ABSTRACT
By comparison with general history or general sociology, the more practical and better-agreed purposes of economics seem to allow clearer principles of selection. The subjects behave more monotonously. Regularity is a more fruitful selector. Some laws are possible – however local, they work, in a useful approximate way, for clinicians sufficiently skilled in recognizing limitations, interferences and exceptions. But as economists move from short-run analysis of established systems to study the change and growth of systems, so does their work resume much of the selective, incomplete form of historical explanation.
