terms of billions of dollars. We began to grope for the outlines of the big national and international pictures. For the first time in its history economics began to be a human science.
Under the classicists economics was dry and bloodless; it was indeed a dismal science. Under the sociologists it was unconvincing; there was always doubt whether the academic writers from jerkwater colleges knew what they were talking about. When we began to talk about facts and their bearings upon immediate affairs, when we began to connect with economic laws things that directly concern us, the intelligent public commenced to sit up and take notice. Cassel, who is one of the outstanding figures among the European economists at the present time, has said that we ought to scrap the most of our old economic literature and begin all over again on the basis of facts. I think that this is going too far, but nevertheless there is much truth in the underlying idea.
The interest in quantitative economics rests upon the thought that this knowledge is teaching us how to conduct our national affairs just as the well-managed family directs itself, just as the corporation controls its business. The affairs of the nation are the aggregate of the affairs of about 27½ million families and they are about 10,000 times greater in magnitude than those of a 30-million dollar corporation. We have been conducting national affairs heretofore without much fundamental knowledge, which is very much the same as if a corporation tried to run itself without a balance sheet and a statement of income and outgo. This has led to terrific mistakes in national policies since the war. Among these was the fixing of the
