ABSTRACT
The facts about developments in neighboring fields that will be assembled in this chapter are of necessity fragmentary. They are, to repeat it once more, impressionist patches of color which any other writer—according to his ideas about what has been or could have been relevant to the development of economic analysis—would have chosen in a different way. In fact, had I been writing histories of these fields for their own sake, I should have chosen differently myself. This inevitable arbitrariness—reinforced by the inevitable arbitrariness that comes from my personal limitations—is much more serious for this period than it was before, for it is in this period that the wealth of specialized work became unmanageable and that any attempt at neat logical tectonics becomes futile. Another point of view that influenced selection must also be kept in mind, namely, the ease or difficulty with which the reader can himself supply the necessary information. For economics, sociology is a most important neighbor. But at the same time, owing to its immature state, its historical development is the most difficult to get at. Psychology and, still more, historiography, however important they are for us, need less comment because their developments have been more satisfactorily described. And though statistics is for us the closest of all neighbors, its development during that period is so well known to the student of economics that we can pass it by entirely in this chapter, on the understanding that a few facts that must be recalled will be mentioned in the section on Econometrics below. 1
