Government and the Economy

Abstract

THE opportunity to be with you today is doubly grateful to me. Five of the most pleasant and rewarding years of my life were spent in the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, years when I learned that there is a wide gulf between the somewhat forbidding term agricultural and the very human and engaging and devoted scientists who practice that profession. I have missed that association a great deal, and this occasion of its renewal is therefore very welcome. But more than that, the nature of this program itself is highly gratifying. My assignment in government, both in the BAE and the now buried Board of Economic Warfare, was that of evangel for the conviction that economics existed not only of and by man but also for him. I hope, therefore, that your dedication of an afternoon's program to the specific discussion of so earthy a subject as legislation will prove the forerunner of an increasing concern with applied economics. only other session of the Association that I have been privileged to attend was the 1938 meeting at Detroit, and I remember somewhat starkly the repercussions that followed the presentation of a paper by Howard R. Tolley, then chief of BAE, entitled The Contribution of Agricultural Economics to the General Welfare. In preparation for this meeting I looked at that paper again, and in the light of World War II and of what has happened since, its unorthodoxy does not seem nearly so heretical now as it did then. In fact, the appearance of the farm organizations here today seems to confirm the main thesis of that paper, that is, that there is an organic relationship between theory and application in economics, and that practitioners of any social science have a social responsibility. In some sense, then, this discussion is a footnote to that earlier paper, although I hasten to add that its author should not be taxed either with my boldness in reference to him or with anything that I say. But it has seemed useful to refer to that period as illustrative of the way circumstances are pushing the layman and the scientist