Essentials a/ Economic Theory: as Applied to Modern Problems of
Industry Gild Public Policy. By John Bates Clark. London: Macmillan and Co. Ild. net] ESSENTIALS OF ECONOMIC THEORY.* MR. Cuour is Professor of Political Economy in Columbia University, and author of The Distribution of Wealth, &c., /to. In this earlier volume, he tells us, "an effort was made to isolate the phenomena of Economic Statics and to attain the laws which govern them." The present work is issued as an instalment of a promised treatise on Economic Dynamics ; or, The Laws of Industrial Progress. We confess—with some rqggiving that our confession will expose us to the charge of ^listinism—that we wish economists would refrain from /discussing economic problems in the technical terminology of / other sciences and from inventing a pedantic phraseology of / -their own. We are old-fashioned enough to look back with 'regret to the simpler language employed by the earlier -economists, and, as mere critics, standing between the learned and "the man in the street," we have sufficient 'sympathy with the latter to wish that our teachers would geonvey their lessons in plainer terms. We cannot discover
that this distinction between statics and dynamics, which is a comparatively simple illustration of this tendency towards a pedantic obscurity, means anything more than that of late years we have become profoundly impressed by the evolutionary aspects of social progress. "Population is increasing, capital is accumulating, technical methods are improving, and the organisation of productive establishments is perfecting itself ; while over against these changes in industry is an evonition in the wants of the individual customer whom industry has to serve." Was there ever a time when these considerations were absent from the mind of the economic student? Professor Clark seems to think so. "Students of political economy were at that date scarcely awakened to the perception of the laws of dynamics, and still less were they conscious of the need of a systematic statement of them. A modest beginning in the way of formulating such laws the present work endeavours to make." This, in the author's own language, is the purpose of his work. The student who would know more will find much that is acute and interesting in Professor Clark's presentment of the subject. He must, however, be prepared to face mathematical diagrams, algebraic signs, and a few cryptic headlines like the following : "The Law of Value Affected by the Fact that the Final Unit of a Good is Usually a Complex of Unlike Utilities,"—a profound truth, we have no doubt, but one which the English language ought to be capable of conveying in simpler terms.
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