The Statistical Measurement of Various Material Aspects of Economic Progress

Abstract

Economic science would achieve an ideal success if it could sum up in one single index the whole reality of economic evolution. But a thorough study of the measurement of national income seems to exclude the possibility of our ever being able to arrive at this complete success. In addition to synthesis which is clearly inadequate despite its extent and its great practical utility, we are obliged to have recourse to studies of a more analytical, more particular kind; studies which are therefore a priori disparate, incoherent, and complex. But then the mind reels under the mass of innumerable series of figures, which are a priori unconnected, and we are unable to unravel either the causes, or the consequences, or the general tendencies. Our science is no sooner born than threatened with collapse into empiricism.

Translation by Elisabeth Henderson