ABSTRACT

Economics is, of course, the study of economic interrelations, or, as Alfred Marshall defined it with deliberate looseness, the study of mankind in the ordinary business of life. It is generally regarded with envy by other social scientists because the interrelations with which it deals are frequently quantifiable and because their structure can sometimes be expressed in terms of systems of interdependent functions. Economic interrelations are through and through social, they are relations between persons or between groups of persons in society. The path of evolution towards complex and integrated economic interrelations has not occurred uniformly or in a straight line. The more a society is characterized by rational economic calculation and, which comes to the same thing, by the predominance of economic activity with reference to a market, the greater the extent to which pecuniary valuation pervades the pattern of values as a whole.