“"Institutional economics" alone meets the demand for a generalized description of the economic order. Its claim is to explain the nature and extent of order amid economic phenomena, or those concerned with industry in relation to human well-being. In the words of Edwin Cannan, it attempts to tell "why all of us are as well off as we are" and "why some of us are better off than others." Such an explanation cannot properly be answered in formulas explaining the processes through which prices emerge in a market. Its quest must go beyond sale and purchase to the peculiarities of the economic system which allow these things to take place upon particular terms and not upon others.”

—  Walton Hale Hamilton

Source: The Institutional Approach to Economic Theory, 1919, p. 311

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote ""Institutional economics" alone meets the demand for a generalized description of the economic order. Its claim is to e…" by Walton Hale Hamilton?
Walton Hale Hamilton photo
Walton Hale Hamilton 5
Yale Law Professor 1881–1958

Related quotes

“As far as the use of mathematics in economics is concerned, there is an abundance of formulas where such are not needed. They are frequently introduced, one fears, in order to show off. The more difficult the mathematical theorem, the more esoteric the name of the mathematician quoted, the better.”

Oskar Morgenstern (1902–1977) austrian economist

Oskar Morgenstern, " Limits of the Use of Mathematics in Economics https://www.princeton.edu/~erp/ERParchives/archivepdfs/M49.pdf," in: James C. Charlesworth (Hg.), Mathematics and the Social Science. The Utility and Inutility of Mathematics in the Study of Economics, Political Sciences and Sociology, Philadelphia 1963, S. 12-29, hier S. 18.

“There [is]… a list of five tests which any body of doctrine which aspires to the name of economic theory must be able to meet:
1. Economic theory should unify economic science. - The task of a general body of theory in any subject is to give unity to its investigations…
2. Economic theory should be relevant to the modern problem of control. - Students of economics should spend their efforts upon subjects worth investigation…
3. The proper subject-matter of economic theory is institutions. - The demand that economic theory relate to institutions is implicit in the plea for its relevancy…
4. Economic theory is concerned with matters of process. - If economic theory is to treat of institutions it must know both the kinds of things institutions are and the kinds of things they are not…
5. Economic theory must be based upon an acceptable theory of human behavior.”

Walton Hale Hamilton (1881–1958) Yale Law Professor

After all control and institutions and processes are immediate things. They can all be translated into terms of human conduct...
Source: The Institutional Approach to Economic Theory, 1919, p. 311-6

Rudolf Rocker photo

“No thinking man in this day can fail to recognise that one cannot properly evaluate an historical period without considering economic conditions. But much more one-sided is the view which maintains that all history is merely the result of economic conditions, under whose influence all other life phenomena have received form and imprint.
There are thousands of events in history which cannot be explained by purely economic reasons, or by them alone.”

Rudolf Rocker book Nationalism and Culture

Source: Nationalism and Culture (1937), Ch. 1 "The Insufficiency of Economic Materialism"
Context: No thinking man in this day can fail to recognise that one cannot properly evaluate an historical period without considering economic conditions. But much more one-sided is the view which maintains that all history is merely the result of economic conditions, under whose influence all other life phenomena have received form and imprint.
There are thousands of events in history which cannot be explained by purely economic reasons, or by them alone. It is quite possible to bring everything within the terms of a definite scheme, but the result is usually not worth the effort. There is scarcely an historical event to whose shaping economic causes have not contributed, but economic forces are not the only motive powers which have set everything else in motion. All social phenomena are the result of a series of various causes, in most cases so inwardly related that it is quite impossible clearly to separate one from the other. We are always dealing with the interplay of various causes which, as a rule, can be clearly recognised but cannot be calculated according to scientific methods.

“All those words of praise they use for novels – spare, economical. Why should I shell out £17 for economical?”

Howard Jacobson (1942) British author and journalist

Interviewed in the Daily Telegraph, April 2003. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml;$sessionid$FUVRY4DIEVBSTQFIQMFCFF4AVCBQYIV0?xml=/arts/2003/04/27/bojac27.xml&sSheet=/arts/2003/04/27/bomain.html

“We have defined the main task of economic analysis as the explanation of the magnitudes of economic quantities. The student will find also that the main part of this, as of most other works on the subject, is concerned with the theory of the determination of prices, wages, interest rates, incomes, and the like. He may well inquire, therefore, in the midst of so much mathematics, whether the first task of economics is not the investigation of wealth, or welfare. Some economists have endeavored to restrict the boundaries of the science to the investigation of those quantities which are numerically measurable. Well-being, under such a restriction, would not be part of economics at all.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1940s, Economic Analysis, 1941, p. 7-8

John R. Commons photo

“Economic theory, since the time of the Physiocrats, has endeavored to get rid of the human will and to explain economic phenomena in terms of physical and hedonic forces. The human will had been the main reliance of the Mercantilists and of the economic theory of the Church fathers. But the will was arbitrary, capricious and contrary to natural laws. There were two stages of these physical theories which attempted to get away from the will:-the natural rights arld physical equilibrium stage of foreordained evolution of Quesnay, Adam Smith and Karl Marx, and the natural selection stage of blind evolution that followed Darwin, whose distinguished exponent in economics is Veblen. The theorists of each stage attempted to get rid of the human will and to explain economic phenomena as the working out of natural forces, either foreordained or blind. It was a concept of society as the natural growth of a mechanistic equilibrium.”

John R. Commons (1862–1945) United States institutional economist and labor historian

Source: Legal foundations of capitalism. 1924, p. 376

George Ritzer photo

“The ways in which these economic processes, largely originating in the US, have, in short order, flowed around the world is breathtaking and, unfortunately, well illustrates this book's major themes.”

George Ritzer (1940) American sociologist

Preface, p. xiii
Globalization - A Basic Text (2010)

Nicholas Barr photo

“A reduction in the liberty of the least well off cannot be justified even if it is to their economic advantage.”

Nicholas Barr (1943) British economist

Source: Economics Of The Welfare State (Fourth Edition), Chapter 3, Political Theory: Social Justice And The State, p. 49

Michael J. Behe photo

“If a theory claims to be able to explain some phenomenon, but does not generate even an attempt at an explanation, then it should be banished.”

Michael J. Behe (1952) American biochemist, author, and intelligent design advocate

Source: Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (1996), p. 186

Bernhard Riemann photo

“We now apply these laws of mental processes, to which the explanation of our own inner consciousness leads, to explain the order and adaptation observed on the earth, i. e., to explain Being and historical development.”

Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) German mathematician

Gesammelte Mathematische Werke (1876)

Related topics