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The article presents a discussion on the tendencies in economic theory. One argues that little or nothing worth has been accomplished in theory during the last thirty years and there is little really left to do. Another says that it is just an evaluation of results and of possible tasks which textbooks in economics have furnished. For example, the subject of trade unionism is badly in need of a general, even if tentative, statement of results. The clear vision and the sense of relative values which such a text would impart should suggest to the workers in the field the tasks which are really most worth doing. Another has put forward his view that much of the economic theory has been static theory, concerned with "normal equilibria" and delicate marginal adjustments, resting on the assumptions of a fluid market where labor, capital, and goods are perfectly mobile. If these assumptions were true, money would, indeed, be a meaningless "cloak," obscuring the real forces at work. It is, moreover, quite grotesque for static theory to offer itself as a support for its own foundation. A static or "normal" theory of money and credit, resting on the notion of accomplished equilibrium, after transitional changes have been effected, misses the main point as to the function of money and credit. Static theory which assumes frictionless fluidity, misses the whole point concerning money and credit. A functional theory of money and credit must be a dynamic theory, basing itself on an analysis of friction, of transitions and the like.

The article presents comments of economists Christopher Green, Lester C. Thurow and Harold W. Gutherie on research related to poverty research and income distribution conducted by various researchers. Green comments on Edward C. Budd and Daniel B. Radner's paper by arguing that the construction of a comprehensive income size distribution by synthesizing Current Population Survey (CPS) data and information from income tax returns should fill a serious void created by inconsistent estimates of the size distribution of income based on existing surveys of family income. The main objective of the New Jersey investigation was to learn more about the labor supply effects of negative taxes. Gutherie comments that the Budd-Radner paper is concerned with the accuracy of factual knowledge of income distribution. The paper by James N. Morgan and James D. Smith proposes the elements of a new theory of measuring welfare while that of Harold W. Watts outlines an experiment designed to test an important policy proposed to alleviate poverty.

The article announces the 50th anniversary meeting of the American Economic Association which will be held in New York on December 26-28, 1935. The complete list of activities and programs for the event is provided in the article.

During 1880's, more striking new departures occurred in the U.S. economics than in any other comparable period. At that time the conflict between the established laissez-faire orthodoxy and the newly imported German historical ideas, reached its climax. A wave of public interest in economic problems provided an opportunity for several able young men who came to dominate the U.S. economics for the next three or four decades to obtain their first professorial appointments. Academic economists, as a body, slowly but surely divested themselves of the accumulated propaganda and theological trappings of their subject and secured its recognition as the leading independent social science discipline. The first professional economic journals appeared and the foundation of the American Economic Association on September 9, 1885, approximately the midpoint of the decade, symbolized the birth of an indigenous national tradition of economic scholarship. Although the concluding stages of this long period of gestation have repeatedly been subjected to close scrutiny, the process is intrinsically so interesting that it would be unwise to neglect any new evidence, which has a bearing on it.

The article presents the report of the official act of the American Economic Association. The article presents a summary of the year's operations, with comments and interpretations concerning the Association's activities. The second meeting of the 1957 Executive Committee was held at the Westchester Country Club, Rye, New York, on March 29-30, 1957. The managing director B.F. Haley presented suggestions for the regular replacement on the Editorial Board and all names were acceptable to the Executive Committee. The final panel is to be presented to the Executive Committee at the December meeting. Haley expressed a desire to send out a questionnaire to 300-500 people to get opinions and criticism of the various aspects of the American Economic Review. He outlined a proposal to have two survey articles a year for a period of four years, to be published as part of the Review or as separates, the author paid an honorarium. The President was authorized to submit a proposal to the Rockefeller Foundation for the sum of $13,000 to finance this series of survey articles, this proposal to be drawn up by the Editor in consultation with the Chairman of the Committee on Research and Publication.

This article enquires whether economics should remain merely an instrumental science, leaving to others the formulation of ends. Just a decade ago, the U. S. Department of Agriculture called in various groups-economists, historians, sociologists, natural scientists, philosophers, etc., to advise it critically regarding programs and policies. Only the philosophers responded with constructive suggestions. A more particular implication of the topic is the evident departure from the traditional conception of the disparateness of economics and ethics in which anything associated with business and economics was regarded as ipso facto immoral and anything moral or ethical was presumably uneconomical. To explain this by saying that businessmen and politicians do not read or write requires the complementary statement that too many of those who concoct the doctrines do not engage in business or government. The retreat to the ivory tower may merely provide a bower for intellectual incest.

