Essays on economic semantics
- Englewood Cliffs Prentice - Hall 1963
- 304 p.
This collection of Essays On Economic Semantics has been assembled in honor of Fritz Machlup on the occasion of his 60th birthday. The prece dents for this form of appreciation have been well established in economics, the commemorative volumes for Jacob Viner, Professor Machlup's predecessor as Walker Professor of Economics and International Finance at Princeton, and for Professor Frank H. Knight at Chicago being two noteworthy examples.
The particular essays reprinted here are not a representative cross section of Professor Machlup's work, which, as can be seen from the bibliography included in this volume, ranges widely over economics and the social sciences generally. Rather, they are intended as a tribute to his virtuosity as a teacher since their precision and lucidity so epitomizes the man and his methods. By forcing ambiguities, sloppy reasoning, and implicit theorizing out into the open, Professor Machlup has alerted his own students and the profession at large to the tyranny of words. He has been a life-long foc of Mephistopheles, who advised the student in Goethe's Faust to use words to conceal ignorance, to substitute words for what he did not onderstand: "Denn eben wo Begriffe fehlen Da stellt ein Wort zur rechten Zeit sich ein."
For advice and suggestions in the preparation of this volume we wish to express our thanks to a number of Professor Machlup's present and former students and colleagues, especially to Professor T. C. Liu of Cornell University. We are indebted to Dr. Edith Tilton Penrose of the London of Economics for the translation from the German of "Micro vs. Macro Theory." And, of course, the usual acknowledgments and thanks are due to the following publishers for permission to reprint the articles presented here: The Southern Economic Journal, The Economic Journal, Der Zeitschrift für Nationalökonomie, the McGraw-Hill Book Co, The American Economic Review, The Osaka Economic Papers, The Review of Economics and Statistics, and La Rivista Internazionale di Scienze Economiche e Commerciali.
Finally, we wish to thank Professor Machlup himself for allowing us to pry loose from his notes his reflections on the cultivation of economic semantics to serve as the introductory essay for this volume.