ABSTRACT
Arthur Okun was one of the few economists of his generation whose interests and outlook were along the right lines. His main motive was not the pursuit of economic theory for its own sake, the construction of more advanced theoretical models, but the severely practical motive of discovering methods or policies to improve the performance of the economy in terms of the twin objectives of efficiency and equality, that is, how to minimize the cost in terms of economic inequality of policies aiming at higher productivity or efficiency. General economic theory developed, with a high degree of sophistication, the logical or mathematical properties of economic equilibrium, the purpose of which is to explain how the price mechanism serves to coordinate the actions of millions of individual “agents” acting independently of each other, but without investigating at any stage whether its basic axioms correspond to reality or not, or whether the propositions derived from them by deductive methods can be verified.
