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The Penetrative Powers of the Price System

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2014

H. A. Innis
H. A. Innis*
Affiliation:
The University of Toronto
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Extract

Two years ago the chairman of this evening's meeting stood in my place and delivered a scintillating address on “Statistics Comes of Age”. A year ago Professor Mackintosh gave his presidential address on “An Economist Looks at Economics”. I propose, therefore, to follow them in these subjects and to pursue an inquiry which occupied the time and energies of the first important Canadian economist, Adam Shortt. Economics is an older subject than statistics but I shall confine myself in this paper to the period since statistics began to leave its impression on economics and reached that stage, fatal to economics, when it came of age. Professor G. N. Clark in Science and Social Welfare in the Age of Newton (Oxford, 1937) has traced the background of statistics, in the growing importance of mathematics through astronomy, surveying, and book-keeping which followed the discovery of the new world, prior to its beginnings with the publication of John Graunt's Observations upon the Bills of Mortality in 1662, or four years before the census of Talon in Canada. An important statistical department was set up in England under an inspector-general to collect statistics on imports and exports about 1695. The effects of the imports of treasure from North America were becoming increasingly evident and William Fleetwood with a strong vested interest in stability in the value of fellowships published his Chronicon Preciosum in 1706, a first book on prices. And so the snake entered the paradise of academic interest in economics. Under the stimulus of treasure from the new world the price system ate its way more rapidly into the economy of Europe and into economic thought.

Type
Articles
Information
Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science/Revue canadienne de economiques et science politique , Volume 4 , Issue 3 , August 1938 , pp. 299 - 319
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1938

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References

1 Smith, Adam, Wealth of Nations (New York, 1937), p. 531.Google Scholar

2 See Hamilton, E. J., American Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain (Cambridge, 1934)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Smith, Adam, Wealth of Nations, p. 202.Google Scholar Bodin wrote the Discours sur les causes de l'extrème cherté qui est aujourdhuy en France in 1574.

3 Smith, , Wealth of Nations, p. 207.Google Scholar “Of all the commodities, therefore, which are bought in one foreign country, for no other purpose but to be sold or exchanged again for some other goods in another, there are none so convenient as gold and silver” (ibid., p. 516).

4 Ibid., p. 388. For an excellent account of the decline of the feudal system in Japan as a result of the introduction of money see Takizawa, M., The Penetration of Money Economy in Japan and its Effects upon Social and Political Institutions (New York, 1927).Google Scholar

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24 Freedom of the press and freedom of speech have always been relative terms assuming a moderate tolerance. Newspaper space involves a substantial outlay of funds as does an hour's broadcasting. In private conversation where talk is said to be cheap, one is inclined to revise Mark Twain's dictum and to say that we have freedom of speech and freedom of the press and not the good sense not to use either of them. Small talk, bores, and other terms are in constant demand. In so-called conferences freedom of speech is paraded as a special feature, but it usually amounts to common scolding or saying things calculated to get the conference into the newspapers—in other words, advertising space for nothing. See Innis, H. A., “Discussion in the Social Sciences” (Dalhousie Review, 01, 1936).Google Scholar

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