The article presents news briefs in the U.S. The American Society for Cybernetics together with the Wharton School and the College of Engineering and Applied Science of the University of Pennsylvania will be the sponsors of a 3-day conference on Communication and Control in Social Processes to be held at the University of Pennsylvania from October 30 through November 2, 1974. Instructions for the submission of papers for the conference are given.

A list of doctoral dissertations in political economy either in progress or completed and accepted by various universities in the U.S. as of September 1937. Students with a period of non-residence exceeding three years are omitted from the list. The first list of this kind was dated January 1, 1904 and subsequent lists have appeared in various publications. This list specifies doctoral dissertations accepted by universities. Titles not marked completed are assumed to be still in progress. Some thesis titles in the field of sociology are omitted and are published in the periodical "American Journal of Sociology."

The article reports on developments concerning various academic associations in the U.S. as of September 1937. The American Economic Association will hold its annual meeting in Atlantic City, New Jersey on December 28 to 30 at the Hotel and Haddon Hall. The Committee on Biometrics of the American Statistical Association has organized a joint meeting with the Committee on Vital Statistics of the American Public Health Association scheduled in October at New York City. The 16th annual conference of the Pacific Coast Economic Association is scheduled in December at Pomona College in Claremont, California.

The article discusses the role of money in economic theory. Political economy, is the science of business, and economic men are money-makers; nevertheless, the use of money is a fact of no importance for economic theory. This seeming contradiction between the letter of the economic law and its spirit as interpreted by loyal commentators long passed without notice. While the psychological school has been developing its pecuniary logic, certain pure theorists have sought another way of emancipating themselves from hedonism. To explain and to predict economic behavior, then, the economist needs a measure of the strength of the opposing sets of regularly acting motives. The use of money is one of these great rationalizing habits. It gives society the technical machinery of exchange, the opportunity to combine personal freedom with orderly cooperation on a grand scale, and the basis of that system of accountancy which Sombart appropriately calls "economic rationalism." The economist have tried treating money as a superficial phenomenon: they have tried using hedonism as the basis of economic rationality. But in working out, in treatise after treatise, a reasoned account of how men behave, they have come, without foreseeing what they were doing, to the basis on which Cournot built in 1888. The current tendency to make money "the center around which economic science clusters," then, is a tendency to be fostered.

The article discusses economic theorizing and scientific progress. There is a continuing interest among American economists in social speculation. The depression which many American economists feel as to the present state and tendency of the science, is something more than this habitual depreciation. The real charge against American economic speculation is not that it has made use of deduction but that it has made use of it wrongly and defectively. The indictment lies, in strict accuracy, not against erroneous method but against imperfect employment. The question remains whether formal verification--however essential in the physical sciences be either a possible or a necessary element in economic inquiry. Grave as has been the direct harm to the progress of economic science by faulty method, the larger injury has been the un-wholesome influence exerted by example upon students, devotees and disciples. This has taken the form of the encouragement of commendation, the vogue of text-book writing, the tolerance of metaphysical controversy as to final terms and ultimate concepts. If there be substantial truth in the foregoing, the moral to be drawn is neither methodological formulae nor an "advice to young economists," but a larger scientific consciousness.

There is probably no science which has made so little progress in its application as the science of economics. The most elementary principles are as hotly disputed today as ever, except where despair or boredom has supplanted prejudice and passion. The debates and arguments continue, from the country store to the street corner and on to the halls of Congress, everywhere speeches, but only the speakers are new. The speeches themselves, at best, are the same as of old, at their worst they but show the progress we have made in fatuity. The belief that our protective tariff policy makes possible the comparatively high wage scale in the United States was never more widely held than at present. Labor leaders, industrialists, even the farmers, vie with each other in their advocacy of high tariffs. When the protected employers make this attack on the economic theories of the Chase National Bank, they can be assured of the support of the leaders of organized labor. The non-social sciences on the contrary, are applied by experts and therefore in their application, they tend to incorporate the best thought and the latest experience that can be found anywhere in the world.

