Must Science Ruin Economic Progress?

Conservation science must engender hope to succeed.

Measuring Economic Progress

Economists have been inquiring into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations for centuries,1 but the regular and systematic construction of official quantitative measures of relative economic progress is a phenomenon of recent decades. A key role in this transformation was played by Colin Clark, who held that ‘[c]omparisons of economic welfare between one community and another, one econom...

Science in Progress

One, a discussion of the principles and methods underlying the developmental examination of behavior, is unchanged. Part Two, an analysis of defects and deviations of development, has been expanded to include a section on congenital abnormalities in connection with low-grade amentia; the chapter on convulsive disorders has been revised, and includes additional material on epilepsy; a discussion...

Ontological Progress in Science

In the grand tradition, philosophical ontology was considered logically and epistemologically prior to scientific ontology. Like many contemporary philosophers of science, we consider this a mistake. There is a two-way traffic between philosophical and scientific ontologies; the more we learn about what there actually is, the more we learn about what can be and what must be, and vice versa. But...

Discussion of Measuring Economic Progress

One of the strongest motives in life is the desire to ‘keep up with the Joneses’. In economic debate, this tendency is reflected in a concern with international rankings of various kinds. These rankings are frequently used to bolster a variety of spurious arguments. A typical form of the argument is ‘Australia has declined relative to country X on scale Y, and we should therefore adopt policy Z...