ABSTRACT
Economics has veritably turned imprecision itself into a science: economics, the science of the quantification of the unquantifiable and the aggregation of the incompatible. Economics is the science which, of all scholarly disciplines, most recklessly oversteps the gulf between the humanities and the physical sciences. This chapter describes the contrast between the two vistas of economic theory in the same terms as those sometimes used by physicians, some of whom declare that they do not pay attention to statistical experience but only to clinical experience. But a science of imprecision is necessary and indispensable. Government must aim at some formulated results. They can be formulated only in the broadest terms. We might do well to take more pride in the ingenuity and audacity with which the science has devised its language of imprecision, and thus keep the real nature and purpose of its procedures more vividly in mind.
