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Where the action is

The first authority to assert that economics had become a science was John Stuart Mill. He finished his ambitious System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive in 1844. Four years later, almost as an illustration, of his main themes, he produced Principles of Political Economics. The book began this way:

In every department of human affairs, Practice long precedes Science: systematic inquiry into the modes of action of the powers of nature is the tardy product of a long course of efforts to use those powers for practical ends. The conception, accordingly, of Political Economy as a branch of sciences is extremely modern but the subject with which its ends are conversant has in all ages necessarily constituted one of the chief practical interests of mankind, and, in some, a most unduly engrossing one. That subject is Wealth.

To be sure, he wrote, “wealth” existed in in many forms. A nation could be wealthy in terms of power, courage, liberty, artistic ambition, or elegant manner. But everyone understood the wealth that Mill was writing about. It had to do with production and distribution: prices and quantities, money and taxes, yes, competition and choice.

The intellectual atmosphere of the mid-nineteenth century was heady. Other new sciences were progressing rapidly: chemistry, geology, astronomy, electromagnetic studies, and thermodynamics. Isaac Newton had transformed physics more than a century before. Political economy seemed well on its way.