Richard von Strigl · 1928
The source is best read as a collective methodological volume, not as a single Strigl essay. Its contributed chapters revolve around one problem: how far abstract economic theory can be applied when the “data” of economic life—needs, technology, law, organization, nature, expectations, and social psychology—are themselves variable. The volume’s common position is neither naïve deductivism nor empiricist rejection of theory. It treats theory as indispensable for tracing consequences under specified assumptions, while insisting that applied inquiry must identify where those assumptions change.
Wenn jemand den Sinn der ökonomischen Theorie erfaßt hat, so kann es für ihn nur eine Schwierigkeit bei der Anwendung dieser Theorie für die Betrachtung der Wirklichkeit geben.
English translation: For anyone who has grasped the meaning of economic theory, there can be only one difficulty in applying this theory to the consideration of reality.
Across the volume, the contributors use chapters and sub-studies to map the border between economic law and auxiliary knowledge. The opening methodological material frames economics as one science among others whose concepts may be generalized, coordinated, and limited by neighboring disciplines.
Im Zuge dieses Entwicklungs-ganges der Wissenschaft wird vielfach eine Verallgemeinerung von Einzelwissenschaften eintreten, einzelne Spezialwissenschaften werden durch eine übergeordnete allgemeinere Theorie vereinigt werden können.
English translation: In the course of this developmental progression of science, a generalization of the several disciplines will frequently occur; individual special sciences will be able to be unified under a higher, more general theory.
Richard von Strigl’s contribution, “Aenderungen in den Daten der Wirtschaft,” supplies the clearest taxonomy. He distinguishes exogenous changes in the data from endogenous ones. Natural conditions, weather, technical invention, legal reform, organization, fashion, and psychological or social transformations are exogenous in the sense that economics must accept them as altered facts. Endogenous changes are narrower: they arise from the economic process itself, especially through saving, wasting, and the intertemporal ordering of wants.
Es ist nun ganz unbezweifelbar, daß außer diesen exogenen Datenänderungen auch noch endogene Datenänderungen möglich sind, das sind solche, welche aus dem wirtschaftlichen Geschehen selbst und kraft der Gesetzlichkeit der Wirtschaft folgen.
English translation: It is now quite beyond doubt that, apart from these exogenous changes in the data, endogenous changes in the data are also possible—namely, those which follow from the economic process itself and by virtue of the lawful regularity of the economy.
Other chapters and contributors broaden this same problem into applications. The discussion of nature shows why a perfectly static economy is never realized: agriculture, resources, and production are exposed to contingencies no price theory can deduce. The psychological and social sections explain that economic actors do not merely respond mechanically to changed prices or incomes; changed situations may alter wants, habits, labor intensity, expectations, and collective conduct. Legal and organizational chapters likewise show that statutes, property rules, taxes, and institutional forms become economically relevant only through the behavior they elicit—obedience, evasion, adjustment, or resistance.
The volume’s most important collective insight is that some changes are economically occasioned but not economically deducible. A crisis, enrichment, scarcity, wage rule, tax, or innovation may produce political or psychological reactions that transform the data of later economic action. These reactions are connected with the economy, but their explanation belongs partly to psychology, sociology, law, politics, or technology. Economic theory can resume its work only after those new data have been specified.
Hier liegt für die ökonomische Theorie eine Bruchstelle vor, welche sie mit ihren Mitteln nicht überbrücken kann; sie kann nur sagen, daß hier etwas sich geändert hat, das sie einfach als geändert hinnehmen muß¹).
English translation: Here economic theory encounters a breaking point which it cannot bridge with its own means; it can only say that here something has changed, which it must simply accept as changed.¹)
The concluding methodological thrust of the volume is therefore a program for “Datentheorie”: a theory of the sources and kinds of data change. Such a theory does not replace economics; it disciplines its application. The contributors collectively argue that good applied economics must state whether a change is internal to economic reasoning, externally imposed, socially mediated, legally produced, technically generated, or merely triggered by prior economic results. The volume’s enduring importance lies in this boundary work: it defends theoretical economics while denying that economics alone can explain every alteration in the conditions under which economic action occurs.
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