Page:Confessions of an Economic Heretic.djvu/146

 economic processes, the laws and theories which these measurements are designed to serve will be more and more affected by political considerations, and their right to regulate conduct in the field of industry correspondingly restricted. This signifies a radical difference between the physical and the human sciences. Whereas the former can be studied in terms of measurable facts and forces, without the intrusion of human changing thoughts and feelings, the latter cannot. No purely objective exact science of economics, politics, or ethics, is possible, and to pretend that it can be is a species of intellectual self-deceit. Whether “the good” be visualized in terms of utility, happiness, or any other form of welfare, its value is qualitative as well as quantitative, and the qualitative estimate is continually changing alike for the community and the individual. These changes, of course, are not matters of chance, the regularities or laws of this change are right objects of scientific study and of conscious direction. This is where science and art come together in the “social services.” Such considerations ought to keep social students in a constant state of watchful timidity, aware that their studies can never yield “laws” on the same level of validity as the natural sciences, and that their art of prophecy must be correspondingly confined.

To argue that modern economics is moving definitely on to a welfare basis of values, alike on its cost and its utility side, that it thus seeks a reconcilia-