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The article discusses the role of technology in economics. During virtually the whole of their mature existence, that is, throughout the century that has followed the publication of Charles Darwin's "The Origin of Species," social sciences have been moving steadily in the direction of a unified field theory of human behavior, social structure and cultural process. Economics has participated largely in this movement. Most empirical studies and most practical activities in which economists have engaged have been consonant with and contributory to this common understanding of man and society. But neoclassical price theory has not, for reasons, which lie partly on the side of economic theory and partly on the side of general social theory. On both sides a technological hiatus has been largely responsible. Lacking any notion of the technological process by which the industrial economy was coming into being, or even of cultural processes in general, or even of zoological evolution, originators of the market theory of the economy therefore assumed mankind to be a special creation, endowed by "Nature" with aptitudes and propensities such as would bring the whole congeries of economic activities into equilibrium if only tyrannical governments could be induced to leave them alone.

The article discusses the concept of institutionalism. Institutionalism itself does not exist in isolation. The same intellectual influences and the same pattern of social events which have given direction to institutionalism have also produced other developments. Institutionalism has been identified with behaviorism. All that institutionalism proposes to do is to accept the full significance of the conception of human nature which is self explanatory. Price patterns can be conceived to reveal the character of the economy only if some of those patterns be regarded as the consequence of a human nature that is antecedent to all social patterns while others are regarded as evidence of unnatural interference. In recognizing the dynamic character of technology, institutionalism does not minimize the importance of the institutional patterns of any society. Economic theory is rightly identified as value theory. From the beginning, one of its central problems has been the relation of value-in-exchange to value-in-use.

The article discusses the impact of the great depression on economic thinking of U.S. in thirties. The author's study is confined to so-called "Keynesian revolution." By 1929 the whole community had become machine-conscious to an unprecedented degree. Consequently the depression figured in the imagination of the community at large and also in the researches of economists as an affair of idle machines and mass unemployment, drastically reduced industrial production and vast accumulations of farm products. So conceived, this situation revealed with dramatic suddenness the complete implausibility of the reasoning which attributed such a situation to a deficiency of abstinence and thrift. The time had therefore come for a revolution in reasoning. The traditional analysis was ancillary in the first place to a previously established conviction that the progress of opulence was contingent upon the accumulation of capital funds by virtue of extreme inequalities of income.