Confessions of an Economic Heretic/Foreword
FOREWORD
Autobiography is often considered to be the least defensible form of biography, because it is impossible to see ourselves as others see us, and a skilled onlooker is more likely to see us right. Against this, however, may be set two considerations. Certain relevant facts, with special bearing on a man’s thought and feelings, can only come into his personal knowledge. And, again, in the almost inevitable attempt to make the best of himself, an autobiographer is pretty certain to “give himself away” by processes of selection, concealment, and over-emphasis which are discerned by the unbiased reader and shed important light upon the mind and character of the “life” in question.
Both of these considerations are especially applicable to the restricted type of autobiography recorded here. For, while primarily directed to explaining the development of my economic thinking during half a century, it is largely engaged in showing how that thinking has been affected by current events and personal experiences that lie outside the accepted field of economics, some of them quite momentous in their impact on my mental career, others belonging to fields of experience which accepted political economy does not recognize as having any bearing on its special study. I have taken the title of heretic not in the spirit of bravado, but because it strictly applies to the several processes of thought which have come to debar me from accepting the assumptions regarding the nature of such terms as “value,” “cost,” “utility” as are still fixed in the orthodox economics of our time. In my endeavour to give a human interpretation to such terms and to the processes in which they figure, and to establish a basis of harmony between the arts of industry thus humanized, and other arts of personal and social conduct, political, ethical, artistic, recreative, which utilize the fruits of industry, I claim to have made some advance towards a better understanding of the part played by economic thinking and economic practices in a world of changing environment and values. It belongs, however, to the account I give of the thinking process, to admit that I may be biased in favour of the rightness and the worth of such a claim.