matzner & Alessandro Roncaglia (ed.), Barriers to Full Employment, chapter 11, pages 297-339, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-19233-5_12
    DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-19233-5_12
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    Cited by:

    1. O'Hara, Sabine, 1997. "A theory of production tasks, processes, and technical practices : Robert Scazzieri, Clarendon Press, Oxford, UK, 1993," Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, Elsevier, vol. 8(3), pages 371-375, August.

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