ABSTRACT
Today's economist finds himself in an unhappy position. Anyone else may feel justified to entertain optimism, if only for the more distant future. No matter how gloomy the economic situation at this very moment, rapid strides in our technical knowledge seem to open up vistas of a brighter future. The present state of his discipline offers no such reassurance to the economist. It is not that advances in his discipline have been slower than elsewhere. What is troubling is that his field lacks the influence on practical applications that is assured to other fields because their practitioners, as a matter of course, have some grounding in the principles relevant to the discipline. If consumption of capital resulted exclusively from a voluntary decision by the owners of capital, it is highly unlikely that over the years its scope would exceed the simultaneous formation of new capital and that the outcome would be an overall decline in the economy's available capital.
