#nature

"… in economic political discussions there is a nearly infinite number of specific questions that may be asked. Besides the ones mentioned in section 3 consider for instance these: "Should we build a road between points A and B in the country?", "Should we promote investments that will give employment to many people, or should we on the contrary promote such investment which will save labour?"… "Should we put more emphasis on things that have up to now not been included in the statistical concept of the gross national product? For instance, should we try to avoid air-pollution and all the kinds of intoxications that may be caused by refuse and waste ?“, “Should we assess economic value to an undisturbed nature?” etc."

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“In this feverish world of ours, where one wants the economic analyses to produce easily understandable results quickly and at the least possible cost, some of us have fallen into the habit of assuming for simplicity that the hundreds sometimes thousands of variables that enter into the analyses are linked together by very simple relationships. Frequently we even go so far as to assume linear relationships. Only in this way have we been able to feed our problems into the electronic computers and get mechanical answers quickly and at low cost.”

“Usually it is easier to obtain estimates for budget proportions and Engel elasticities than for elasticities with respect to price. By making certain want independence assumptions, the elasticities with respect to price can be deduced from the knowledge of budget proportions and Engel elasticities. In this connection the concept of the flexibility of the marginal utility of money is essential. A system of formulae decribing these relations is given.”

“We may predict that the science of which we try to be the humble and devoted servants will in the future life of the nations be an important factor in eliminating maladjustments between fundamental economic sectors and assure a smooth and progressive utilization of resources... One wants men with a knowledge of the characteristic features of the economic and social structure of their country and with a fundamental theoretical knowledge along modern lines.”

“length of the cycles and the tendency towards dampening are determined by the intrinsic structure of the swinging system, while the intensity of the fluctuations is determined primarily by the exterior impulse. An important consequence of this is that a more or less regular fluctuation may be be produced by a cause which operates irregularly.”

“The propagation problem is the problem of explaining by the structural properties of the swinging system what the character of the swings would be in case the system was started in some initial situation”

“the unification of economic theory, statistics and mathematics.”