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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 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.

The article presents the comment of the author on the selection of one of his article related to market economy. In ignoring the machine process by which two hundred million Americans now live, and fastening their attention on "the market," economists of the twentieth century are of course following an ancient tradition. The first economic literature of the Western world was contained in the sermons in which medieval schoolmen sought to identify "just price." They saw no economic significance in the horseshoe, any more than did the blacksmiths who devised the horseshoe. But then, centuries later, Adam Smith, great as he was, completely missed the significance of the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century in England. At the same time the new doctrine found an academic rostrum. Not only has "political economy" produced a formidable body of classics for which students could be held responsible, the discovery was made almost immediately that economic situations, being largely composed of financial transactions expressed in terms of quantities of money, are therefore very readily reduced to sets of equations, which in turn can be reduced to graphs, all of which lends itself most readily and naturally to the exigencies of pedagogy.