ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the evolving characteristics of economics teaching and research, with special reference to the implications for the storage and retrieval of economic knowledge in libraries. It focuses on the assumption that future directions of evolution in economics can be extrapolated from past trends. Technological progress in paper-making and printing, and advancing literacy, have vastly increased the numbers of readers and of books to be stored, while rising wages of unskilled and semi-skilled workers have made the cost of construction of buildings, and of the administration of library services, increasingly expensive. The foregoing remarks clearly are not about economic methodology, but about its application to the economics of libraries and the improvement of their usefulness. Professor Harry G. Johnson described the economist's basic methodological choice as being between and among deductive logic, quantitative and historical empirical, and moral suasion.
