THE EC DEPARTMENT--1

"In Economics A you learn the theories, and in the advanced courses you learn how they do not apply." This old verdict sums up the tragedy of academic economics: the struggle for a scientific approach to an essentially unscientific objct, the attempt to project reality into a vacuum by relegating the "other factors" out of the rump of reality, the economist wilfully shapes a fragment into an imaginary whole, his theory. By its very origin, economic theory is a segment.

The common criticism that the Harvard Economics Department is too theoretical is, in itself, meaningless. College economics cannot start off on seasonal unemployment in Southern California. Its task is to breed rational economic thought, and for that it must be rooted in theory. A study of the economic doctrines of the past is essential to an understanding of the economic problems of the present.

This must sound ludicrous to any one who has had a taste of economic theory at Harvard. Nobody has yet gained a clearer judgment of New Deal Economics from the graphs and curves and trends of Ec A or 1. The reason is that economic theory, when isolated from the forces that condition it, remains litle more than abstract quibbling for its own sake. The Harvard Department's "vacuum" approach to theory is, at best, a mental discipline, and as such much inferior to mathematics.

Economic theory is significant only as an expression--or better, rationalization--of social change. To give it reality, it must be projected back on to the plane out of which it was cut: the economic world of the author. In the very choice of the "factors remaining equal" lies social philosophy. Quesnay and eighteenth-century France, Adam Smith and British industrial supremacy, Keynes and stagnation, are inseparably intertwined. Like political science, economic theory cannot be torn out of its historical context without losing substance.

In the historical perspective, the economic doctrines, as milestones in capitalistic development, assume a fuller meaning than they possess on the blackboard. In the chaos of the vacuum, they provide, indeed, the celebrated "principles"--which the bewildered student drops one by one as he enters the labyrinth of real-life economics.