ABSTRACT
The ‘second stage’ in the development of numeracy in economics, which hales from the founding in 1883 of the Statistical Section (F) of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and the Statistical Society of London, focused on data collection and statistics for the purpose of establishing ‘correct views’ about the moral sciences and their relationship to the physical sciences. Some thinkers, William Stanley Jevons among them, believed that the science of Political Economy ‘might gradually be erected into an exact science.’ He became an avid student of commercial fluctuations in search of laws that governed seasonal and cyclical variations by linking them to meteorological changes, but his enthusiasms were not widely shared. This was partly because the construction of an hedonic balance sheet for the guidance of policy makers was recognized as insoluble, so that British economists disassociated themselves from the notion of utility as a measurable magnitude. As was noted in Chapter 12, Jevons’ views on the prospective role of inductive research in economics failed to dominate, because many contemporaries, among them John Elliot Cairnes, were of the opinion that, as a moral science, economics is inherently deductive. This was, of course, also Marshall’s view.