This article evaluates the report on Behavioral and Social Sciences Survey which assesses the state of political economics in the U. S. The conventional economists unduly emphasize, at the expense of more important things the methods and techniques applicable. Various recommendations from the panel of economist who have surveyed the entire field of economics are presented. Also recommended that the economic profession pay more attention to the economic implications of the fact that the U. S. is heavily involved as the power in a hierarchical international capitalist system.

Few areas of inquiry in the field of economics demonstrate more clearly the importance of an institutional approach to the discipline than the area of social insurance. At a time when one wing of economics is finding more and more uses of mathematics in the development of the theoretical analysis of the behavior of markets and prices, another wing, more concerned in the role of the human factor in the economic equation, is seeking the aid of the full spectrum of social science to discover the interrelations of economic policy and the enhancement of our way of life. It is good that this is so. The traditions of the discipline of economics are broad enough and deep enough to encompass a widely varied attack upon the essential problem of how man organizes his productive efforts to assure the best possible livelihood for himself and his fellows. It is a matter of personal taste and predilection whether one prefers to analyze by the most precise methods the operation of any or all measurable phenomena or to range more widely in the exercise of both analysis and judgment in developing new structures and devices for the improvement of the economic machinery of our society. The economist with a mathematical bent warms to the deductive process of a tightly reasoned demonstration from assumed economic premises. If the premises are approximations of reality and the deductive process is sound, results of much value to understanding are achieved. As in all scientific proof, however, the essential consideration in the evaluation of results is in large measure aesthetic. Is the solution neat and tidy? Is it beautifully symmetrical and simple? Does it "click" into place and fit situations other than those used in the demonstration? On the assumption-the basic faith of all scientists-that this is an orderly world, such an aesthetically satisfying solution may reveal truths of far-reaching application. They may eventually change the premises of all future policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the institutional and theoretical implications of the economic theory. The author compares the economy of the U.S. with other countries like Great Britain and other Scandinavian countries. The economic system of Soviet Russia, together with its political, social and cultural manifestations, cannot be considered socialistic in any sense. The Soviet society is far more authoritarian and less egalitarian than U.S. economy and the workers in this country have far less control over the conditions of their employment. U.S. Economic system is characterized by capitalism, which means private property, individual enterprise and competition. A program "New Dealers" was implemented in the U.S. that looked at the great depression, which reached its depth in the early nineteen-thirties, when American industry was no longer characteristically competitive. Conservative businessmen and orthodox economists as inconsistent with the principles of capitalism initially denounced the measures that the New Deal brought into agriculture, in industry and in monetary and budgetary policy.

The article presents the chief purposes served by economics as a field of knowledge and of study. Economics is primarily a social study, the importance of which derives from the contribution it can make to the understanding and solution of social problems. This implies that training in economics is first and foremost training for citizenship, whether that citizenship is to be exercised professionally or on a lay level. It implies also that business training, for private profit making, must be distinguished from training in general or should say in social-economics. Business economics cannot in any sense be substituted for general economics, or vice versa, however much the subject matter of the two may overlap. Another purpose of the study of economics might be mentioned; i.e., training in scientific discipline, in a field in which many persons begin with emotional preconceptions and in which laboratory techniques are not available. Such training is accomplished only when the students become aware of the character and limitations of the methods of economic analysis.

The article presents a report of the American Economic Association to the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). A number of committees of the Social Science Research Council continue to be active on matters of interest to the members of the American Economic Association, and a brief progress report on the work of these committees may be in order. The Committee on Economic Growth, under the chairmanship of Simon Kuznets, is continuing its far flung activities. Its foreign studies are well along and arrangements were made this past autumn for work on the Australian national accounts. A conference on the recruitment of a stable labor force in undeveloped areas is planned for the spring of 1958. The Committee on Business Enterprise Research has been inactive but an attempt is being made to reactivate it. In short, the SSRC continues to be active in a range of matter of interest to economist and continues to show a gratifying interest in economic issues for their own sake and in the interrelation between economics and the other social science.